A COUP IN INSTALMENTS, AND WE HAVE STOPPED ONE BEFORE- Fred M’membe

A COUP IN INSTALMENTS, AND WE HAVE STOPPED ONE BEFORE

Let us call this thing what it really is.

Nobody is going to drive a tank to State House. Nobody is going to read a proclamation on the radio or television at four in the morning. What is being done to our Constitution is being done in instalments, and every instalment is built to look lawful standing on its own. That is the entire method. By the time our people see the shape of the thing, it is finished, and the men who built it hold up the papers and tell us that every single step was legal.

Let me be precise about the word I am using. I do not mean soldiers. I mean a constitutional coup: the slow transfer of the supreme law of this Republic away from the people who own it, into the hands of one man who happens to be occupying State House. And unlike most accusations in our politics, this one comes with dates. Let me give them.

On May 23, 2025, they brought us Bill 7.

On June 27, 2025, the Constitutional Court declared Bill 7 unconstitutional. Article 79 of our Constitution requires wide public consultation before a constitutional amendment is even initiated. There had been none. The Law Association of Zambia said plainly that the Bill was null and that it could not be made the basis of any future reform.

And what did they do when the court ruled against them? They did not accept it. They went after the court itself, accusing the judges of legislating from the bench. I want our people to remember that, because it tells you everything about what is coming. The first time an institution of this Republic stood between these men and their project, their instinct was not to obey it. It was to discredit it.

On October 2, 2025, the President appointed a twenty-five member Technical Committee on Constitutional Amendments to manufacture the consultation that the court had found missing.

On December 15, 2025, the National Assembly passed the Bill. One hundred and thirty-five votes in favour. None against. Not one. On December 18, 2025, it was assented to, and it became Act No. 13 of 2025.

Now, what did that instalment buy them? It enlarged the National Assembly from 156 constituencies to 226, with further forty seats filled by proportional representation. Every one of those salaries, allowances, and benefits lands on the back of a people who are told every single day that there is no money. It brought constituency members of Parliament into our councils so that the same men who write the rules sit in the rooms where the rules pay out.

And, it removed the two-term limit on mayors and council chairpersons.

I want our people to stop and read that sentence again. Term limits have already been abolished in this country. Not proposed. Not debated. Not threatened. Abolished, in law, assented to by Mr Hakainde Hichilema on December 18, 2025, while most of us were thinking about Christmas.

So let nobody insult our intelligence by telling us that the presidential term limit is safe. The principle is already gone. What remains is only a question of which office is taken next. And anyone who wants to tell you that a third term is unthinkable must first stand up and explain to you why a two-term limit was an intolerable restriction on the mayor of Lusaka, and a sacred, untouchable pillar of our democracy when it comes to the President of the Republic.

They cannot explain it. There is no explanation. There is only a sequence.

The philosopher George Santayana warned us: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We have watched this film before, in this country, in our own lifetime. In 2001, the late Mr Frederick Chiluba and the men around him tried to amend our Constitution to give him a third term.

[CLIENT INSERT — the author’s own testimony of 2001, in his own voice. One to three paragraphs. What he was told, what he was offered, what it cost him and those around him to keep publishing, and what he watched happen to people who refused to go along. This is the one thing in this article that no other leader in Zambia can write, and it belongs here. Do not issue the article with this bracket still in it: either fill it or delete the bracket and run the paragraph above straight into the paragraph below.]

Look at what that bid did to the men who launched it. Twenty-two MMD Members of Parliament were expelled from their own party for refusing to go along and had to run to the High Court for an injunction just to keep the seats their people had given them. Sixty-five Members of Parliament then petitioned the Speaker to recall the House and debate a motion to impeach the President. The party split. Those who were driven out went and formed another party. And, on May 4, 2001, Mr Chiluba announced that he would not stand.

But mark how it was stopped because this is the part that matters now. It was not stopped by the courts alone. It was not stopped by Parliament alone. It was stopped because the Law Association of Zambia, the church mother bodies, the non-governmental organisations, and ordinary citizens came together in the Oasis Forum and stayed together, week after week, month after month. An entire nation had to be put on its feet to defend a clause that was already written, in plain language, in the supreme law of the land.

That is the measure of what this costs a country. And we are being asked to pay it again.

It will tear the ruling party apart, exactly as it tore the MMD apart. Ambitious men do not queue quietly behind a leader who will not leave. It will deepen the divisions in an already divided nation, setting citizens, churches and civil society against the apparatus of the state, and it will give us gridlock at a moment when our people need a government that is working for them. It will hollow out what is left of our institutions because overriding a constitutional limit always requires subverting the judiciary, the legislature, and whatever internal democracy still survives inside the governing party. And it will cost us money we do not have. Succession crises frighten investors, foreign and local alike. You can not beg the world for capital with one hand while tearing up your own rules with the other.

