Zambia Must Prosper leader Kelvin Fube Bwalya has never been shy of the spotlight, but his latest broadside against the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) risks crossing from political critique into outright theatre.
Quoted in The Mast newspaper of today, Bwalya alleged that the Commission was poised to “gift” constituencies to the ruling United Party for National Development (UPND) ahead of 2026 elections.
The outspoken ZMP leader has once again chosen insinuation over evidence. 
The timing is instructive. With the newly delimitated constituencies now public, there is little in the data to sustain the narrative advanced by both Bwalya and, previously, Sishuwa Sishuwa.
The anticipated skew so confidently hinted at has not materialised in any credible or demonstrable form. What remains, therefore, is not a scandal but a vacuum filled hastily with conjecture.
In political terms, this is a familiar manoeuvre: lay the groundwork for contesting defeat long before ballots are cast. It is the rhetoric of pre-emptive grievance, designed less to win voters than to manage the optics of losing them.
For a figure like Bwalya, whose electoral footing remains, at best, uncertain, the temptation to construct an external adversary is perhaps unsurprising.
One cannot help but observe that building a narrative of institutional bias is far easier than building a viable grassroots machine. Yet such tactics carry consequences beyond the individual.
The ECZ, as a constitutional body, underpins the fragile but vital trust in Zambia’s democratic process. To drag it into partisan mudslinging without substantiation is not merely reckless it is corrosive.
Democracies do not collapse only through grand conspiracies; they are eroded, slowly but surely, by the casual undermining of public institutions.
The opposition political parties, broadly speaking, face a choice. It can continue down the well-worn path of grievance politics loud, emotive, but ultimately hollow, or it can do the harder, less glamorous work of organisation, mobilisation, and policy articulation.
Elections are not won in press statements; they are won in wards, in communities, in the patient accumulation of trust.
Bwalya’s outburst, then, says less about the ECZ than it does about the state of opposition strategy. It betrays a politics that is reactive rather than proactive, performative rather than substantive.
In the unforgiving arithmetic of electoral competition, that is rarely a winning formula.
If the opposition is serious about 2026, it must abandon the comfort of excuses and confront the discipline of preparation.
Until then, accusations like these will continue to ring hollow more noise than narrative, more theatre than threat.
