🇿🇲 ANALYSIS | Mundubile’s Exit From the PF Conclave: What is Said, and What is Carefully Avoided
Brian Mundubile’s has withdrawn from the Patriotic Front conclave, framing his decision as a principled stand against bad faith. “A conclave such as the one underway must be based on the highest exhibition of good faith, trust and confidence,” he wrote last night, before announcing that he could no longer participate in a process he believed had been “soiled.”
On the surface, his move reads as an objection to procedure. Beneath it lies a more complex political calculation.
What Mundubile says is important. He acknowledges that the Expanded Council of Elders acted with “noble and well-intentioned” motives. He affirms loyalty to the PF constitution and insists that a general conference before the end of January 2026 remains the proper path. He positions himself as reasonable, conciliatory, and constitutional.
This framing matters. It casts him not as a rebel, but as a victim of internal manipulation.
What he does not say is equally telling.
Mundubile does not deny sustained engagement with the Tonse Alliance, even as that alliance this week formally ejected the PF as an anchor party and retained only Lungu loyalists under a redefined political movement. He does not address growing reports that his political future may lie outside the PF’s formal structures. Silence, in this context, functions as strategic ambiguity.
The timing sharpens the ANALYSIS | Mundubile’s Exit From the PF Conclave: What is Said, and What is Carefully Avoided. Just days before Mundubile’s statement, Tonse Alliance leadership moved to sever institutional ties with the Patriotic Front, citing paralysis, court battles, and factionalism. In the same week, the alliance reportedly barred the use of Edgar Lungu regalia and imagery in Chawama and Kasama by-elections. That decision directly weakens PF symbolism while protecting Tonse’s repositioning.
Mundubile’s withdrawal lands squarely in that window.
The legal reality also looms. Even if the PF were to miraculously unite behind a single leader, the party’s operational control remains entangled in court processes. The Chabinga faction holds the formal instruments of the party. Mundubile understands this. His statement’s emphasis on being “listed for purported discipline and eventual expulsion” reads less like surprise and more like preparation. Victimhood, once established, becomes political currency.
By stepping away from the conclave rather than being expelled from the party, Mundubile preserves dual legitimacy. Inside the PF base, he can claim persecution and bad faith. Outside it, particularly among Lungu-aligned networks now embedded within Tonse Alliance structures, he carries sympathy capital without the stigma of open defection. The language of “availability to participate in any credible process” keeps every door open.
His invocation of Tonse Alliance is also precise. He references the meeting that provisionally removed PF as anchor party not as betrayal, but as a legitimate political engagement. That framing aligns him subtly with the alliance’s reformist narrative while avoiding an explicit break with PF identity. It is politics by footnote rather than declaration.
None of this negates the factual dysfunction inside the Patriotic Front.
Mundubile’s account of disciplinary threats during a unity process reinforces a pattern seen repeatedly since 2021. The party has struggled to separate reconciliation from retribution. Processes meant to unify often become arenas for score-settling. In that sense, his critique stands on observable ground.
However, neutrality requires acknowledging agency. Mundubile is not a passive casualty of PF chaos. He is an experienced political actor reading a narrowing field. Aligning too early with a new platform risks alienating core PF supporters. Leaving too late risks being trapped in a party without legal or organisational capacity. His current posture manages that tension.
The broader picture is one of accelerated fragmentation. The PF is losing not just time, but narrative control. Tonse Alliance is moving to rebrand without it. Courts continue to define who holds the keys. By-elections are being fought with new rules of symbolism. In that environment, Mundubile’s statement is less an endpoint than a staging post.
What remains clear is that the conclave is not failiing because of one withdrawal. It is failing because the conditions for trust have never existed. Mundubile’s exit has simply made this visible.
Whether he ultimately contests on a PF ticket, an alliance platform, or another vehicle altogether, his statement has already done its work: it places him on the record as aggrieved rather than rejected, principled rather than sidelined.
© The People’s Brief | Editors