EXCLUSIVE | Makebi’s Eastern Enclave Calculations
Eastern Province has never been an easy region to read politically. It is patient, slow to shift, and deeply anchored in historical loyalty. Voting patterns here do not change overnight. The region stayed with UNIP long after Kenneth Kaunda left office. Even today, decades after the MMD lost power, its political memory still lives in parts of the province. The UPND holds parliamentary seats here. The PF still has influence. .
No party fully owns Eastern Province, and no leader walks in assured of victory.
This context matters as Makebi Zulu re-emerges on home soil.
Makebi’s return to Malambo is not a surge. It is a recalibration. He understands that Eastern Province does not move on excitement but on familiarity, reassurance, and long memory. This is a region was once mobilized around the Wako ni Wako logic, a political instinct popularised by late former President Rupiah Banda. The idea is simple. Protect what is yours. Rally around one of your own. The language may not be spoken openly, but the thinking survives quietly in villages, wards, and party structures.
Within the PF base, this instinct is colliding with unresolved bitterness. Many self-described “original greens” still trace the party’s 2021 defeat to the succession that followed Michael Sata’s death. Edgar Lungu, an Easterner, took over. The party later lost power to Hakainde Hichilema. Among some northern-based PF figures now aligned with Brian Mundubile, the belief persists that Eastern Province leadership cost the party State House. This sentiment remains unspoken publicly, but it shapes resistance to another Eastern figure inheriting the PF brand or its political legacy.
Makebi is reading that terrain carefully.
He knows the PF cannot say these things aloud without tearing itself apart further. He also knows that internal PF hostility makes a national takeover impossible without first building a home base. This explains the turn to chiefs, rituals, and regional affirmation. Today’s trending anointing by Chief Mkanya is not theatre. It is a calculated message to local structures that Makebi is reclaiming legitimacy from the ground up, not waiting for party endorsement from a divided centre.
But this path is not without contradiction.
Makebi served as Eastern Province minister and Malambo MP. He lost his seat in 2021. That loss still hangs over his mobilisation claims. The political figures around him, including former ministers and loyalists from the Lungu era, carry history but little current ground power. Their strength lies in memory, not structures.
Makebi is leaning on them because they are trusted within the Lungu circle and because he is positioning himself as a custodian of that legacy at a time when the PF itself cannot agree on what that legacy means.
This is why Edgar Lungu’s name remains central to his messaging. It is not nostalgia alone. It is survival politics. In a fractured opposition space, grief still mobilises where ideology cannot.
The police presence at his Malambo home earlier today adds another layer. Authorities say the gathering lacked a permit. Supporters say the move was intimidation. Either way, the optics matter. A leader returning home to organise, surrounded by police, feeds into Makebi’s narrative of resistance and struggle. In Eastern Province, that narrative resonates more than polished press statements.
This is not yet momentum. It is groundwork.
Eastern Province will not move quickly. It never has. Makebi’s gamble is that regional affirmation, Lungu loyalty, and quiet ethnic calculation can rebuild relevance before August. Whether that is enough, especially against entrenched party structures and voter memory of 2021, remains uncertain.
What is clear is that opposition politics is drifting further into regional logic. Parties are weakening. Personalities are rising. Old wounds are shaping new strategies.
Eastern Province is once again being asked to choose between memory and the future. How it responds will not be rushed, and it will not be simple.
© The People’s Brief | Editors
