Following the gathering at which Lawyer Makebi Zulu emerged as the winner, the Patriotic Front (PF) would like the country to believe it staged a credible convention and turned a new page.
Yet the more one looks at the affair, the less it resembles a national convention, and the more it appears to have been a dressed-up branch meeting.
That is not an insult. It is a serious political observation. 
A proper convention, particularly in a party that once prided itself on nationwide machinery, should answer basic questions without strain.
How many aspiring candidates actually paid nomination fees? Who exactly constituted the Electoral College?
Did all provinces participate in a verifiable and representative manner?
These are not hostile questions. They are the first questions any serious political observer would ask.
When such questions remain hanging in the air, legitimacy begins to wobble.
If this was indeed a national convention, why is there so much uncertainty around the numbers? A process that is sound does not fear arithmetic. It publishes it. It does not hide behind slogans, selective photographs, or triumphalist declarations. One should be able to say, plainly and without hesitation: this is how many contestants paid; this is who voted; these are the provinces represented; this is the tally. If that cannot be done cleanly, then what exactly is being defended?
Politics, like law, is often tested not by noise but by procedure. One is therefore entitled to ask: who formed the electoral college?
Was it drawn from duly elected structures of the party, from recognised provincial leadership, from constituencies and districts, or from a convenient assembly of loyalists?
If the answer is solid, why has it not been made obvious to the membership and the nation?
And if it was obvious, why does the event still leave so many with the impression of a hurried indoor caucus rather than a grand national assembly?
That impression matters.
The last truly memorable PF convention in the public imagination was the Mulungushi gathering during the Edgar Lungu era. Whatever one may say about the politics of that period, nobody needed persuasion that a convention was taking place. The scale spoke for itself. The atmosphere spoke for itself. The attendance spoke for itself. There was a visible sense that the party had summoned its national body.
This latest event, by contrast, has triggered an awkward question that refuses to go away: if this was a convention, why did it look and feel like a branch-level meeting?
Was the venue too small for a party claiming national reach?
Was the attendance too thin?
Was representation too narrow? Or was the event deliberately kept compact because a broader process would have been more difficult to manage? These are uncomfortable questions, yes, but politics does not stop being serious merely because questions become uncomfortable.
One may even go further. Can a party that once filled major venues now present a modest gathering and expect the country to treat it as proof of institutional strength? Can a national opposition movement afford to project procedural ambiguity at a time when it most needs moral and structural clarity?
Can a winner emerge from a process that many do not fully understand and then claim the authority that comes from broad internal consent?
These are not questions of malice. They are questions of democratic credibility.
The problem for PF is that optics in politics are never merely cosmetic. Optics are evidence of organisational health.
A large, representative, transparent convention communicates vitality. A thin, unclear, tightly managed event communicates fragility. It tells the country that the party may still have a name, but its internal machinery no longer inspires confidence.
And that may be the deepest issue here.
For a party seeking to convince members, sympathisers, and neutrals that it remains a serious national force, this was the very moment to demonstrate order, reach, and constitutional discipline. Instead, it has left the public debating elementary matters: who paid, who voted, who attended, and whether all provinces were truly part of the exercise. That is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of procedural weakness.
Makebi Zulu may have emerged as a winner, but victory alone does not settle the argument. In politics, how one wins can matter just as much as winning itself.
If the process was clean, let PF publish the details in full and silence doubt with facts. If all provinces participated, let the record show it. If the electoral college was lawfully constituted, let the membership see it. If nomination fees were duly paid by all relevant candidates, let the numbers be known.
In the end, a genuine convention should not require the public to squint, speculate, and guess. It should be unmistakable.
If people are still asking whether what they saw was a national convention or merely a glorified branch meeting, then PF has not won the argument. It has merely announced a result.
