“I was very happy when I received a call from Honourable Harry Kalaba,” Kapata said, recounting a message that was simple and calculated: finish your convention, then we are on board. This line alone exposes the gamble. Kalaba is not offering ideas.
He is waiting for a structure. A ready-made skeleton. A party whose best days are behind it.
Kalaba reportedly told Kapata, “We don’t want to fight over the issue of presidency. Let us meet together and come up with one leader.” That sounds noble on the surface. In reality, it is a refusal to do the hardest work in politics: building patiently from the ground up.
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Unity without vision is not strategy. It is convenience. This is where history matters.
Kalaba left the PF during the Edgar Lungu era citing corruption and bad governance. He presented himself as a clean break from a party that had become synonymous with cadres, violence, and ethnic mobilisation. That decision earned him some credibility, even in defeat.
But credibility is fragile. You don’t preserve it by circling back to the same house you escaped, hoping the paint has dried. PF today is not a platform.
It is a dispute. Jean Kapata herself spent the evening warning against “fake movements” and insisting that “there has never been anything called the ECL/PF Movement.” She urged respect for Edgar Lungu “even in death,” while simultaneously presiding over a party that cannot agree on who speaks for him, who leads it, or who owns its future. This contradiction is the PF’s daily reality.
Kalaba knows this history. He lived it. He lost with it.
Now he appears willing to re-enter it under the banner of opposition unity. That is not bold politics. It is short-term thinking.
PF is shrinking, not consolidating. Its internal wars have expelled MPs, fractured alliances, and frozen conventions in court. As one analyst recently put it, PF is no longer organising for power; it is organising for survival.
Hitching your future to that moment is not coalition-building. It is political inheritance of debt. Come August, the electorate will not be voting on nostalgia.
As Davis Mwila bluntly observed, there may be “no PF, only memories” – memories of violence, cadres, tribal rhetoric, and name-calling. Those memories still repel swing voters, urban youth, and undecided professionals. No amount of alliance arithmetic will erase that.
Kalaba’s real opportunity lies elsewhere. He has time. He has name recognition.
He has distance from the PF’s worst years. If he continues to build his own party, clarify his ideas, and stay away from the PF style of politics, he may not win in August, but he positions himself for relevance beyond it. Politics is not always about the next election.
Sometimes it is about the next decade. Borrowing PF structures may offer instant crowds, but it comes with inherited baggage. You don’t climb out of a burning building by running back in to rescue the furniture.
Harry Kalaba should resist the temptation to be buried with the PF coffin while he is still alive. Build your own house. Even if it takes longer, it will still be standing when the dust settles.© The People’s Brief | Editor-in-Chief
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