🇿🇲 VIEWPOINT | “We Will Reverse Bill 7” As Dangerous Illusion
Days following the passage of Constitution Amendment Bill No. 7, a comforting promise has taken hold within sections of the opposition. Makebi Zulu has said that once elected in 2026, he will reverse Bill 7. Some of his supporters, joined by a few bishops and activists, are holding onto this as proof that the battle is not lost.
It sounds defiant. It feels hopeful. It is also legally incoherent.
Here is the missing fact that no one addressing crowds and press briefings is confronting honestly. The 2026 general election will be conducted under the new constitutional framework created by Bill 7. This framework expands Parliament to 226 elected Members, alongside 40 proportional representation seats. The electoral system itself is altered. The Parliament that emerges in August 2026 will exist because Bill 7 exists.
This creates a fundamental contradiction.
If an opposition candidate were to win the presidency under this framework and then seek to repeal Bill 7, they would be attempting to invalidate the very constitutional order that produced their election. The presidency, the Parliament, the proportional seats, and the constituency boundaries would all rest on a law they would be declaring illegitimate. This is not reform. It is constitutional self-destruction.
No serious constitutional lawyer has explained how this reversal would occur without collapsing the legal basis of the 2026 elections themselves. None has explained whether such a repeal would require a referendum, another two-thirds parliamentary majority, or fresh elections. The promise is repeated because it is emotionally useful, not because it is legally viable.
History offers a sharper contrast.
In 1996, UNIP faced a constitutional amendment it considered targeted, illegitimate, and exclusionary. Kenneth Kaunda was barred by new eligibility rules. UNIP did not promise to win and undo the law later. It boycotted the election entirely. Several opposition parties joined that boycott. The result was a landslide for the MMD, but the protest had internal coherence. UNIP refused to legitimise a process it rejected.
That was a costly decision. But it was intellectually honest.
Today’s opposition is attempting to have it both ways. They call Bill 7 illegal. They denounce the process as void. Yet they are preparing to contest elections under it, campaign for seats created by it, and benefit from the expanded Parliament it establishes. That is not resistance. It is accommodation wrapped in rhetoric.
There is another silence in this conversation. Money.
Bill 7 expands the parliamentary battlefield. Two hundred and twenty-six constituencies require candidates, agents, logistics, and sustained ground operations. The ruling party is already positioned for that scale. The opposition is not. PF, still the largest opposition formation, has no settled leadership, no confirmed convention outcome, and no unified campaign structure. Some presidential hopefuls are already demanding refunds for nomination fees after a convention that never materialised.
Running a nationwide parliamentary campaign at this scale requires resources that PF and its allies have not demonstrated. Promising to reverse Bill 7 without explaining how to fight an election under it is not strategy. It is avoidance.
This is why the current messaging matters. Populist reassurance delays the reckoning but deepens the collapse. Telling supporters that the law will be undone later postpones the hard questions that must be answered now. Who is the candidate? Who controls the party? Who funds the campaign? Who coordinates the alliances? Who owns the ground game?
The ruling party does not need to manufacture this confusion. It benefits from it.
As Davies Mwila bluntly put it on Diamond TV, his claim that there may be no PF after 2026 is not a prophecy. It is a warning about organisational decay. Parties do not die because opponents defeat them. They die because they refuse to confront reality.
If Bill 7 is illegal, the honest options are limited. Challenge it successfully in court. Or refuse to participate under it. Or accept it as law and reorganise to compete within it. Pretending to reject it while planning to govern through it is the weakest option of all.
Zambian voters have seen this pattern before. They recognise the difference between conviction and comfort. In 2026, the ballot will not test who shouts loudest about reversal. It will test who understood the terrain early enough to prepare for it.
Right now, one side is planning for the system that exists. The other is campaigning against a system it intends to use.
This contradiction will not survive contact with the electorate.
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© The People’s Brief | Ollus R. Ndomu
You and who?
What you should say is that you will lobby with the president who will come into office to reverse bill 7, Makebi you do not have the capacity to campaign nationwide let alone in one constituency, Presidency is not child’s play, you do not have the financial resources to reach all corners of Zambia physically. It is not jus about speaking good English, you have to have presence in all corners of Zambia with good representation.