So When Was Lungu Supposed To Be Buried?

🇿🇲 EDITOR’S NOTE | So When Was Lungu Supposed To Be Buried?

Former president Edgar Lungu died on June 5, 2025. Today is July 5, 2026. Thirteen months later, Zambia’s sixth president remains unburied.

For one year, the country was told the matter was about dignity, wishes and family rights. We were told the late president had left clear wishes. We were told President Hakainde Hichilema should not be anywhere near his body, his funeral or his burial. We were told the family wanted to bury him outside Zambia, and the government had no right to interfere..

Government fought that position. It prepared Embassy Park. It argued precedent. It said every former president had been buried on Zambian soil with national honours. The matter moved through South African courts until late June, when the South African court ruled in favour of the family’s preferred burial path.

At that point, the argument should have ended.

If the issue was truly the family’s wish, the burial should have proceeded.

It has not.

Instead, Brian Mundubile now tells voters in Chinsali: “When you vote for us and we win, we will honour late President Edgar Lungu and bury him with respect.”

That sentence changes everything.

It raises a hard question. Was this ever only about the wishes of the dead, or has the body of a former president now become part of an election strategy?

Mundubile is not speaking alone. His running mate, Makebi Zulu, is also the Lungu family lawyer. This is not a distant political relationship. The legal and political streams are now touching each other in full public view.

If the family already won the right to bury Lungu in South Africa, why has the burial not happened? If the wish was to avoid Hichilema, that condition has effectively been met. If the wish was burial in South Africa, the court cleared the road. So why is the campaign now saying burial will happen after an opposition victory?

And if Hichilema wins on August 13, then what?

Will Edgar Lungu remain unburied because voters did not choose Tonse? Will the family continue waiting? Will the same people later return to Zambia and ask for national honours after turning the funeral into campaign material?

This is where morality enters.

A family has rights. But a family also has responsibility. No family should allow grief to be dragged this far into partisan politics. No political alliance should reduce the burial of a former head of state to a campaign promise.

Zambia has seen many ugly things in politics. This one sits low. The dead deserve dignity. The living deserve honesty.

And voters deserve to know whether they are being asked to choose a president or vote for a funeral date.

© The People’s Brief | Editor