PF SETUP UNFOLDING – AND WHY THE TIMING WAS NEVER ACCIDENTAL
By Elias Kamanga
What has happened today in the Cour of Apeal, is not confusion. It is strategy playing out in real time. The PF capture and political game has played out exactly as predicted.
The court triggered return of activity around the Patriotic Front has landed exactly where it was most politically useful, on the doorstep of an election.
And the effect is already visible, noise, fragmentation, and uncertainty especially for those still holding on to the PF name.
Key actors in this drama such as Robert Chabinga and Miles Sampa now sit at the centre of a contested political space where competing claims, parallel structures, and identity battles will pun out.
That is not coincidence. That is consequence.
And the consequence is simple: divide the base, confuse the voter, and fracture the opposition vote.
But some PF Members saw this coming early and acted accordingly.
The decision by Brian Mundubile and a number of MCCs, MPs and members to exit the PF andv reposition within the broader opposition architecture under the Tonse Alliance now looks to have been a very intelligent political decision.
Mundubile or BM8 as he is affectionately called, stepped out before the storm fully formed.
Before the legal and factional explosion of competing PF identities. Before the scramble for legitimacy began, Mundubile had stepped out.
That move now stands out as strategic foresight.
Meanwhile, the so called reconfiguration of PF linked politics is creating exactly the environment we warned about, a battlefield of names, candidates, claims, and counterclaims that will inevitably spill into the elections.
Now, that reality is unfolding in full view.
What remains to be seen and appreciated is how the PF-Pamodzi Alliance will deal with this judgement.
Miles Sampa has openly accused the Makebi Zulu led Alliance as impostors calling it’s Convention illegal and expelling all MCCs and banishing them from the Secretariat.
This perhaps explains why late 6th Republican President Edgar Chagwa Lungu was akin to using the name PF in his plan B project of the Tonse Alliance.
ECL appears to have known that once internal legitimacy becomes contested as it had been ever since Miles seized the party, the PF name itself had become a liability, not an asset.