By EditorZambia
By any political measure, the Patriotic Front (PF) and its Tonse Alliance are sinking under the weight of their own contradictions.
What is unfolding before the nation is not a temporary misunderstanding that can be cured by press statements, accusations, counter-accusations, or disciplinary threats. It is a deep, structural crisis rooted in ego, legitimacy battles, unresolved succession questions, and an addiction to power without order. The hard truth is this: the PF and Tonse Alliance, in their current form, are going nowhere. 
The recent spectacle of parallel Tonse Alliance Council of Leaders meetings — one led by Given Lubinda and another by figures aligned to Dan Pule and Zumani Zimba — should alarm even the most loyal PF supporter. Alliances are formed to consolidate strength, clarity, and direction. What Tonse has become instead is a political marketplace where rival factions trade legitimacy, expel one another on paper, re-admit parties at will and issue threats that they lack the moral authority to enforce.
When an alliance reaches a point where there are two secretariats, two chairpersons, two nomination processes, and two versions of legality, it ceases to be an alliance. It becomes a battlefield.
The Lubinda-led faction insists PF is the anchor party and that Lubinda remains acting party president and Tonse chairperson. The rival faction dismisses this claim as constitutionally hollow and accuses Lubinda of thriving on confusion. Both sides accuse the other of illegitimacy. Both claim loyalty to the late former president Edgar Lungu’s legacy. Both speak with absolute certainty, yet neither commands uncontested authority.
This is not a strategy. It is paralysis.
More worrying is that the PF’s crisis is not confined to Tonse. The alliance drama is merely a symptom of a much deeper disease within the PF itself. The party has failed, years after losing power and following the death of its founding figure, to resolve a simple but critical question: who legitimately leads the PF, and by what process?Instead of a clear, uncontested succession anchored in internal democracy, the PF has drifted into factional dominance disguised as legality. The result is predictable. Every major decision — from by-elections to alliances — is contested. Every leader is vulnerable to expulsion threats. Every mobilisation effort is undermined by internal suspicion.
The irony is striking. PF factions threaten mass expulsions over association with “illegal” Tonse structures, yet senior leaders across the party — including Members of Parliament and former ministers — have openly campaigned under those same disputed banners in Chawama, Kasama and elsewhere. If discipline were applied consistently, the party would expel itself into political irrelevance.
This exposes the central weakness of the PF-Tonse drama: rules are not instruments of order but weapons of convenience. Constitutions are cited when useful and ignored when inconvenient. Loyalty is demanded but not reciprocated. Unity is preached but never practised.
Figures such as Brian Mundubile, Dan Pule, Zumani Zimba, Mumbi Phiri and Given Lubinda are all, in different ways, caught in the same trap — trying to assert authority in structures that lack a shared moral centre. Mundubile’s contested entry into Tonse leadership, Phiri’s procedural objections, Pule’s parallel leadership claims and Lubinda’s consolidation of administrative control all point to one reality: there is no commonly accepted referee.
And without a referee, every match ends in chaos.
The Tonse Alliance was sold to Zambians as a broad-based platform for opposition unity. Today, it is a case study in how alliances collapse when they are built around personalities instead of institutions. New parties are admitted, old ones re-admitted, and leadership titles are exchanged as if legitimacy were a membership card. Meanwhile, ordinary opposition supporters watch in confusion, fatigue, and growing apathy.
The damage is not abstract. Every day, the PF and Tonse fight among themselves is a day they fail to articulate a credible alternative vision to the electorate. While they quarrel over chairs, nomination fees, and secretariats, the ruling party governs unchallenged in both message and momentum. Opposition politics becomes noise, not substance.
What makes this situation particularly tragic is that no amount of public accusations will fix it. Calling Lubinda a divider will not resolve Tonse’s legitimacy crisis. Declaring PF, the anchor party will not erase internal fractures. Expelling rivals will not manufacture unity. Ego cannot substitute for consensus, and authority cannot be shouted into existence.
Political organisations either submit to rules they all respect, or they disintegrate.
Unless the PF confronts its leadership crisis honestly and unless Tonse Alliance is rebuilt — not rebranded — on clear, democratic and enforceable foundations, the current drama will only intensify. The alliances will multiply, expulsions will escalate, and relevance will continue to shrink.
History is unforgiving to movements that confuse survival with progress. PF and the Tonse Alliance risk becoming permanent opposition not because of state repression or external sabotage, but because they cannot defeat their own internal demons.
A house divided against itself does not need enemies. It collapses on its own.
