Principle Is Not Division: A Response to Dr. Mwelwa’s Misreading of Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba
By Thandiwe Ketiš Ngoma
Dr. Mwelwa’s article presents itself as a reflective meditation on unity, leadership, and democratic ethics. In substance, however, it is a carefully stylized reaction to one uncomfortable position that Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba has consistently articulated on principle that an illegal process cannot produce a legal outcome. That, plainly, is the real grievance.
This position is not personal. It is institutional. It is grounded in responsibility. As Patriotic Front Publicity and Information Chairperson, Ambassador Mwamba is not at liberty to romanticize illegality or remain silent in the face of procedural abuse. His duty is to defend the party’s constitution, decisions, and lawful directives, regardless of who is inconvenienced in the process. That is the context Dr. Mwelwa’s article avoids.
For clarity, because Dr. Mwelwa’s article is notably silent on key facts, Hon. Brian Mundubile is the Member of Parliament for Mporokoso, elected on the Patriotic Front ticket. PF is not a peripheral opposition player. It is the anchor party of the Tonse Alliance, the coalition within which this dispute has arisen.
Following internal disagreements, Dr. Dan Pule and leaders of smaller opposition parties convened a virtual meeting in which they purported to expel PF, the anchor party, from the Tonse Alliance, while selectively accepting individual PF members into a newly improvised alliance of their own making. This action was procedurally defective and legally incoherent. An alliance cannot lawfully remove its anchor party and retain legitimacy, least of all through a virtual meeting convened by parties with no authority over PF’s internal structures.
In response, the PF Central Committee issued a clear directive that no PF member was to associate with or participate in the breakaway Tonse arrangement. Hon. Brian Mundubile chose to defy that directive. He aligned himself with the illegal Tonse led by Dr. Dan Pule, participated in determining which PF individuals would be accepted into that formation, and went further by filing to be appointed Chairperson of the illegal Tonse, all in open defiance of the party under whose banner he holds parliamentary office.
These are not opinions. They are facts.
When Ambassador Mwamba states, in his capacity as PF Publicity and Information Chairperson and speaking strictly on principle, that such a process is illegal, he is not waging personal battles or positioning himself for advantage. He is articulating a principled institutional position that rules matter, structures matter, and legitimacy flows from procedure, not popularity.
The Tonse formation currently being promoted under the leadership of Dr. Dan Pule, as Ambassador Mwamba has explained, has no legal standing. It lacks PF authorization, violates alliance norms, and rests on the false premise that individuals can substitute for institutions. No amount of political enthusiasm can convert that illegality into legitimacy. Calling this out is not division. It is fidelity to principle.
Dr. Mwelwa directs his critique at Ambassador Mwamba, yet avoids the central contradictions raised by this situation. He does not address why party discipline is condemned when it restrains ambition, why defiance of lawful directives is celebrated as courage, or why the enforcement of rules is portrayed as sabotage. This selective indignation does not strengthen democracy. It weakens it.
Unity without legality is fiction. Cohesion without rules is performance. Leadership without accountability is illusion. What unsettles Ambassador Mwamba’s critics is not his tone or his location, but his refusal, as PF Publicity and Information Chairperson speaking on principle, to pretend that disorder is strategy or that illegality can be dressed up as unity.
This critique exists because Ambassador Mwamba drew a clear line grounded in law, party constitution, and principle, and some are angered because they cannot cross that line without being exposed. History does not reward those who confuse ambition with legitimacy, and it will not forget those who defended rules when it was inconvenient to do so.
An illegal process cannot and will never produce a legal outcome. That is not division. That is not politics of exile. That is principle.