🇿🇲 VIEWPOINT | Bill 7 Aftershock: The Cost of Underrating Hichilema
What is unfolding after the passage of Bill 7 is not merely opposition anger. It is political miscalculation laid bare. Right now, there is flood of political statements, threats, false hope and PF-inhouse accusations.
For weeks, opposition voices spoke with certainty. They said Bill 7 would not pass. They said the courts would stop it. They said Catholic bishops had spoken and therefore the matter was settled. They said MPs would not dare defy the “people.” They said Hakainde Hichilema was isolated, weakened, on the back foot. Every one of those assumptions collapsed in one sitting of Parliament.
This collapse reveals a deeper problem. The opposition continues to underrate Hichilema as a political force. Not a president. A political animal.
Hichilema is not a leader who stumbled into State House. He is a man shaped by fifteen years of opposition defeats, arrests, propaganda, internal betrayal, regional isolation and prolonged exclusion from state power. This experience hardened him. It taught him patience, timing and how to operate under hostility. When resistance peaks, he does not retreat. He shows up. This instinct has not left him in power.
The opposition misread this moment because they substituted social media noise for political reality. They believed trending hashtags equalled public consent. They mistook elite outrage for mass resistance. They assumed that because Oasis Forum, sections of the clergy and legal voices opposed Bill 7, Parliament would fold. Instead, Parliament voted. Overwhelmingly.
The silence that followed is telling. Catholic priests who spoke loudly have gone quiet. Oasis Forum has retreated into court processes that no longer shape events. LAZ is internally divided. The moral certainty that once framed opposition messaging has evaporated, replaced by accusations, betrayal narratives and panic statements.
The deeper failure is strategic. The opposition still believes regime change happens through pressure, declarations and moral outrage. Hichilema knows it happens through numbers, structures and timing. While they rushed to microphones and courts, he counted MPs. While they prayed and issued statements, he secured outcomes. That is not arrogance. It is experience.
False hope is now being sold to supporters. That next year the law will be reversed. That Hichilema is leaving. That betrayal explains everything. It does not. What explains this moment is fragmentation. PF has no consolidated leadership. Multiple figures speak with equal authority. Alliances are announced weekly without ground structures. Presidential ambitions multiply while voter organisation shrinks. That is not a movement. It is a crowd.
What is missing is painfully obvious. One leader. One message. One machine. One credible economic alternative. Without that, the opposition is not competing with a government. It is competing with itself.
Hichilema understands something they still refuse to accept. Power does not fear noise. It fears organisation. And right now, the opposition has none that can withstand pressure.
As Parliament edges toward dissolution in May, expect movement. MPs read power correctly. Defections are likely. Quiet repositioning is already underway. The same MPs accused today will calculate tomorrow. That is politics, not morality.
The tragedy for the opposition is not Bill 7. It is the continued refusal to study the man they are facing. They underrate him as cautious. He is deliberate. They frame him as cornered. He is comfortable under siege. They speak of courage. He has lived it for fifteen years.
Unless the opposition learns that reality fast, next year will not be a contest of ideas. It will be a rout explained away by excuses, betrayal stories and missed lessons.
History is not kind to movements that confuse noise for numbers. And Hakainde Hichilema has already beaten louder opponents with less power than he holds today.
© The People’s Brief | Ollus R. Ndomu
Like all of the rest of us Zambians which includes me, we highly underrated the cattleman as a very big underdog in politics, some called him an under five but after this day, he has proved to be more politically astute than most of us, KUDOS TO YOU BALLY ON THIS ONE, even though I have misgivings on the passing of Bill 7, you have taught all of us a lesson in politics which has incidentally come at the same time as the total annihilation of the former ruling party PF, Ndiwe Chikali apa peve, but we meet again in the political battle field in 2026, congratulations for now.
I believe HH has the wellbeing of our country at heart unlike those whose only concern was to line their pockets with ill gotten wealth. He has done well considering the hopeless situation we were in after the country was ransacked by the notorious PF in pursuit of their philosophy of “uubomba mwibala alya mwibala”.
We need his steady hand for another five years because the damage done by PF was extensive and will take more than ten years to correct. They ruined the country in every way, morally, economically, politically, socially, faith wise. No area of human endeavour was spared. They even managed to currupt the Catholic Church, something that no other regime had done.