PF’s February Deadline is Collapsing, Opposition Entering Its Most Dangerous Week

🇿🇲 BUILD-UP | PF’s February Deadline is Collapsing, Opposition Entering Its Most Dangerous Week

Everyone knows PF is fighting. That is not the story anymore.

The story now is time. The calendar is closing. February is ending. The convention PF promised “at all odds” has not happened. The injunction they vowed to defy has held. And with barely a week left in the month, the party is being exposed not as a wounded opposition, but as an organisation without a steering wheel.

This is no longer factional drama. This is a deadline crisis.

PF leaders told supporters a convention would happen regardless of Robert Chabinga’s court order. They framed it as inevitability. They framed it as courage. Yet February is slipping away with no convention, no elected centre, and no credible legal platform. When a party cannot keep its own timetable, it cannot ask the country to trust its national promises.

This is why February feels different. The PF is not simply divided. It is running out of institutional oxygen.

Brian Mundubile, long framed by rivals as a “traitor” and “power hungry,” is now behaving like the only opposition actor with an operational vehicle. He is not waiting for PF’s internal court battles to resolve. He is building around them. His camp has publicly offered Makebi Zulu and Given Lubinda the running mate position, giving them 12 days to decide. This is not generosity. It is a political ultimatum dressed as unity.

The subtext is brutal: PF’s door is closed, Tonse’s door is open.

The offer lands because PF has failed to deliver the one thing it promised its base, a convention that produces legitimacy. Instead, PF has become a marketplace of ambitions without a referee. The longer this drags, the more the opposition looks like a coalition of personal careers rather than a national alternative.

Then came the clearest warning yet, from PF’s own side.

Christopher Shakafuswa has not speak in metaphors. He declared: “There is no PF to talk about.” He argued that the real PF is trapped in Chabinga’s hands, while the rest is political theatre. His prediction was sharper still: once Parliament dissolves, the PF’s remaining visibility collapses with it. “When Parliament is dissolved… there won’t be any PF to talk about anymore.”.

This is the approaching earthquake.

May is not just another month. It is the moment the parliamentary label disappears, and politicians must choose survival over nostalgia. MPs are already signalling movement. Some are warming toward UPND development language. Some are positioning as independents. Some are quietly orbiting Mundubile’s Tonse structure. The ground is shifting before the formal whistle even blows.

This is what political exodus looks like before it becomes official.

The deeper danger is geographic. PF’s so-called traditional strongholds across the northern circuit are no longer guaranteed territory. Kasama has already shown competitive drift. Kabwe is bleeding councillors. The north is not collapsing into UPND love, it is fragmenting into divided opposition loyalties. A divided vote is a gift to incumbency.

Opposition parties do not lose only because the ruling party is strong. They lose because they weaken themselves into irrelevance.

That is the strategic disaster unfolding. PF is spending its final pre-election months fighting over certificates, injunctions, delegate lists, and expulsions. Zambia is entering a copper rush moment. The kwacha is strengthening. Investor confidence is returning. But PF’s loudest message remains internal rescue, not national renewal.

A party that cannot govern its own convention cannot govern a republic.

The punchline writes itself: PF promised a convention. February is ending without one. Mundubile is offering lifeboats. MPs are scanning exits. Strongholds are splitting. The opposition is not being crushed by the state.

It is being deserted by time.

© The People’s Brief | Political Desk