RESPONSE TO DIGGERS’ EDITORIAL BY THOMPSON K. LUZENDI
Diggers’ latest editorial is not journalism. It is fear mongering dressed up as analysis, leaning on speculation and a deliberately distorted narrative to try to scare Zambians away from the one political movement that is actually offering them a way out of their suffering, the NRPUP led by President Brian Mundubile.
Let us be clear about what Diggers is deliberately ignoring. The PF UPND alliance is not hidden, it is public. PF is actively campaigning for the UPND today. UPND has adopted former PF MPs, mayors and councilors, the very people they spent years calling corrupt, criminal and thuggish. Overnight, those same individuals became acceptable once they crossed the floor to boost UPND’s numbers. If Diggers wants to talk about political opportunism and PF’s fingerprints on a campaign, that is where the real story is, not in a poorly written manufactured attempt to paint NRPUP as a PF front.
Their editorial does not read like neutral commentary, it reads like a UPND campaign memo. Diggers built its name on holding power to account and speaking for ordinary Zambians. Instead of examining a government that has failed to bring down the cost of living, failed to create jobs and failed to put money back into people’s pockets, this editorial spent its energy manufacturing a scare story about NRPUP. That is not journalism in the public interest, that is a media house choosing a side.
The suffering of Zambians did not start with NRPUP, and it will not be solved by attacking NRPUP. The hunger, the poverty, the unemployment, these are the direct result of a UPND government’s failure to deliver on its own promises. No amount of baseless editorial spin can hide that reality from the millions of Zambians living it every day. Trying to redirect that anger toward NRPUP, rather than toward those actually in power, is dishonest and it will not work.
Zambians are not as easily frightened as this editorial assumes. People have seen through the noise. They know the difference between a government’s failures and a movement that is offering them change. That is exactly why support for NRPUP and President Brian Mundubile continues to grow, because people are voting with their lived reality, not with a headline written to scare them.
We say this without malice, Diggers has a choice to make. It can return to the principles that once made it a credible, independent voice for the Zambian people, holding power accountable regardless of who holds it, or it can continue down the road of becoming just another mouthpiece for a government that cannot defend its own record. A captured press, one that abandons scrutiny of power in favour of scaring the public away from alternatives, is not a hallmark of a healthy democracy, it is a warning sign of one under strain.
NRPUP will not be intimidated by manufactured propaganda. Our mission remains what it has always been, to free Zambians from the grip of a cost of living crisis, from joblessness and from a government that has run out of excuses. Zambians have made up their minds. No editorial, however one sided, will change that. Prepare yourselves News Diggers for President Brian Mundubile.
Thompson K. Luzendi
NRPUP and Tonse Alliance Member