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Chairmen to fund MCP convention
By
Pilirani Semu-Banda - 18-06-2002 |
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The MCP convention scheduled to take place between Friday and Sunday this week at Natural Resources College in Lilongwe will be paid for by the district chairmen who have summoned it, Lilongwe Msinja North MP Binton Kutsaira said yesterday.
Reacting to reports from the other MCP camp led by the party’s president Gwanda Chakuamba that the convention was being funded by the ruling UDF, Kutsaira said the district chairmen will pay for transport, food and accommodation at the convention.
“If at all, MCP will only pay for the venue of the convention,” said Kutsaira.
He said reports that the camp led by the party’s vice president John Tembo has received K5 million from the UDF to hold the convention were “false and wrong”.
“How can the UDF pay for our convention when we will only discuss internal issues in the MCP? The issue of the open term for the country’s president is not even on our agenda,” said Kutsaira.
“The district chairmen have made private arrangements to pay for food, transport and accommodation themselves,” he said.
He said the Chakuamba side was “just giving lame excuses” for them not to attend the convention.
Kutsaira said the organisers of the convention have already sent letters of invitation to the delegates including Chakuamba.
MCP Deputy Administrative Secretary Potiphar Chidaya said in a separate interview the convention will be chaired either by Chakuchanya Nyirenda or Steve Ching’ang’a, regional chairmen for the North and South respectively.
“The regional governor for the Centre, Betson Majoni, can’t chair the convention because it will be conducted in his region. That’s what our Constitution says,” said Chidaya.
Some copies of the letters including that of Chakuamba, made available to The Nation, bore the signature of the party’s secretary general Kate Kainja.
But the party’s publicity secretary Nicholas Dausi said in a separate interview that the party met for a regional conference (South) in Blantyre last weekend where they agreed to ignore “the so-called convention” and continue to look for ways of reuniting the two camps.
Dausi said the party is not supposed to spend money on a convention when it has a lot of debts to settle which include the paying of city rates in millions of kwacha..
He said MCP did not have money from the convention alleging that the Tembo camp was holding the convention after being funded by the ruling UDF to the tune of K5 million.
“They just want to advance UDF’s interests to weaken the opposition more but we will not allow to be used in such a sinister way,” said Dausi.
He said the method used to call the convention was irregular, saying the district chairmen who called for the convention were not legitimate.
“Tembo created his own committees at his own forums and these people are not for the real MCP and they can’t summon anyone to a convention,” said Dausi.
UDF deputy publicity secretary Ken Lipenga had said in an earlier interview two weeks ago that his party had not given money to Tembo to hold the convention, saying if his party had a lot of money it would have used the funds to hold its own convention.
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