ADVICE TO ALL POLITICAL PARTIES
….Do not adopt the MPs who crossed to enable Bill 7’s passage.
By Kanyanta Chanda Kapwepwe
In the aftermath of the passage of Bill 7, a quiet but dangerous temptation is emerging across Zambia’s political landscape: the temptation to absorb Members of Parliament who crossed to enable Bill 7’s passage.
This advice is directed not only to the ruling party, but to all political parties. Do not adopt the MPs who crossed to enable Bill 7’s passage. Using their votes is one thing. Trusting them is another.
Political posterity is unforgiving on this point. Politicians who betray their own parties at critical moments rarely become loyal allies to those they join.
They do not move because of principle; they move because of power. And once power shifts, they move again. What appears as political support today often reveals itself as strategic convenience tomorrow.
The MPs who abandoned their party principles did not undergo a sudden ideological awakening. They did not discover new convictions overnight. They responded to pressure, proximity, and opportunity. That behaviour is not conversion; it is political elasticity. And elasticity cuts both ways. If they could abandon their party ideology at a critical moment, they can abandon any party when incentives change.
This is not a moral judgment; it is a political reality.
There is also a deeper strategic risk that parties should not underestimate. Defectors import instability. They bring factionalism, internal bargaining, and long-term uncertainty. They arrive without roots, without shared sacrifice, and without accountability to the party base.
Parties may use defectors in moments of parliamentary arithmetic, but they seldom build sustainable political organisations with them.
For UPND in particular, the advice is that consolidating power responsibly does not require importing political nomads whose loyalty is conditional. It requires strengthening internal ranks, delivering governance outcomes, and allowing opposition parties to manage the consequences of their own internal differences.
The same advice applies to every other political party contemplating opportunistic recruitment.
Absorbing MPs who crossed on Bill 7 does not signal strength. It signals tolerance for political opportunism. And once opportunism is rewarded, it becomes the operating logic of Parliament.
Zambia’s democracy is already strained by transactional politics. Normalising defection as a pathway to relevance will only accelerate institutional decay.
Voters are watching closely. They may be silent once. But they do not forget patterns. Those who betray once betray again.
Kanyanta Chanda Kapwepwe is a governance analyst and senior lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He writes in his personal capacity.
That analysis is correct everything being equal but to start with, PF didn’t have a principle that was sound except to order that the process is flawed don’t do your job.
Secondly, the leader of opposition in parliament asks them to, so they didn’t cross the floor as you have put it Sir. We always have to analyse things correctly. Each time we analyse from a partizan point of view, all other well meaning points become blurred.
I am willing to pay anyone who can honestly convince me that this man is not talking nonsense.
Most of the current MPs are not going to be adopted thats why they voted for Bill 7 so that they have a chance to enter parliament through the back door using the proportionate system introduced in the bill which will enable them to be hand picked as an MP without a single vote cast in their favour.