🇿🇲 EDITORIAL | Opposition Discovers the Convenience of 2025 Law Amendment
We are now watching the afterlife of the 2025 constitutional amendment process, formerly known as Bill 7. The country has moved from fierce resistance into the practical stage of implementation, with the Electoral Commission beginning preparations for delimitation. What is striking is not the reform itself, but the speed with which some of its loudest critics are now positioning themselves as beneficiaries and advisers.
This week, lawyer John Sangwa, now operating on the political stage under the Movement for National Renewal project, publicly argued that Lusaka alone should have as many as 30 constituencies. Not asked. Not prompted. Declared. The same political space that spent months warning against delimitation is suddenly making expansive proposals about how far it should go. The question writes itself. What changed?
And Sangwa is not alone. Patriotic Front figures such as Miles Sampa have also joined the conversation with ease, speaking confidently about the need for more constituencies and greater representation in Lusaka. But these are among the very actors who helped fuel the loud national campaign against the amendment process, describing it as illegitimate, dangerous, and unaffordable.
This was not mild disagreement. The opposition ecosystem ran a serious propaganda campaign against the reforms. There were press conferences, daily denunciations, and even highly theatrical “Black Friday prayers,” with some clergy drawn into political mobilisation, framing the constitutional amendment as an assault on democracy. The President was accused of manipulating institutions. Parliament was scandalised. The entire process was branded a rigging scheme even after the vote passed.
And yet, here we are.
The same actors who said Zambia could not afford more constituencies are now demanding more seats. The same voices who described the amendment as authoritarian are now discussing constituency arithmetic with confidence. The same leaders who promised that once they return to power they will “reverse everything” are now adapting to the very framework they called illegal.
This is not principle. It is opportunism.
A constitutional amendment does not become acceptable because opposition politicians have discovered how to use it. Delimitation does not become democratic because it might create new political openings. If the argument then was cost, legality, and national interest, those standards did not expire when the law was enacted. If the argument now is representation, then representation was not invented in February.
This is the oldest Zambian political habit: denounce reforms when they are not in your hands, embrace them once they become negotiable. The Constitution becomes a weapon in opposition and a tool in ambition. The country is asked to treat yesterday’s “dictatorship bill” as today’s “needed reform.”
The deeper contradiction is legal as well as moral. You cannot campaign for office under a constitutional order and then promise to nullify that order after winning without collapsing the legitimacy of your own mandate. If the system is unlawful, then the elections it structures are equally compromised. You cannot call the rules illegal until you see a path to benefit from them.
This is why Zambians are exhausted. Politics has become performance before it becomes governance. Leaders speak in absolutes when resisting power, then speak in technicalities when chasing it.
If Lusaka deserves more constituencies, argue it honestly, consistently, and with costed realism. If the 2025 constitutional amendment had defects, propose reforms through lawful and coherent processes. But Zambia cannot keep normalising selective constitutionalism, where the same law is cursed in opposition and celebrated in calculation.
Here is the blunt truth: many politicians were never opposed to delimitation. They were opposed to delimitation under someone else’s presidency.
This hypocrisy dressed as principle.
© The People’s Brief | Editor-in-Chief