🇿🇲 EDITORIAL | 2026 Will Not Save PF; Organisation Might
This is the hardest moment to be Patriotic Front. The anger, grief, and confusion inside the party are real. Supporters feel besieged, disrespected, and politically orphaned. Many believe an external hand is deliberately dismantling what remains of a once-dominant movement. This sentiment deserves acknowledgment, not mockery. But sympathy cannot replace diagnosis. Politics punishes denial, not enemies.
The central truth PF must confront is structural, not conspiratorial. The party suffers from a classic founder complex. In Zambia, parties built tightly around individuals struggle to survive once the founding figure exits power or life. PF survived Michael Sata’s death in 2014 only because it was in government. State power provided money, leverage, and enforcement. Edgar Lungu inherited a functioning machine backed by authority.
Today, PF has neither power nor cash, and the illusion that the party can behave as though it still does is the root of the crisis.
What is unfolding now is not sabotage from outside. It is the collapse of internal discipline. Parties do not disintegrate when rivals attack them. They disintegrate when they lose the ability to manage ambition, succession, and popularity from within. PF normalised suspicion as governance. Popular figures were treated as threats. Loyalty was personalised. Rules were bent. That culture did not die with power. It metastasised. See what is now happening with Brian Mundubile.
The Bill 7 vote has exposed this brutally. More than twenty PF MPs broke ranks en masse, not because they were hypnotised or kidnapped, but because the party no longer commands unified authority. Some have cited constituency interests. Others cited conscience. What followed was not strategic containment but panic. Expulsions have been announced without legal clarity. Counter-statements have followed. Provincial leaders resigned. Rival centres of power spoke past each other. This is not resistance.
This is fragmentation.
Blaming the UPND offers emotional relief but avoids responsibility. The ruling party did not invent PF’s confusion. It exploited it. This is what organised parties do. For Bill 7, UPND counted votes, mapped incentives, and moved with discipline. PF issued statements, prayed, litigated, and shouted. Politics rewards numbers, timing, and structure. Moral outrage without machinery loses every time.
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There is also a dangerous turn toward grief-based politics. The constant invocation of Edgar Lungu’s memory as political capital is not strategy. It is stagnation. Zambian voters do not elect governments out of mourning. They move forward. UNIP learned this in 1996 when it boycotted elections on principle. That was integrity, but it also marked the end of its relevance.
PF today is neither boycotting nor organising. It is campaigning under a law it calls illegal while promising to repeal it after benefiting from it. That contradiction erodes credibility.
Promises to reverse law amendment No.7 after winning in 2026 sound emotionally satisfying but collapse under scrutiny. The next election will be held under this law. A Parliament of 226 elected MPs and 40 proportional seats will be constituted by it. Any government emerging from that process derives legitimacy from the same framework. To abolish it would raise questions about the validity of the very House that produced the president.
This is populism, not governance.
The uncomfortable reality is this: PF is not positioned for regime change next year. Not because voters hate it, but because it lacks a centre, a leader with uncontested authority, and the financial and organisational capacity to contest an expanded parliamentary map.
Zambian politics rarely returns former ruling parties to power quickly. UNIP did not. MMD did not. History is not sentimental
The path forward is honesty. PF must stop fighting ghosts and start rebuilding institutions. This means settling leadership through credible processes, abandoning politics of the dead, and learning to harness popularity instead of purging it.
Until then, the party will keep mistaking survival instincts for strategy. And while that continues, Hakainde Hichilema will remain president, not because he is untouchable, but because his opponents are not ready.
© The People’s Brief | The Editor-in-Chief