There is no doubt that the PF government is insensitive towards right or wrong. Its leaders are wallowing in exaggerated self esteem and very few of them, if any, appreciate the fact that they are superintending over a democratic nation.

Just yesterday, we heard Home Affairs Minister Stephen Kampyongo announcing that anyone who does not recognise Edgar Lungu as duly elected Republican President will face treason charges.

Kampyongo said; “Now, we are not going to play. We need to let the country run, and the people of Zambia to be served. We cannot be hijacked by few little individuals who think by the little money they have lined up in their pockets, they can hijack and undermine the governance of this nation. We are in charge and the President is totally in control.”

The minister of Home Affairs sounded very macho when sending threats to the UPND leadership. He added that “Those of you who are closer to them, go and tell them that Kampyongo has said ‘this time, it’s to go by the law and anyone who breaks it will be dealt with firmly, fairly but decisively’.”

If you pay, even very little, attention to what Kampyongo was saying, you realise that he was saying a lot of nothing. Nothing, apart from what he has learnt from the PF school of dictatorship.

According to what he has told the National Assembly of Zambia, the Home Affairs Minister is a certificate holder of a public administration course and also has a higher diploma in information management system – enough for a national leader by our Zambian standards.

But we can confidently say, therefore, that Kampyongo is not a police officer, he has never been one and he should, in fact, never be allowed to be a law officer, because he doesn’t understand the law. His job description as Home Affairs minister has nothing to do with enforcing the law.

How can Minister Kampyongo proudly say that “this time, it’s to go by the law?” Is he saying the law takes a break sometimes until he decides to use it?

This is not the first time when Hakainde Hichilema, president of the UPND, and his followers have declared that they do not recognise Edgar Lungu as a DULY ELECTED President of Zambia. In fact, there is more evidence in public domain, of UPND members making this pronouncement than there is evidence against Obvious Mwaliteta who was denied constitutional bail for aggravated robbery.

So where was the law all this time? Why haven’t the police arrested HH and GBM? On Saturday, UPND national youth spokesperson Gilbert Liswaniso was on live television saying, “Edgar Lungu is a weak leader, a coward, and he does not recognise him as duly elected President”, police watched the TV programme and were sitting ndwii without taking action. And now that Minister Kampyongo says “Now it’s to go by the law” then the Inspector General will wake up to act! No, Mr Kakoma Kanganja, you must be ashamed if you have reduced the police service to an enforcement wing for orders coming out of politicians like Kampyongo who are in pursuit of absolute power.

We know Minister Kampyongo is seeking absolute power because he also said allowing the UPND to hold a rally is promoting anarchy because they may tell people to stop recognizing President Edgar Lungu. He added that the opposition party officials will not be allowed to enjoy their freedom of assembly in Zambia until they “sober up”.

“Until they sober up”? Is that what the law says now; sober up before addressing a rally? What is wrong with Minister Kampyongo? With all due respect, if Kampyongo is too lazy to read the Constitution, let him step aside before more lives are lost at the hands of the brutal police.

As for HH and his UPND band, they are a complete let down to half the Zambians who voted for regime change on August 11, 2016.

To start with, the Kanyama rally should have been cancelled for the safety of those people who live in Kanyama compound. We appreciate that political rallies in Lusaka are organised in densely populated, low-income neighbourhoods for obvious reasons, but that does not mean citizens who live in these communities are less important human beings. Subjecting them to this type of torture and danger is inhuman.

Mr Hichilema knew that he was not going to address the Kanyama rally yesterday because of the risk involved, and he was probably still in South Africa at the time, but he did not order the rally to be cancelled. As a result, his supporters went ahead to try their luck. As a result, one citizen was stabbed to death in unclear circumstances, leaving another one nursing serious assault wounds. We all know the drill by now – police will (and they already have) accuse UPND of stabbing the victim while the UPND will counter accuse the police.

Surely, does a life have to be lost every time you want to provide checks and balances to the government? People of Kanyama matter just as much as those who aspire to go into State House. Therefore, we condemn the UPND for giving police impetus to cause the death of Stephen Kalipa.

Of course we are not politicians and we can’t claim to know politics better than those in the UPND leadership. But we must say that Mr Hichilema’s politics is boring! Much as he is an accomplished businessman, HH doesn’t seem to understand that he is just about the most monotonous politician Zambia has ever seen.

When given a rare opportunity to address his supporters, HH wastes it talking about exactly the same things he said in 2016 when recruiting Miles Sampa and Keith Mukata at Chainama Hotel, both of whom have abandoned him already, by the way. He will talk about PF dictatorship, stolen votes, and the presidential petition. Quite alright, those are issues, but who is listening? Every time Mr Hichilema attempts to hold a rally, more and more people get arrested. Even from yesterday’s Kanyama rally, which never even took place, police managed to pounce on two; and these people are going to prison to perish under the PF tyrannical regime, together with over 300 other UPND political prisoners.

While Minister Kampyongo is keeping HH outside, he is filling prisons with energetic opposition youths who should be out there campaigning – and HH doesn’t even realise that sooner than later, his supporters will get tired of this trend and start boycotting his risky rallies.

What Mr Hichilema is failing to do, is changing his strategy. If HH was listening to advice, he would have toured half the country by now, thanking the grass-root voters and building his support base. To do so, HH does not need to go to the police and mention any political rally. He simply needs to look at his party’s constitution and find a clause which empowers him to call for ward or constituency committee elections – even if it meant electing the same people back in their positions. If Mr Hichilema succeeded in officiate at just 30 out of the 56 constituency ‘election’ events organised by local committees, he would understand if his grass-root supporter approve that he should continue pursuing the presidential petition which he keeps talking about. He would then realise how many of his supporters believe that any court in the world can call for fresh elections in Zambia on account that the PF rigged the 2016 polls. He would realise how many Zambians want him to move on.

While UPND members are busy getting arrested and HH is preoccupied with repeating himself, there is Saviour Chishimba who is making more sense to listen to. You can choose to ignore the president of the United Progressive Party, but he is causing a tiny storm with his political approach and government institutions are sitting up.

Saviour Chishimba, with all his lack of financial support and political acumen, was the first to break the maize-gate scandal, long before the Malawian government acted. Mr Chishima had all the evidence supporting his allegations and it was very difficult for those he accused to drag him to court, but the Zambian people did not take him seriously. Just last week, Chishimba returned with a corruption exposé targeted at the Zambia Revenue Authority. We saw ZRA jump to its defence, in a rather panic fashion.

We stand to be corrected, but judging by the sizes of the two political parties and the current support base, we would like to believe that Mr Hichilema has more access to intelligence information than Mr Chishimba. We believe that Mr Hichilema is best positioned to know a lot of what is going wrong in the PF government than the leader of the UPP. But we can’t recall when the UPND leader fed the Zambian media, porous as it may be, with incriminating evidence of the rampant corruption and theft in the PF government.

We respect the fact that he is leading the biggest opposition political party, perhaps even bigger than the PF in terms of approval ratings, but he needs to change his political game-plan if he wants to truly be a meaningful alternative-government leader worth his salt.