With just over two and half years to go before the next general elections in 2026, the country’s political temperature is already heating up, albeit the country having been in an election mood soon after the 2021 general elections.
Political blows and jeers have been crisscrossing the ruling party and opposition camps every often, leaving the ordinary Zambian, at times, in utter quagmire.
Wednesday, January 31, saw the birth of the ‘People’s Movement’, an alliance of several opposition political parties taunting a challenge to the ruling United Party for National Development (UPND) come August 2026 polls.
Embattled Patriotic Front (PF) faction leader and former president Edgar Lungu led a coterie of cohorts featuring Citizens First leader Harry Kalaba, Saboi Imboela of the National Democratic Congress, Jackson Silavwe of the Golden Party, Chishala Kateka of the New Heritage Party and Sakwiba Sikota of the United Liberal Party.
A long-winded bucket list of issues raised on the way the UPND is running the country included debt restructuring, human rights, and corruption; with Lungu himself, the country is ”worse off now” than when under his seven-year tenure between 2015 and 2021.
”So if people want me back on the ballot, who I’m I to say no?” he claimed.
However, chief government spokesperson Cornelius Mweetwa was on hand to defuse the alliance’s remarks, at a media engagement where he described the cohort as “a group of power-hungry political hypocrites.
Mweetwa, who is also the Information and Media Minister said he found it sinister that the opposition could allege a deteriorating civic space yet their briefing went on flawlessly under the cool breeze of a mild January sunshine.
”In their time, that briefing could not have taken place or could have been punctuated by pangas and machetes, causing all sorts of untold mayhem” he said.
Mweetwa further said most of the parties at the briefing represented ”one-man shows” or ”one-man band” organisations, thus causing bemusement on which citizens they were representing.
He blew the cohort offside because the issues raised during its briefing were already being resolved by the UPND, further pointing to the fact why Zambians showed Lungu a red card in 2021.
