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Government Chief Whip in Parliament Davis Katsonga said yesterday he has fired from parliamentary committees over 20 UDF members of Parliament (MPs) who were part of the plot to shoot down the 2004/2005 national budget in September.
Zomba Central MP Valentine Mussa said on Tuesday he went to an orientation seminar for Parliamentary committees at a hotel in Blantyre as a member of the Commerce Committee on November 1, only to find his name missing from the list of participants. Mussa said he was told that if he wanted to attend the function, he had to foot his own bills for accommodation and food.
“When I asked Honourable Katsonga as to what was going on, he told me that I had been removed from the Parliamentary Committee on Commerce where I belonged to because I had aligned myself to party chair Bakili Muluzi. He told me I wasn’t the only one who had been fired,” said Mussa.
He said this has made him and other MPs who have also been booted out to decide to start aligning themselves with opposition MCP and that they will be voting against government in Parliament because “government does not need our help”.
But Katsonga said what Mussa was saying “is silly” as it has nothing to do with Muluzi but the conduct of MPs during the budget session when 41 of them absconded from voting at the time the budget was to be passed.
He said the majority of those 41 MPs were from UDF and that they were over 20.
“Anybody who was absent has been removed and replaced by somebody else. Membership in Parliamentary Committees is at the discretion of the President and if somebody cannot be relied upon to help government to push its policies in Parliament, then that person does not deserve to be in any committee,” said Katsonga.
He said as Chief Whip, he was appointed by Mutharika to represent him in Parliament and that his job is to ensure that government is successful when it comes to Parliamentary issues. He said he had to act on the MPs who had intentions of sabotaging government business.
“I have no apologies for what I have done,” said Katsonga.
He said he would not know whether an MP has aligned himself to Mutharika or Muluzi and he cannot, therefore, fire on that basis because both leaders belong to the UDF.
“All I know is that these people were removed for being absent when Parliament was supposed to vote on a very delicate issue,” said Katsonga.
He said he wishes Parliament was sitting soon so that he informs the MPs on why they have been replaced, observing that some of them might not have known that they were wrong to abscond from an important session since they are new.
But UDF deputy spokesperson Mary Kaphwereza-Banda said it is not fair to fire any MP from a parliamentary committee on “unknown reasons” and that the issue has to be discussed between the party and government.
“The budget was not sabotaged. And now committees have been set up to bring unity in the party and instead of firing others, people should work on uniting the party and not dividing it further,” said Kaphwereza-Banda.
In July, some MPs threatened to sabotage the 2004/2005 budget if government through Treasury did not soften up on improving conditions for car loans which, they claimed, would leave them with a take home pay of K3,000 after deductions.
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