By Tetiwe Mweemba

Satirist Roy Clarke, popularly known as Kalaki is ostensibly distraught that the Patriotic Front (PF) Government wants to change the constitution to suit their egos.

According to Clarke, the PF wants to alter the constitution to drive the country back to the infamous one party state.

“My opinion is that the PF Government is attempting to change the constitution back to one party state constitution. The original idea of multipartism was that we should not only turn to multipartism but we should also change the constitution to lessen the powers of the President  so that the powers are distributed equally among State House,  Legislature, Judiciary and of course the fourth estate which is  the press,” Clarke said

He said it is unfortunate that successive Governments have lamentably failed to remove the powers of the President in the National Legislative document.

“…Now in successive changes of the Constitution, we have not managed to change the Constitution so that the President’s powers are lessened. According to the findings and the will of the people, we were supposed to have a Constitution which has ministers outside parliament, which gave us high decentralization of government through the provinces and also gave us proportional representation,” Clarke who was implicated in the Defamation of the President’s case in the Mwanawasa regime said, “When Lungu introduced his amendments to the Constitution which was a new Constitution through the back door, all these things were wiped out and now he wants to amend the Constitution again to increase his powers so that there is a more highly centralized State House government which leaves the Judiciary  and Parliament even more powerless.”

Clarke accused President of being manipulative.

“During his regime, (Dr) Lungu has infiltrated and manipulated Parliament and the judiciary and he has infiltrated government institutions such as the ACC so that he has power over all of them by manipulation. Now, he wants his National Dialogue Forum (NDF) Constitution to go  through to Parliament which will actually give these powers which he has assumed… he wants to change the Constitution to legalise himself  and if he succeeds, then we will be back to a one party state,” he said.