PF MAY BE PAYING HEAVILY FOR POLITICAL LESSONS THEY HAVE REFUSED TO LEARN FROM
A KBN TV Editorial
To know where you are going, they say, you must understand where you are coming from. Past and present political happenings in Zambia are full of lifelong lessons that the former ruling party Patriotic Front should have embraced to learn from in order to avoid the many challenges they are faced with today.
Why should we invest our time writing editorials about the PF, you may ask. PF is not just an ordinary party. They were in opposition, formed Government and were in power for 10 years and they are now back in opposition. This is the party whose formation was shaped by one man’s charisma that propelled it to fame, overrunning the UPND that had been in opposition longer than the PF.
Given the years of experience on both sides of the coin, one expected better from the PF than its current predicament and self inflicted inconveniences.
When President Frederick Chiluba dribbled King Combra Michael Sata and annoited Levy Patrick Mwanawasa as his successor, Sata summoned everything within him and with the help of the Post Newspaper solidly behind him then, he became the people’s favorite, beating Rupiah Banda in an embarrassing defeat that only comes close to the 2021 general elections in which UPND (opposition) beat the PF (in power) with over 1 million votes to spare.
After such a humiliating defeat of the ruling party by an opposition outfit, the expectation was that the PF would retreat and hold a convention with the likes of Brian Mundubile as favourite to take over the party leadership from former President Edgar Lungu who had formally resigned from active politics. The plan was for him to handover power to whoever the convention could have chosen.
This perhaps was the beginning of the problems in PF. No convention was held to choose the new leadership that would address the problems that a post election study revealed as the main reasons for PF’s embarrassing fall from grace.
The first two Parliamentary by-elections after the August 12, 2021 elections in Kwacha and Kabushi, should have taught the PF lessons that the political field of play had changed. They lost both seats and it appears they also lost the lessons.
Fast forward, the PF today has 3 presidents, each one of them claiming legitimacy in the courts of law. The former ruling party may have played in the hands of the state sponsored machinations and the appetite to fight back, may have come too little too late.
As though that is not enough, the ECZ has introduced new rules regarding signing of adoption certificates and so far, any PF candidate from the ECL aligned camp hasn’t been successful at the attempt to participate in recent ward by-elections. Here too, the former ruling party doesn’t seem to have learnt anything from these experiences.
The real problem, it seems, PF officials like to listen to themselves. Big mistake!
Senior officials and former advisors must realize that they are way too invested to offer an objective assessment of the challenges facing the PF.
All things considered, the real trump card for the PF is the UKA Alliance. But even there, the mistakes that sneaked Miles Sampa into the driving seat are being repeated with unilateral declarations such as “UKA is ECL and ECL is UKA.” If the PF doesn’t see any problem with such statements, then we are worried for them.
UKA itself though very promising, has a lot of teething problems but those problems are not insurmountable.
Already, the majority of PF MPs and MCCs have boycotted UKA, which means even among themselves, they are still undecided which way to go. Information reaching us indicates that only 7 out of 58 MPs are remitting their monthly contributions to the party. It’s now 9 months the party is failing to pay its Secretariat staff. These are serious problems.
What should also be bone in mind is that once Parliament is dissolved in two years time, each PF MP will have to choose a ticket to use for their seats. If the court cases have not been decided by then, former MPs may be looking elsewhere, potentially to the UKA Alliance for adoption.
Should the status quo remain the same with ECL, Chabinga and Miles all claiming the presidency of PF, only the UPND version of PF will most likely be allowed on the ballot.
As someone intimated recently “we (PF) have a lot of lessons on how UNIP and MMD died, yet we have failed to learn anything from that and we have done the exact same things that made UNIP and MMD die.”
If PF truly considers UKA as an alternative vehicle, they should show commitment to the Alliance by deeds, not words only. Information reaching us that PF wants to field an independent candidate in the Kawambwa by-election, raises a lot of questions about the party’s sincerIty and commitment to UKA.
The expectation by now is PF should be allowing its candidates to contest by-elections on the Alliance ticket not sponsoring independents.
