THE HORROR OF THE BBC INTERVIEW WHERE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BRIAN MUNDUBILE WAS FEATURED.
There is a reason Brian Mundubile looked uncomfortable when Dingindaba Jonah Buyoya asked him the simplest question in politics, why are you the alternative.
For all his talk of second independence and people who cannot communicate, he was communicating live on the BBC from Nairobi, while his own rallies are broadcast on Diamond TV, Prime TV and every smartphone in Zambia. That is not oppression, that is freedom that did not exist before.
Under the PF, markets and bus stations were run by cadres, journalists were beaten, and opposition rallies were teargassed before they started. Under Hakainde Hichilema, Mundubile himself can stand at a rally and call the President a failure and go home to sleep. That is the difference between propaganda and reality, and Zambians can feel it.
Buyoya exposed the emptiness of his economics, and it was painful to watch. When you ask a man who wants to run a $30 billion economy where the money will come from and he answers money is always there, you know he has never run anything bigger than a constituency office.
Hakainde Hichilema is on the right trajectory because he understood the unpopular truth that Mundubile will never say. You cannot industrialize a bankrupt country. You have to stabilize it first. HH found inflation at over 24 percent, a hidden debt mountain, zero reserves and a kwacha that had lost its mind. Four years later ZamStats confirms what markets already know, inflation at 6.5 percent in June 2026 from 6.6 percent in May, down from 9.4 percent in January. That is not luck, that is discipline. The debt restructuring that Mundubile mocks is the reason contractors are now being paid, fuel is available, and we can actually talk about industrialization without borrowing for salaries.
Mundubile waves around the K12,000 JCTR food basket as if Hichilema created it, forgetting that bread, fuel and fertilizer were already unaffordable in 2021 when copper was $6,000 and the PF was stealing the future. Today copper is $10,000 and for the first time Zambia is negotiating a fair share instead of mortgaging it for quick cash. That is the trajectory that matters
Bane, Jobs do not come from shouting about women and youth from the margins to the centre, jobs come from power plants that work, from mines that pay tax, from an exchange rate that does not change every morning, from investors who trust that contracts will not be cancelled at a rally. Hichilema has done the hard, boring, lonely work of making Zambia creditworthy again.
Mundubile wants to spend that credibility in six months with big projects funded by priorities. Zambians voted out that economics in 2021, let’s be serious as a nation for once.
Article By Chadrin Nseemani
Picture for illustration