The Editor Zambia
There is, in politics, a point at which propaganda collides with reality.
Zambia’s opposition appears to be approaching that point. For all the noise, slogans and recycled claims of momentum, the blunt truth is that none among the current crop of opposition figures looks remotely capable of matching even a quarter of President Hakainde Hichilema’s political stamina. 
That is not a partisan talking point. It is an observation grounded in endurance, discipline, organisation, and the sheer ability to absorb punishment without losing strategic focus.
President Hichilema’s rise was not built on luck, accident, or political charity. It was forged over years of setbacks, defeats, mockery, and relentless pressure.
He kept going where weaker politicians would have folded, drifted away, or settled for relevance at the margins. That sort of resilience cannot be improvised in an election year. It cannot be manufactured through social media excitement, nor borrowed from angry surrogates and hired praise singers.
Political stamina is tested over time, and Zambia has already seen who has it and who merely enjoys the performance of appearing presidential.
That is where the opposition’s self-diagnosis of failure ought to begin.
Before blaming institutions, circumstances, or the governing party’s incumbency advantage, they must first confront their own inadequacies.
The opposition’s central weakness is not simply a lack of numbers or resources. It is the absence of a figure with enough emotional steel, consistency, and strategic patience to survive the long-distance race of modern politics.
Elections are not won by those who make the loudest statements in March and vanish by June. They are won by those who build, hold, and sustain pressure over the years.
Brian Mundubile, often presented by his admirers as a serious national prospect, is a case in point. He is, in truth, a hyped politician whose public image has often run ahead of his political substance.
There is an evident reluctance among his backers to engage in honest introspection. They would rather inflate his standing than ask the more uncomfortable question: does he genuinely possess the national reach, personal tenacity, and electoral magnetism required for the contest ahead? So far, the answer appears to be no.
The danger for Mundubile is that he may begin to believe the mythology being built around him. That would be a grave misreading of the moment. Those pushing him seem less interested in political realism than in the fantasy that power may somehow fall their way by fortuna, just as many believe Edgar Lungu’s ascent was shaped as much by circumstance as by design. But politics does not endlessly reproduce the same script.
Fortune may visit once; it rarely does so on command. In any case, the terrain facing Zambia ahead of the August elections is altogether different.
This time, the ground is not ripe for political lottery. The electorate is more watchful, the competition sharper and the demands of leadership more exacting. Voters may be frustrated in places, impatient in others, but impatience alone does not amount to a credible transfer of power. For that to happen, there must be an opposition candidate with visible staying power, message discipline, broad acceptability, and a demonstrated ability to convert grievance into a coherent national campaign. At present, no such figure has emerged.
The opposition’s deeper problem is that it keeps mistaking noise for strength. It celebrates internal excitement as though it were national appeal. It confuses factional applause with popular legitimacy. It often treats wishful thinking as an electoral strategy. Yet the country is not governed from political WhatsApp groups, hotel lobbies, or choreographed press briefings. The presidency is won in the hard field of organisation, sacrifice, and message consistency. That is precisely the field in which President Hichilema has proved unusually durable.
This is the uncomfortable writing on the wall. Zambia’s opposition is not merely struggling against an incumbent; it is struggling against its own failure to produce a leader of comparable endurance. Until it confronts that reality, honestly, it will remain trapped in a cycle of hype, self-deception, and eventual disappointment. The problem is not that it lacks ambition. The problem is that ambition without stamina, discipline, and self-knowledge is just theatre.
And theatre, however loud, does not win State power.
