Garry Nkombo’s independent gambit exposes UPND’s brittle grip on Southern Province
The decision by Garry Nkombo to contest the Mazabuka parliamentary seat as an independent candidate has provoked a predictable chorus of condemnation from within the ruling United Party for National Development (UPND). Yet most of those now lining up to denounce the move betray a profound misunderstanding of both the man and the moment.
Mr Nkombo, a former minister and long-standing figure in Southern Province politics, could easily have chosen to stand under any number of opposition banners. That he opted instead for the independent route is not, as his critics claim, a gesture of petulance or betrayal. It is a calculated and astute piece of political strategy one that leaves the door open for future reconciliation, while simultaneously exposing the raw nerves and strategic blind spots of a party that has grown dangerously complacent.
What the President’s inner circle those Kandiles who appear to be feasting on the drift between President Hakainde Hichilema and Mr Nkombo consistently fail to grasp is the nature of perception and Mr Nkombo’s rare ability to shape it. They see defiance; the electorate sees a man who has refused to be owned. They see a rupture; the ground sees a leader willing to stand apart from a party that has, in the view of many, forgotten its own.
A narrative that cuts through
In the space of a few carefully orchestrated moves, Mr Nkombo has achieved something that UPND’s provincial strategists have long pretended impossible: he has laid bare the fragility of the party’s hold on its supposed heartland. Southern Province has been treated by Lusaka as a safe deposit box a region whose loyalty can be withdrawn at will, without interest or acknowledgment. That presumption is now being tested, and the results are proving uncomfortable.
A well-planned narrative push of the kind Mr Nkombo appears to have mastered has already begun to scatter what once looked like a monolithic bloc. The whispers from local party structures are no longer whispers. They are open accounts of neglect: unfulfilled campaign promises, vanishing constituency development funds, and a chasm between the party’s elite and the grassroots that grows wider with each passing quarter.
Machiavelli’s warning ignored
The truth, unpalatable as it may be to those who surround the President, is that the UPND has compromised its grassroots base through sustained neglect. And neglect, in politics, is rarely a victimless error. The party has behaved as though the people of Southern Province owe it an eternal debt of gratitude as though the act of winning power in 2021 conferred perpetual ownership over their votes and their voices.
This is where Niccolò Machiavelli’s cold counsel ought to have been heeded. Loyalty, the Florentine warned, is an illusion. It persists only so long as benefits flow. When those benefits cease, loyalty does not merely waver it evaporates. The UPND has spent the better part of five years treating its bedrock supporters as fixtures of furniture, ignoring their daily struggles, their petitions, their quiet resentment. Now, with an election looming, the party imagines it can simply return, knock on the door, and be welcomed back as though nothing has happened.
That is not how politics works. And it is certainly not how Southern Province works.
A reckoning in Mazabuka
Mr Nkombo’s independent candidacy is not the cause of the UPND’s troubles in the region; it is the symptom. The cause lies deeper in a culture of entitlement, in the failure to understand that power is a lease, not a freehold, and in the reckless assumption that loyalty can be taken for granted without being earned anew each day.
Whether Mr Nkombo ultimately wins the Mazabuka seat is, in some respects, secondary. The message has already been sent, and it is reverberating far beyond the constituency boundaries. The party that once prided itself on being the authentic voice of the province now finds itself having to defend ground it never imagined losing. And in that defensive crouch, more than a few UPND loyalists are beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about how they arrived here.
The answer, of course, has been in plain sight all along. You cannot ignore people for five years and then expect them to salute when you finally remember their names. Mr Nkombo understands that. The question is whether the President’s inner circle will learn the lesson before it is too late. On current evidence, the signs are not promising.
-Barbra Musamba Chama