UPND Alliance has potential to undo other parties in 2026 – MNT
By Oliver Chisenga
THE Movement for National Transformation says the UPND Alliance has the potential to undo any political party in the 2026 general elections.
MNT leader Daniel Shimunza, whose party is a member of the alliance, says the 2021 general elections provided Zambian politics a pattern and precedent setting UPND-Alliance council of presidents which had the potential to undo other parties in 2026, but “if only managed well”.
“The way forward in breaking the stalemate of under-development is political partnerships and alliances, not hegemony,” Shimunza said in a statement titled ‘Beyond politics of hegemony’. “This partnership must be based on mutual national interests, above partisan interests or self-seeking interests.”
He said if Zambia desires development and transformation, which brings about the fourth industrialisation, now was the time to craft a new state and government.
Shimunza said a business as usual approach of hegemonic politics would not suffice.
He said men and women with leadership qualities must rise to champion political alliances and partnerships.
Shimunza also noted that Zambia’s presidential terms are likewise restrictive of continuity in terms of planning and execution of national development.
“Furthermore, human fallibility can only be curbed by collective responsibility, and wisdom of like minds, to advance a first world development for Zambia. Self- preservation and hegemony are the devil and demons keeping us on the path of national suicide and self-destructive practices of insults, partisanship, caderism, bootlicking, rivalry, division, tribalism and under-development,” he said.
Shimunza said transformative leadership would require a breaking away from hegemony, and foster a presidency worth true national vision, character, inclusive, and with proportional representative governance systems.
He said failure to advance such a system of state-craft and government would sabotage all efforts to be a 21st Century “bastion of regional and global free-market economy, and political models of first world free societies, instead of Third World mediocrity”.
“The question is, do we have men and women willing to die to self and put national interests above partisan interests for posterity? The nation is advised accordingly, and the wise will always learn,” said Shimunza.