Grief is Not Immunity: The Dalitso Lungu Forfeiture & Grief Politics

🇿🇲 EDITORIAL | Grief is Not Immunity: The Dalitso Lungu Forfeiture & Grief Politics

On Monday, Zambia’s Economic and Financial Crimes Court delivered a ruling that has immediately spilled beyond the courtroom and into the country’s already tense political atmosphere.

The Court ordered the forfeiture to the State of assets linked to Dalitso Lungu, the son of late former President Edgar Chagwa Lungu, after finding that the properties were reasonably suspected to be proceeds of crime under Zambia’s forfeiture framework.

The forfeited portfolio is substantial by any measure. It includes dozens of motor vehicles and more than twenty parcels of land and real estate, with the total value widely cited at over K24 million. The application was brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Gilbert Phiri, through a non conviction based forfeiture process, a legal mechanism that allows the State to recover suspected tainted assets without a prior criminal conviction, provided statutory thresholds are met.

The judgement was delivered by judges sitting in the Economic and Financial Crimes Division, including Pixxie Yangailo, Annie Ononuju, and Ian Mabolobolo, according to reports circulating in Lusaka’s legal and media circles.

The Court’s reasoning, as summarised in the public reporting, turned on a central issue that often defines these cases: lawful source.

Investigators pointed to an absence of tax compliant income streams capable of credibly explaining the acquisition and maintenance of such an asset base. The Court noted concerns around nil tax returns and the failure to establish verifiable earnings, concluding that the evidentiary burden placed on the interested parties had not been discharged in line with the Forfeiture of Proceeds of Crime Act.

This legal conclusion, however, is only the first layer of the national story.

The second layer is political emotion.

Across WhatsApp groups, PF aligned pages, and opposition networks, the ruling has been interpreted through the language of mourning and persecution rather than through the language of compliance and proof. Supporters argue that the timing is insensitive, that the former president remains unburied, and that the State is humiliating a bereaved family.

Others have framed the forfeiture as a deliberate strategy to financially cripple the opposition, alleging that the governing party is weaponising institutions to bankrupt political rivals ahead of 2026.

Some reactions have bordered on the surreal.

The argument being advanced in parts of the public discourse is that a former head of state “cannot fail” to gift his son dozens of vehicles and extensive property, as though public office automatically creates private dynastic entitlement. In that framing, the scale of wealth becomes normalised by proximity to power.

This is precisely where Zambia’s democratic maturity is being tested.

A republic cannot operate on inherited immunity.

Grief is real, and the burial impasse is a national embarrassment that requires dignity and resolution. But grief cannot become a constitutional shelter for unexplained accumulation. Mourning does not suspend the obligation to account.

If assets were legitimately acquired, the law provides the evidentiary pathways. Gifts have documentation. Transfers have records. Businesses have audited accounts. Wealth has tax footprints. In modern governance, legitimacy is not asserted through sentiment. It is demonstrated through paper.

The deeper issue here is not merely Dalitso Lungu.

It is the political economy of the PF era that continues to haunt the state.

Zambia entered unprecedented debt distress under the Patriotic Front, contracting major external liabilities with limited visible developmental conversion. The country defaulted. Restructuring followed. Citizens absorbed the austerity. Social sectors tightened. The macroeconomic bill arrived.

And yet, alongside that national indebtedness, Zambia also witnessed an explosion of elite consumption: expensive vehicles, sudden property empires, land allocations, and opaque enrichment networks that were never fully reconciled with public salaries or declared business outputs.

This contradiction is at the heart of Zambia’s poverty trap.

A country cannot remain permanently in debt while allowing politically connected private wealth to operate as an untouchable parallel economy. That is how institutions rot. That is how public trust collapses. That is how development becomes a slogan rather than a lived outcome.

The persecution narrative must therefore be approached with care, but also with clarity.

Accountability is not persecution. Due process is not revenge. Asset recovery is not “grabbing” when it is anchored in statute and adjudicated by a court.

At the same time, the State must understand its own burden.

Anti corruption enforcement must be consistent, not selective. It must be professional, not theatrical. It must not appear timed for political effect. Institutions must speak through evidence, procedure, and restraint, not through triumphalism or factional signalling.

Zambia needs a republic where no family is above scrutiny, and no institution is above neutrality.

This moment should not be reduced to PF versus UPND.

It should be understood as a national reckoning with a long running governance question: do leaders and their families treat Zambia as a kingdom, or do they submit to Zambia as a republic?

If wealth was gained through dubious means, it was never theirs. It was borrowed from the public future. It was extracted from a country that remains poor. It is exactly why accountability must be pursued, regardless of surname, party, or grief.

Zambia cannot build prosperity on silence.

It can only build it on law.

© The People’s Brief | Editor-in-Chief