Has UPND Brought Chawama MP Bright Nundwe?

🇿🇲 VIEWPOINT | Has UPND Bought MP Nundwe?

Chawama has become one of Zambia’s most politically watched constituencies, not because it is large on the map, but because it is large in meaning. Last month, the ruling UPND failed to flip the parliamentary seat, and Bright Nundwe entered Parliament under the FDD banner through an opposition alliance win that immediately shifted Lusaka’s political temperature. Every gesture from the new MP is now being read as a signal of where urban opposition politics is heading.

This is the context in which Nundwe’s remarks this week matter. Speaking at the commissioning of the Kuku Police Post, a facility built through the Constituency Development Fund, the new lawmaker praised President Hakainde Hichilema with tonal emphasis for prioritising development and expanding CDF allocations.

He described the project as proof of government’s commitment to security and community-level investment, and he urged unity across Chawama’s wards, warning against segregation along tribal or partisan lines. In an election year, those are not neutral words. They are a deliberate choice of register.

The predictable backlash has already arrived. Some opposition voices are framing Nundwe’s praise as evidence of being “bought” by the ruling party. But that reaction exposes one of Zambia’s deepest democratic weaknesses: the belief that acknowledging development is betrayal. The truth is simpler. A police post does not belong to UPND or FDD. It belongs to residents.

Development is not a party card. It is a public good, paid for by citizens and meant to outlive electoral cycles.

Nundwe is not the first opposition figure to learn this lesson publicly. He joins a small but important class of politicians, including Kanchibiya PF MP Sunday Chanda, who have shown that opposition does not require hostility to every state project. In functioning democracies, lawmakers compete on policy, oversight, and alternative programmes, not on denying reality when clinics, schools, or police infrastructure are delivered. The idea that an MP must perform permanent outrage to prove authenticity is political theatre, not leadership.

The larger issue is strategic. Chawama is densely populated and politically sensitive, and its development demands are not negotiable. Any MP who treats government-funded projects as enemy territory risks isolating themselves from the basic expectations of constituents. Nundwe’s message, anchored in “One Zambia, One Nation,” is an attempt to position Chawama as national space, not factional property. That is a mature instinct in a city constituency where votes move quickly and loyalty is increasingly transactional.

This also speaks to the opposition’s current dilemma. Alliances can win seats, but governance credibility is built in how leaders behave after victory. If every compliment to a national programme is treated as treason, opposition politics collapses into a purity contest, not a development contest. Zambia cannot afford boutique parties whose main product is grievance while communities demand security, jobs, and services.

There is, of course, a line that must remain clear. Praising a policy outcome is not the same as surrendering oversight. Nundwe can commend CDF expansion while still demanding transparency, efficiency, and fairness in implementation. This is the proper democratic balance: cooperation on development, confrontation on accountability.

The deeper issue is this: when a new MP cannot celebrate a police post without being accused of defection, it is not the MP who has failed politics. It is politics that has failed the country.

This August, the contest should not be about who hates whom more. It should be about who can deliver, scrutinise, and govern with seriousness.

© The People’s Brief | Editors