THE CANDIDATES | Hichilema vs The Field: The 15-Year Opposition DNA
Hakainde Hichilema did not inherit power. He fought for it across fifteen years of electoral defeats, arrests, propaganda wars, internal fractures and a media landscape that often shut him out. That experience built a muscle that today’s opposition has not yet developed. They face a President who understands their battlefield better than he understands State House. That imbalance is visible every week in Zambia’s political arena.
Two men in multiparty Zambia mastered opposition survival: Michael Sata and Hakainde Hichilema. Sata weaponised grassroots energy, street language and urban anger into a movement. Hichilema weaponised endurance, discipline and institutional pressure. Sata destabilised incumbency with cadence and volume. Hichilema destabilised it with patience and infrastructure. They came from different schools, but they graduated from the same institution: lived opposition.
That is what sets Hichilema apart now. He did not step into opposition; he was forged by it. He knows how frustration builds, how alliances collapse, how public anger cycles and how protests lose steam when they fail to convert into structures. He knows the difference between noise and numbers. He understands what it means to campaign without state media, organise without police permits, and survive smear campaigns without losing message control. Most of his challengers learned politics inside government vehicles, not at roadblocks at midnight.
The current opposition points to shrinking civic space. There is merit in parts of that critique. Police permits remain a friction point. Opposition figures still face legal pressure. But there is also a truth they avoid saying aloud: the UPND environment is not what PF built. The beatings at rallies, the teargas at private meetings, the closed newsrooms, the midnight raid politics, the deathly violence that marked some PF flashpoints. That architecture has not returned. Zambia is tense, not brutal. Debate is sharp, not silenced. That context matters because it strips the opposition of martyrdom. The repression script that worked in the PF era does not convert with the same power today.
Meanwhile, Hichilema’s background keeps trapping them. He expects them to organise. To build ward structures. To produce agents. To pick one candidate. To stay disciplined. To run a message longer than one news cycle. These are not things today’s opposition has mastered. They respond to headlines; he responds to timelines. They chase emotional moments; he chases institutional positioning. They hope the street will carry them; he knows the street only counts if the polling station counts them too.
Yes, Zambia has problems. Load shedding is biting. Prices are testing patience. Citizens are restless. This is ripe terrain for an opposition recovery. Yet the opposition has not capitalised because their politics is reactive, fragmented and personality-driven. They are running against anger, not organising it. They are not presenting an alternative offer, only an alternative emotion. Voters do not reward rage without a roadmap. Hichilema spent fifteen years proving that.
The paradox is simple. The President is vulnerable on delivery, but the opposition is weaker on capacity. He stands on governance challenges; they stand on organisational vacuum. To beat a long-game player, you must build a long-game machine. Without structures, discipline and a coherent economic alternative, they are competing with a man who already solved the puzzle they are trying to read.
Hichilema’s advantage is not power. It is memory. He remembers what they have not yet learned. And until they study the very playbook that beat him for six straight elections before he won the seventh, they will remain stuck in reaction while he governs in strategy.
Next in The Candidates: Populists, pragmatists, and the dark horses redefining Zambia’s 2026 battle.
© The People’s Brief | Ollus R. Ndomu