The opposition Malawi Congress Party (MCP) has trashed allegations by Cashgate convict Oswald Lutepo that the Joyce Banda administration funded an MCP convention in 2013 through the party\u2019s former president John Tembo.<\/p>\n
Lutepo told the High Court in Lilongwe on Wednesday last week that Banda allegedly offered Tembo K15 million to assist him win the MCP presidential election during the convention.<\/p>\n
The logic behind the move, according to Lutepo, was to have MCP field a weaker candidate so that Banda\u2019s People\u2019s Party (PP) should not face a strong opponent during the May 2014 Presidential Election.<\/p>\n
But speaking to The Daily Times <\/em>on the sidelines of regional elections for the North held in Mzuzu on Saturday, MCP Administrative Secretary, Potiphar Chidaya, said PP did not fund MCP\u2019s last convention in any way or through its former leadership.<\/p>\n He said MCP failed to fill some positions in the party during the convention as they did not have money to keep delegates at the venue of the meeting for more days to vote for the leaders.<\/p>\n \u201cPP never sponsored our convention. We should have completed the whole process. You remember we only elected few positions, president and his deputy, the other deputy, Treasurer and his deputies and Secretary General.<\/p>\n \u201cThe convention then mandated the president to fill the other vacant positions; that was because we could not afford to proceed with the convention because we had no money. So, if PP funded us, we could have completed the process,\u201d said Chidaya.<\/p>\n During the elections that were held in Mzuzu, Osborne Shera replaced Baza Kaunda as chairperosn for North-South Region while Gracious Soko was voted Deputy Regional Chairman. Dilla Nyimba is the new Regional Secretary while Francis Mtawambe is the new Treasurer.<\/p>\n The former Deputy Democratic Progressive Party National Director of Women, Martha Chimpozo Kamanga, was elected Director of Women and Clement Manda became Director of Youth.<\/p>\n And in the North-North Region, former MP Kenzie Msukwa was voted Regional Chairperson while Chidumba Mkandawire from Rumphi won the position of Secretary.<\/p>\n And speaking to The Daily Times after his victory, Shera said his major task is to revamp the party at grassroots.<\/p>\n Shera, who is a retired Director of Irrigation in the Ministry of Agriculture, said MCP has potential to win during the 2019 elections if the leaders can work for the party.<\/p>\n MCP Director of Elections, Emmanuel Thyolera, and Campaign Director, Dzoole Mwale, presided over the elections in Mzuzu while in Karonga, Deputy Party Spokesperson, Ezekiel Ching\u2019oma, led the electoral body.<\/p>\n There was total security in all the places and no violence was reported.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The opposition Malawi Congress Party (MCP) has trashed allegations by Cashgate convict Oswald Lutepo that the Joyce Banda administration funded an MCP convention in 2013 through the party\u2019s former president John Tembo. Lutepo told the High Court in Lilongwe on Wednesday last week that Banda allegedly offered Tembo K15 million to assist him win the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17974,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17971\/revisions\/17974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}