🇿🇲 EDITORIAL | When Politics Becomes a Bail Application
“It is only in Africa where thieves will be regrouping to loot again and the youths whose future is being stolen will be celebrating it.”
Wole Soyinka’s words sting because they describe a familiar cycle, and Zambia is not immune. We are watching, in real time, an opposition conversation that increasingly sounds less like a national alternative and more like a rescue mission for a political class under legal siege.
Over the last few months, senior voices around the Patriotic Front factions have been unusually blunt about their central priority. The message is not jobs, not inflation, not energy, not education. The message is release. Release of colleagues in custody. Protection of those facing investigations. The framing is consistent: “political prisoners,” “persecution,” “targeting.” It is a narrative designed to turn accountability into victimhood and criminal procedure into campaign material.
This is where the country must pause. Zambia cannot be run like a private club where power changes hands simply to unlock prison doors. A democracy is not a revolving amnesty machine. Elections are not court appeals. When political leaders begin to speak as though state authority exists mainly to shield friends, relatives, and party networks from scrutiny, the republic itself becomes collateral.
The timing is not accidental. Just last week, the Economic and Financial Crimes Court ordered the forfeiture of assets belonging to Dalitso Lungu, including 79 vehicles and 23 properties, under non-conviction based forfeiture provisions. The public reaction has been loud, emotional, and deliberately funerary. Some have argued that this is happening because the former president is not yet buried. Others have wrapped legal questions in grief rhetoric, as though mourning should suspend the rule of law.
Grief deserves respect. Justice requires consistency. The courts do not stop functioning because politics is uncomfortable.
The deeper issue is what many Zambians already know but rarely say plainly. For some in the PF ecosystem, politics was never only about ideology. It was also about access. Access to bus stations. Access to markets. Access to rent-seeking points where cadres collected “taxes” outside the formal state. Access to cash-driven campaigns where handouts substituted for policy. When that system is interrupted, the anger is not philosophical. It is financial.
So the bitterness we see is partly the bitterness of a machine that can no longer feed itself.
Zambia has spent the last four years crawling out of a fiscal crater. Debt restructuring, IMF discipline, easing inflation, a firmer currency, rising investor appetite for government securities, these are not slogans. They are macroeconomic signals that credibility is returning. The bond market does not oversubscribe because of sympathy. Capital responds to stability, predictability, and institutions that hold.
This is why the stakes of August are larger than party colours. The question is whether Zambia continues building a state where public money is audited, where wealth must be explained, where institutions can function beyond personalities, or whether we return to a political culture where power is treated as a kingdom and accountability as revenge.
A serious opposition is fundamental in a democracy. But an opposition whose loudest promise is to “free our people” before it speaks of freeing the economy is not offering renewal. It is offering restoration of impunity.
Zambians must be careful what they clap for. When thieves regroup, the applause does not make them innocent. It only makes the public complicit.
This election will not only choose leaders. It will choose whether the republic belongs to citizens or to networks.
And Zambia cannot afford to be looted again.
© The People’s Brief | Editor-in-Chief