We do not have to imagine where this road ends. Uganda removed presidential term limits in 2005, then removed the presidential age limit in 2017. Rwanda amended its constitution by referendum in 2015 so that the incumbent could run again. Burundi’s third term in 2015 brought an attempted coup, killings, and a refugee crisis. And, Guinea got itself a brand-new constitution in 2020 so that Alpha Condé could contest a third term. He won it. Soldiers removed him the following year — and let us be honest about what those soldiers were doing. They were not interrupting Guinea’s constitutional order. They were finishing what Condé had already started. Every one of those countries began precisely where we are standing now, with supporters insisting that their man was the exception, was a God sent Messiah.

Opposing this is not hatred of Mr Hichilema, and I will not spend a paragraph pretending otherwise. We would oppose it with exactly the same force if the man in State House were our own.

But I must say something that the rest of those opposing this will not say, because we are socialists and they are not. Term limits are necessary. They are not sufficient. Changing the occupant of State House every ten years, while the same few families and the same foreign interests own the mines, the land, the banks, and the shops, is not yet democracy. It is a rotation. We defend the Constitution not because the document has made our people free — it has not — but because it is the only ground we are all standing on, and men who will take that ground will take everything else afterwards.

And we reject completely this line being pushed at us, that development must take precedence over democracy and constitutionalism. It is patently false. A country that is developing while its Constitution is being dismantled is not developing at all. It is simply postponing the bill.

So let me stop warning and start asking, publicly, and let those I am asking answer publicly.

To Mr Hakainde Hichilema: Say it yourself. Not through a party official. Not through a provincial delegation. Not through a spokesman who can be disowned next month. Stand before the Zambian people, in your own voice, and say that you will not seek and will not accept a third term and that no amendment to that effect will be initiated by your government. It is one sentence. The nation is waiting for it. Your silence is already an answer, and our people can read it because they have seen it before.

To the Law Association of Zambia, to the Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops, to the Council of Churches in Zambia, to the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia, to the NGOCC: reconvene. What you built in 2001 saved this Republic once. It is needed again, and it is needed now, before the drafting starts and not after. The Socialist Party will serve in such a front, and I say this plainly so that no one can misunderstand our motive: we will not seek to lead it, we will not seek to brand it, and we will not seek to turn it into a campaign platform. This is not our property. It is Zambia’s.

To every sitting member of Parliament, in every party: publish your position now. Today. Before the whip reaches you, before the envelopes move, before a committee is appointed to tell you what you think. In 2001, twenty-two men lost their party and nearly lost their seats because they would not bend, and Zambia remembers their names. In December, one hundred and thirty-five of you voted for Act No. 13, and not one of you voted against. Our people have seen that number. They will see the next one.

And let me put down a marker today, the 23rd of September 2026, so that our people can hold this article up against events as they come.

First, it will be denied, and those of us raising it will be called alarmists and enemies of development. Second, the third term will not be proposed by Mr Hichilema. It will be raised by somebody else — party officials, a provincial delegation, a spontaneous petition of the grassroots that is anything but spontaneous. Third, he will be seen to hesitate and then to be persuaded, reluctantly, in the national interest. Fourth, a technical committee or a referendum question will be produced to give the thing a democratic costume. And fifth, it will pass in that House by a margin that looks a great deal like one hundred and thirty-five to nothing.

I would be glad to be proved wrong on every one of those five points. I do not expect to be.

There is one last lesson in 2001 that the men around Mr Hichilema should sit with quietly. The third-term bid did not merely fail. It consumed the man who attempted it. Mr Chiluba left office diminished, his party fractured, and his immunity lifted by the very Parliament he had counted on. He spent the years that followed in the dock. He was acquitted in 2009, and we accept that verdict. But the acquittal did not give him back the eight years, or the party, or the standing he had before he reached for that third term. That is the point, and it is the part they never understand until it is too late. The bid does not have to succeed, and the charges do not have to stick for the man who makes it to lose everything else. And those who are shouting loudest for it today will not be standing anywhere near him when that bill is presented.

Our Constitution is not the property of whoever happens to be occupying State House. It is not the property of a party, or a cabinet, or a majority in a single Parliament. It belongs to the people of Zambia, living and still to be born.

We stopped this in 2001. We will stop it now.

Fred M’membe
SP President