Miles Sampa is Not a man you build a strategy around — and HH should know it

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“A crocodile will always be a crocodile”

President Hakainde Hichilema has once again welcomed Miles Sampa into his political fold, and on the surface it looks like a shrewd numbers game. Sampa brings a name, a following, and a reputation for delivering votes wherever he lands. But scratch beneath that surface and a harder truth emerges: Miles Sampa is not a man anyone builds a durable political strategy around, and the President would do well to remember why.

Consider the record, because it is all there, publicly documented, spanning a decade of political zigzagging that would exhaust even the most patient observer.

In 2016, after falling out with Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front leadership, Sampa did not simply grumble from the sidelines. He openly joined forces with the UPND, campaigned against his own former party, shared platforms with Hichilema, and worked to unseat the man he had served under. When that gamble did not pay off, with Hichilema losing the 2016 election, Sampa did not stay the course. He formed his own outfit, first called the Democratic Front, later rebranded the United Democratic Front, positioning himself as an alternative to both PF and UPND. That venture went nowhere.

By 2018, he was back in PF, adopted as the party’s mayoral candidate for Lusaka after the death of Wilson Kalumba, and he won. He held onto his Matero parliamentary seat in 2021. Then, after PF lost power and Lungu stepped back from active politics, Sampa positioned himself as a contender for the party presidency, one of eight aspirants who paid nomination fees for a convention that never materialised on schedule.

What followed was the messiest chapter of his career. In October 2023, Sampa organised his own extraordinary general conference at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre and declared himself PF president, defeating seven other aspirants who were not even present to contest the outcome. PF’s own information and publicity chairperson at the time, Emmanuel Mwamba, immediately branded the convention illegal and contrary to the party’s own constitution. Acting president Given Lubinda suspended Sampa. The matter went to court. The party split into rival factions, one behind Sampa, another behind the returning Lungu. It would take until March 2026, two and a half years later, for the High Court to finally rule that the disputed convention had not been illegal after all, a ruling that arrived only after multiple competing court cases, the rise and fall of yet another rival claimant in Robert Chabinga, and enough factional confusion that even now it remains genuinely unclear, to ordinary Zambians watching from the outside, who actually controls PF’s name, structures and assets.

Then, in May 2025, having spent the better part of two years fighting to be recognised as party president, Sampa simply handed the position back to Lungu, stepping down from the very post he had gone to court to defend. Months later, following Lungu’s death, Sampa reasserted himself as PF president once more, dissolved the party’s central committee, and reconstituted the leadership structure under his own authority. And now, in 2026, with an election weeks away, he has switched allegiance again, this time back into the corner of President Hichilema, the very man he had campaigned against, reconciled with rivals over, and drifted away from more than once in the past decade.

This is not the record of a strategist with a fixed compass. It is the record of a man who moves toward whichever door currently looks open, and who has done so with a consistency that is, in its own way, remarkable.

Which brings us to the deeper problem for President Hichilema. The Head of State has, throughout this campaign, repeatedly framed the former ruling establishment, the officials and structures of the PF era, as a collection of “thieves” who looted the country and must never be trusted with power again. It is a line that has featured heavily in UPND campaign rhetoric. But Miles Sampa was not a peripheral figure in that PF era. He was a Cabinet-level deputy minister under Michael Sata, a sitting PF Member of Parliament since 2011, and later the self-declared president of the very party the ruling party spends its rallies condemning. If the label applies to the structures and personalities of that era, it is difficult to see the principled basis on which Sampa alone is exempted from it simply by virtue of walking back through the President’s door.

Nor is it clear whose blessing, precisely, Sampa now carries when he speaks for PF. The party’s leadership has been contested in the courts for years, through Sampa’s own convention, through Ng’ona’s dismissal of him, through Chabinga’s rival claim, through Makebi Zulu’s PF Pamodzi Alliance, and back again. A man who has spent years arguing in court about who legitimately controls a party cannot, in the same breath, be treated as a clean and stable asset for anyone’s campaign, least of all a sitting President seeking a mandate on the promise of competent, orderly government.

The uncomfortable possibility for State House is this: Hichilema may believe he is gaining numbers by embracing Sampa. What he may be losing, quietly and without anyone announcing it, is credibility with voters who have watched this same man switch sides, form and dissolve his own party, litigate his way into and out of a party presidency, and now reappear once more, all inside a single decade. Two political operators can each believe they are the one using the other. History suggests that in this particular arrangement, neither side may end up getting what it thinks it is getting.

Zambians heading to the polls on August 13 would do well to look past the optics of endorsements and coalition-building, and ask a simpler question: has this individual, whoever they are and whichever side they currently stand on, demonstrated the kind of consistency and judgement the country actually needs. On that test, the record on Miles Sampa speaks for itself, and it is not a record that inspires confidence, regardless of which principal he happens to be standing beside this week.

The author writes on Zambian political affairs and not an LT staffer.

Miles Sampa is Not a man you build a strategy around — and HH should know it