Has Hichilema Bought Mundubile too?

🇿🇲 EDITORIAL | Has Hichilema Bought Mundubile too?

The Patriotic Front is once again reaching for a familiar refuge: blaming President Hakainde Hichilema for its internal collapse. Brian Mundubile’s takeover of the Tonse Alliance has triggered the same reflex that followed the Miles Sampa episode in 2023 and the Robert Chabinga phase that came after it. Each time, PF insists the ruling party is “using” someone to kill the opposition. Each time, the party avoids the harder question: why is it so easy for PF to be taken over from within?

This pattern is now too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.

When Miles Sampa staged his October 2023 takeover of PF, the party said it was a State project. Police presence at Mulungushi was cited as proof. When Sampa later lost control to Robert Chabinga, PF said Chabinga had been bought. Now that Brian Mundubile has emerged through the Tonse Alliance route, the same accusation has been recycled. Three leaders in three years. Same explanation. Different actors.

At some point, the conspiracy collapses under its own weight.

If everyone who rises in PF can be “used,” then the problem is not infiltration. It is vacancy. A party without clear succession rules, without uncontested authority, and without institutional discipline creates space for coups. Power does not need to be stolen when it is lying on the floor.

Mundubile’s manoeuvre does not look new. It looks familiar. Zambia has seen this script before. After Michael Sata’s death in 2014, Edgar Lungu rose to the PF presidency through a contested, chaotic process that sidelined Miles Sampa. At the time, it was defended as political realism. Fast forward a decade and the same tactics are now being denounced as betrayal. The method has not changed. Only the moral language has.

This raises a deeper question PF refuses to answer: what exactly is the Tonse Alliance?

Is it an alliance of political parties, civil society organisations, churches, individuals, or all of the above? If Tonse is not a registered political party, how does it elect a president? If it uses a political party as a special purpose vehicle, what is the legal and political status of that vehicle relative to other members? Can any party simply be absorbed? Can individuals acquire seats without organisational mandates?

These questions are not academic. They determine legitimacy, nominations, campaign financing, and ballot access.

Mundubile’s election exposes these structural gaps. Does his elevation mean he has resigned from the PF? If not, who does he answer to? If yes, what happens to the PF MPs who have aligned with him? Does PF intend to formally release its members to Tonse, or will it pivot and recognise Robert Chabinga’s faction instead? Silence on these issues deepens confusion and weakens the opposition’s credibility.

PF’s own history explains the crisis more convincingly than any State project narrative. The party has never developed a stable succession culture. Leadership transitions have been transactional, personality-driven, and often enforced through brute political manoeuvre. While in power, the party held together through access to state resources. Out of power, the cracks are no longer patched over.

Claims that UPND is orchestrating PF’s implosion may resonate emotionally with a frustrated base, but they do not stand up structurally. At most, the ruling party acts as a catalyst. PF supplies the fuel.

The danger now is escalation. Reports that some PF old guards are preparing to refer Mundubile to law enforcement over alleged abuse of public funds during his tenure as Northern Province Minister point to a familiar cycle. Once investigations begin, the narrative will again shift to persecution. Accountability will be framed as political victimhood. Institutions will be blamed for doing their jobs.

This is how opposition credibility erodes.

The hard truth is this: PF is fighting PF. Tonse Alliance is not resolving PF’s succession crisis; it is exporting it. Until the opposition confronts its internal contradictions honestly, no amount of blaming the State will restore coherence.

Voters are watching closely. They are less interested in who is betraying whom, and more interested in whether the opposition can organise itself into a serious alternative government. Right now, the answer remains uncertain.

And uncertainty, not repression, is the opposition’s greatest enemy.

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