WHY is the Government Desperately Fighting Over Edgar Lungu’s deceased Body? – Kasonde Mwenda C- EFF President

The BIG QUESTION??

WHY is the Government Desperately Fighting Over Edgar Lungu’s deceased Body? – Kasonde Mwenda C- EFF President

27th June 2025

Zambia has now crossed a dangerous threshold. The burial of former President Edgar Chagwa Lungu, scheduled to take place in South Africa, was officially halted not by the family but by the desperate Zambian government of Hakainde Hichilema

The Attorney General of the Republic of Zambia, Mulilo Kabesha, successfully secured an injunction from the High Court in Pretoria to stop the burial. This is no longer a legal strategy—it is an international embarrassment and a national tragedy.

The question every Zambian must now ask is: why is this government so desperate to control Edgar Lungu’s corpse?

This is no longer about state honours. This is no longer about protocol or patriotism. This is a raw, unsettling political power play over a dead man’s body. And it reeks of insecurity, desperation, and a disturbing attempt to rewrite legacy by force.

Let us speak plainly, what kind of government fights to own the dead while failing to serve the living? The justification offered, that President Lungu must be buried in Zambia with full honors is thin and unconvincing. Lungu died in South Africa.

His family, not the state, should have the final say in his burial arrangements. Yet the state, like a paranoid regime frightened even by a lifeless body, has invoked courts, lawyers, and diplomatic channels to seize control.

And for what?

To parade a coffin under military salute and claim moral high ground in death that it never earned in life? Or is this about suppressing the narrative of how Lungu died, where he died, and why he died outside his own country? These are the deeper questions haunting the nation—and the government knows it.

This is not how statesmen behave. This is how regimes operate when they fear ghosts of their own making.

Zambians are not fools. We know this is not about honors. It is about optics. It is about manipulation. It is about converting grief into a political weapon. While families mourn, the state plays games with the dead, and worse, uses the distraction to quietly advance constitutional changes behind our backs.

This is a tragedy, legal, moral, and national.

Instead of uniting the country in a moment of mourning, the government has embarrassed Zambia on the international stage. The world watches as a so-called democratic state litigates over burial rights in a foreign court, turning death into theatre and grief into government policy.

And make no mistake, while they drag Edgar Lungu’s body through courtroom battles, they are dragging Zambia’s democracy through the mud back home. The proposed constitutional amendments, returning deputy ministers, manipulating electoral boundaries, and shielding powerful individuals from future prosecution are still on the table. And now, conveniently cloaked by mourning and manufactured chaos.

Let this be a national wake-up call.

Zambia must not allow funeral theatrics to mask constitutional treachery. We must not allow a lifeless body to become a smokescreen for living betrayal. The citizens of this Republic must open their eyes to what is truly being buried here: truth, decency, and democracy.

This is not about Edgar Lungu. It’s about every Zambian. It’s about every right we stand to lose while we’re distracted by the coffin politics of a regime that fears both the past and the people.

Let history record this moment accurately, that while Zambia was mourning, those in power chose manipulation over dignity, politics over peace, and control over compassion.

We mourn the man.
But we must fight for the nation.

Because if a government can fight this hard to control a dead man, imagine what they are willing to do to control the living.

May God comfort the bereaved Lungu family as they traverse this trying moment . We are with you.

Wherever we want to go our feet will take us there.

Kasonde Mwenda C, Economic Freedom Fighters-EFF President