By EditorZambia
PATRIOTIC Front (PF) Chawama member of Parliament Tasila Lungu Mwansa’s fall from the House is more than a personal setback. It is a mirror pointed at a political system that refuses to confront the obvious.
Tasila’s prolonged stay in South Africa, triggered by the legal saga surrounding her late father’s burial, opened a constitutional trapdoor that the law makes brutally clear: if you’re absent beyond the permissible period, you lose your seat.
No sentiment.
No exemptions.
No political poetry.
Just the law doing what the law says. 
But here is the uncomfortable truth Zambia keeps dodging: by-elections aren’t accidents.
They’re built into the constitution.
They are legal.
They are expensive.
They they will keep happening until the political class grows up and fixes the very document they love to weaponise but refuse to modernise.
If Zambia genuinely wants to avoid these unscheduled polls, the solution is not emotional outrage or mourning colours. It’s legal reform. Full stop.
A smarter constitution, like what is being proposed in Bill 7, would have allowed the PF to replace Tasila with another member clean, quick, and cost-effective without dragging the country through another round of polarising politics and public spending.
This is not rocket science. It is political hygiene, and Zambia desperately needs it.Yet every attempt at comprehensive constitutional amendments is greeted with suspicion, resistance, and melodramatic opposition.
The same people who shout about wasted resources are the loudest voices blocking constitutional reforms that would stop the wastage in such by-elections.
It is a cycle of contradiction that has defined our politics for too long.
Tasila’s case is a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is a constitution stuck in an era that no longer matches our governance realities.
If we want a system that is efficient, less costly, and more predictable, then the rules must evolve.
Laws don’t adjust themselves you change them through deliberate political courage.
Zambians need to stop pretending this is complicated.
Let the country stop dressing problems in black and calling it protest.
Let us stop acting shocked by outcomes that are clearly spelt out in the nation’s supreme law.
Changing the law is the beginning and the end of this conversation.
