🇿🇲 EXCLUSIVE | Kasama is the New Battlefield as PF Splinters & Tonse Alliance Ties Itself in Knots
Kasama has emerged as the latest pressure point in Zambia’s opposition politics, not because of a single election, but because of unresolved power struggles now spilling into open contradiction.
The Given Lubinda–led Patriotic Front enclave has moved into the Northern Circuit at a moment of acute internal confusion, just a day after Brian Mundubile openly crossed to the Tonse Alliance and filed nomination papers to contest its chairmanship. The move comes weeks after a Tonse Alliance faction formally expelled the PF from its books, a decision Lubinda’s camp continues to reject as illegal.
On Friday, Mundubile submitted his nomination at the Tonse Alliance Secretariat in Lusaka. Within hours, the Lubinda enclave, through its self-exiled U.S based information chief Emmanuel Mwamba, issued a sharply worded statement warning PF members to stay away from what it described as an illegal process.
“The so-called nominations and congress held by the Zumani Zimba Tonse Alliance must be regarded as a totally non-PF activity,” Mwamba said, warning that PF members who participate “risk serious sanctions from the Party.”
The statement reaffirmed that the Patriotic Front is preparing for its own National Conference in February 2026, where presidential aspirants paying K200,000 would contest under the party constitution. It also reasserted the Lubinda camp’s position that only structures established under late former President Edgar Chagwa Lungu remain legitimate.
This declaration, however, now collides with political reality on the ground.
While rejecting Tonse Alliance processes in Lusaka, the same PF leadership is actively campaigning under the Tonse Alliance banner in Kasama.
Lubinda is leading a high-profile team into the Northern Circuit to support Peter Yuda Chikwete, a mayoral candidate running on the FDD ticket with Tonse Alliance backing. Among those on the ground are MPs Stephen Kampyongo, Mutotwe Kafwaya and George Chisanga.
The paradox is stark. The Lubinda camp does not recognise the Tonse Alliance faction organising elections in Lusaka, but it is relying on the same alliance machinery to contest and defend political territory in Kasama.
Kasama itself is no longer politically predictable.
The district has more than 133,000 registered voters, 19 wards, and 171 polling stations spread across Kasama Central and Lukashya constituencies. Historically a green base, the whole Northern Circuit has become contested territory. The ruling UPND has steadily penetrated the region, building structures once considered out of reach.
Kasama Central MP Sibongile Mwamba, elected on the PF ticket, has publicly endorsed President Hakainde Hichilema and supported Bill 7, underlining the fluidity of loyalties in the region.
Unlike Chawama, where grief politics linked to the unburied remains of Edgar Lungu shaped voter sentiment, the Northern Circuit operates differently. Lungu body politics carries limited emotional weight here. Voting patterns in the North have historically shifted slowly, moving from UNIP to MMD, then to PF, and now increasingly opening space for the UPND. Identity alone is no longer enough to secure dominance.
This reality explains why both the red base and the green base are treating Kasama as a frontline rather than a safe zone.
Lubinda’s visit also carry a symbolic dimension. He paid condolences to Mwine Lubemba and the Bemba Royal Establishment following the burial of Abasano ba Mfumu, Mama Bernadette Mwamba. The gesture reinforces PF’s continued courtship of traditional authority in the North, even as political control fragments.
What is unfolding is not just a by-election campaign but a broader struggle over who speaks for the opposition.
Mundubile’s move into Tonse Alliance structures has unsettled PF hardliners. KBF, Dan Pule, Mundubile and other figures are jostling for space under the Lungu legacy banner, even as Lubinda insists that only PF structures sanctioned before Lungu’s death remain valid.
Everyone wants the name. No one trusts the process.
As Kasama votes on January 29, it does so under competing flags, overlapping alliances and unresolved disputes. The Northern Circuit as a whole is no longer a green stronghold nor a guaranteed red pickup. It is a contested voting bloc where old loyalties are weakening and new calculations are taking shape.
© The People’s Brief | Gathering —Chileshe Sengwe; Fact-checking —Mwape Nthegwa & Filing —Ollus R. Ndomu