EDITORIAL | We Can’t Return to Cadre Capture
The emails have not stopped reaching us since the Chingola stoning fiasco. They come in long paragraphs and short bursts of anger wrapped in frustration. The message is the same. UPND cadres believe President Hakainde Hichilema has not “taken care of them.” They compare their lives to PF cadres who once commanded cars, land, cash and a frightening level of influence. They insist that they deserve something because they campaigned. They insist that politics owes them. They insist that power must feed them.
They are wrong.
What PF built between 2015 and 2021 was not empowerment. It was a patronage pyramid that rewarded thuggery with land plots, bus stations, market stalls, mining sites and cash collected from fear. It destroyed institutions. It weakened policing. It enriched a few. It impoverished many. And it extracted a price from Zambia that the country is still paying for today through debt, collapsed services, weak revenue and the cost of cleaning up corruption.
The deadliest part of this system is the mindset it leaves behind. A belief that political support must translate into personal enrichment. A belief that proximity to the ruling party is an economic plan. A belief that cadreship is employment.
The Chingola stoning incident exposed how dangerous this mindset has become.
Among those reportedly linked to the violence is a known UPND cadre who was quietly aligned to internal networks unhappy with the President’s refusal to open the treasury for party loyalists. His arrest has shaken parts of the ruling party’s grassroots. It has revived the whisper that some cadres are sabotaging their own government because, according to them, “Hichilema is favouring professionals over us.” These voices forget that the President campaigned on dismantling the very cartel system they admired under PF.
They forget that if cadres alone determined political power, PF would still be ruling Zambia. PF had the most formidable cadre network. A network more powerful than the police. But we we flushed them out of power like human waste
The idea that any President should hand out houses, plots and patronage is the fastest route back to the disorder that nearly broke the country. It is also the fastest way to collapse the same government they claim to love. Zambia cannot return to a politics where markets are controlled by gangs, where councils operate in fear, where police officers take instructions from “commanders” with no rank, and where citizens must show party colours to access opportunity.
UPND supporters asking for the same benefits PF cadres enjoyed are not asking for empowerment. They are asking for a return to criminal privilege.
This is why the Chingola incident must be viewed with sober eyes. It was not only about opposition agitation. It was also about internal frustration. That frustration is being weaponised by individuals who want a return to the old order where chaos delivered personal income. The fact that a ruling party cadre has been implicated shows that lawlessness does not wear only one colour. It grows wherever entitlement is allowed to breathe.
President Hichilema’s refusal to feed cadre politics is not a betrayal. It is the only path that can keep Zambia standing.
The country needs markets free of gangs, police who answer to the law, councils that operate without fear, and an economy where citizens succeed through work, not violence. The people who voted in 2021 did not vote for a new version of PF-style cadre rule. They voted to end it.
Our message to the cadres sending emails is simple:
You are citizens, not owners of the state.
You deserve opportunities that come from a growing economy, not from illegal land allocations. You deserve skills, jobs, clean governance and institutions that protect every Zambian. But no cadre, in any party, deserves to be paid for loyalty with state resources
And our message to the political class is equally clear:
Stop flirting with the idea of cadre appeasement. It is a dangerous path. It invites violence. It corrodes institutions. It will swallow any government that entertains it.
Zambia’s democracy cannot survive another era of political militias masquerading as party structures. The lesson from Chingola and UPND cadres messages to us is not only about security. It is about the urgent need to confront the entitlement culture that is poisoning our politics from within.
The state must act. Parties must reform. Citizens must demand better.
Zambia cannot afford a repeat of the past.
© The People’s Brief | Editors | 15/11/25