PF DOUBLE STANDARDS!
The announcement by the Patriotic Front that it may now use a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to hold its long-awaited General Conference is not only mischievous but a textbook case of double posturing, hypocrisy, and political dishonesty
So, Mr Celestine Mukandila, Secretary General of the Patriotic Front, what exactly was so difficult about doing this two months ago, when Hon Brian Mundubile and many others made the same proposal?
I am also aware that Peter Sinkamba, President of the Green Party and leader of the People’s Pact, before exiting the Tonse Alliance out of frustration with endless procrastination, formally offered his Pact as a neutral platform for the Patriotic Front to hold its long-delayed Conference.
That Conference, whose postponement had become the single biggest obstacle to progress within Tonse, was rejected.
The offer was not rejected because it was impractical, but because holding a democratic Conference was never the intention in the first place.
This further exposes the dishonesty of the PF leadership’s excuses. The problem was never logistics, legality, or court processes, the problem was fear of a Democratic outcome they could not control.
You and Acting President Hon Given Lubinda chose to hide behind the excuse of “waiting for the Court judgment,” to restore PF, completely oblivious or conveniently indifferent to the realities of the August 13th electoral calendar.
What is now abundantly clear is that you and your sponsors simply could not stomach the idea of a Brian Mundubile Presidency. The signs were unmistakable: the membership wanted Mundubile. In response, you deployed every trick in the book to postpone the elections.
Even the Party Spokesperson, Emmanuel Mwamba, admitted in our telephone conversation, that he was shocked by the unjustified postponements and delays in holding the Conference.
He agreed with me that the injunction was being conveniently used to justify the postponement of the Congress, despite the party freely holding other similar meetings during the same period.
This confirms what many already knew: the PF hierarchy had no intention of proceeding with the Congress as long as Brian Muntayalwa Mundubile remained a candidate.
Plans were set in motion to suspend and expel Mundubile. These efforts began with a calculated dismantling of his support base among Members of the Central Committee and Members of Parliament.
However, when Brian Mundubile finally decided to bite the cherry and contest elections under the Tonse Alliance—an alliance to which he was appointed by the late President Edgar Chagwa Lungu as an alternative to the PF’s endless internal shenanigans—panic broke out.
Hon. Given Lubinda’s Central Committee immediately went into overdrive. Mundubile was expelled in haste, and suddenly, miraculously, the same leadership that had spent years postponing elections announced that it would now hold the Congress before the end of February.
The hypocrisy was breathtaking.
But by then, the membership was done. They were no longer buying the same recycled lies that had been fed to them for four consecutive years. They began moving to Tonse like shifting sand, starting with long-standing senior figures such as Hon Stephen Kampyongo, Presidential Candidate Hon Mutotwe Kafwaya, and several Central Committee members.
Provincial, District, Constituency, Ward, and Branch officials across all 10 Provinces have since been captured in several public videos openly shifting allegiance to the Brian Mundubile Tonse, rebranding PF offices across the country.
Yet the PF Secretariat, now sounding more like a war-time propaganda unit continues to downplay the mass exodus, even going as far as expelling members who had already left and branding them “sellouts.”
The reality, however, is brutal and unavoidable: whatever remains of the Patriotic Front exists only in the imagination of its leaders. The structures have bolted for survival. They needed something—anything—to cling to as 13th August approaches.
Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see how the PF can credibly hold this so-called Congress, let alone miraculously assemble the much-talked-about 4,000 delegates—ironically under an SPV, the very mechanism they have consistently condemned and opposed.
The best course of action left for the PF leadership is to heed the advice of PF veteran Yamfwa Mukanga and others to support the Mundubile Tonse project, after all it is ECLs project.
That path, however, demands maturity, magnanimity, and humility—from both sides of what once was the PF.
Both the Mundubile and Lubinda camps owe it to their departed leaders, Michael Sata and Edgar Chagwa Lungu, to salvage something meaningful from this political wreckage.
Above all, they owe it to the Zambian people and to their colleagues languishing in prison or stranded in the diaspora on politically related cases, to rise above personal egos and do what history will judge as right.