By Moses Haansimuna “PF neglected Luapula,” President Hakainde Hichilema declared. I read the headline and could not help but smile. Not because the point is entirely without merit; every incoming administration inherits unfinished work from its predecessor. What is difficult…

By Moses Haansimuna

“PF neglected Luapula,” President Hakainde Hichilema declared. I read the headline and could not help but smile. Not because the point is entirely without merit; every incoming administration inherits unfinished work from its predecessor. What is difficult to understand, however, is how such an explanation can still be presented after four years and five months in office, as though Luapula’s challenges were only discovered yesterday.

The UPND has governed Zambia since August 2021. If the roads, hospitals, schools and agricultural services highlighted during the President’s recent visit to Nchelenge remain inadequate, those shortcomings are no longer simply part of the PF inheritance. They have also become the responsibility of the government that has held both the authority and the resources to address them for nearly five years.

A diagnosis made in 2021 cannot continue serving as a campaign message in 2026. When a government has possessed the prescription for almost half a decade, repeatedly describing the illness begins to sound less like leadership and more like an acknowledgement that the treatment has not produced the promised recovery. At some point, responsibility must replace explanation.

The convenient memory

One of the most striking features of this administration’s political messaging is its selective memory. Whatever has gone wrong is conveniently attributed to the PF, while whatever has gone right is presented as an exclusive achievement of the New Dawn administration. The historical record, however, paints a far more balanced picture than campaign rhetoric often allows.

Take the Kazungula Bridge. It was commissioned on 10 May 2021, three months before the general election, by former President Edgar Lungu. The project was negotiated, financed and substantially constructed under the PF administration, with construction completed in December 2020. Yet campaign speeches frequently speak of it as though it materialised only after August 2021.

The Chibombo Multi-Facility Economic Zone tells a similar story. Construction had already commenced and government officials were publicly promoting the project before the change of administration. The same applies to the Lusaka-Ndola Dual Carriageway, whose route planning and initial financing negotiations began under the previous government before the current administration renegotiated the financing under a public-private partnership.

To its credit, the UPND secured a significantly lower project cost of approximately US$650 million, and that deserves genuine recognition. But acknowledging that achievement does not require pretending that the vision itself began in 2021. Nations do not progress by erasing history; they advance when successive governments honestly build upon one another’s work.

A leader who is confident in his own record does not diminish that of his predecessor. He acknowledges what was started, completes what was left unfinished and then leaves behind achievements of his own. That is the continuity that strengthens nations. What we are witnessing instead is a political narrative in which the PF is blamed for every pothole while being credited for virtually nothing, as though Zambia’s development story began only on 24 August 2021.

Infrastructure did not fall from the sky

The President regularly celebrates the recruitment of thousands of teachers, nurses and police officers, and recruitment is indeed important. But public servants require infrastructure within which to serve. Police officers need police posts, teachers need classrooms and nurses need clinics and hospitals. Those facilities did not simply appear overnight.

Many of the schools, hospitals and police stations now being staffed were constructed under previous administrations, including the PF. Celebrating those employed while remaining silent about the infrastructure that makes their work possible presents only half the story. Development is rarely the achievement of a single administration; it is almost always the cumulative work of governments across generations.