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The UDF secretariat will Thursday be meeting the party’s MPs where they will be taken to task over their conduct in Parliament on Monday when they agreed to reject the 2004/2005 budget.
The MPs, according to sources within their group, also agreed not to attend any of the party caucuses where President Bingu wa Mutharika is present.
The decision to boycott caucuses that involve Mutharika followed an earlier caucus prior to the budget session where the president is said to have told them that he can run the country without their help if they are not willing to support him.
“He told us that he can do without UDF MPs, so we’re leaving him alone,” said an MP who did not want to be named.
He said the MPs will only be going for caucuses called by their party chairman, former president Bakili Muluzi, because Mutharika does not enjoy the support of most MPs who are also scared that he will have them arrested.
Muluzi has been saying that no government can survive without a political party that ushered it into power but Mutharika contradicted him on September 13 saying “even in America, government is above the Republican party so every government is above party politics”.
While refusing to comment on the threats by the MPs, UDF secretary general Kennedy Makwangwala confirmed that the party secretariat will be meeting all MPs Thursday to chastise them over their conduct in Parliament.
“The budget is a UDF budget. Their conduct to threaten the budget was not right no matter what reasons they had for doing that,” said Makwangwala.
He said UDF MPs are supposed to be the first people to support the budget because it is their party that is in government.
“The party secretariat will be talking to them and they will have to stop behaving the way they are behaving,” said Makwangwala.
The threat by the UDF MPs only lasted a day because on Tuesday the Parliamentarians made a U-turn on their threats to sabotage the budget and started voting overwhelmingly on some budget allocations.
On July 13 this year, a group of MPs from all parties in Parliament had threatened to sabotage the budget, if government, through Treasury, does not improve conditions for car loans which, they claimed, would leave them with a take-home pay of K3,000 after all deductions. The conditions have not been improved yet.
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