Mundubile accuses UPND officials of looting through ZNS company, calls Hichilema’s “thieves” jibe hypocritical

NRPUP presidential candidate Brian Mundubile has accused senior officials within President Hakainde Hichilema‘s own party of looting public resources through a company established under the Zambia National Service, telling a Lusaka press briefing that it was hypocritical for the Head of State to label his opponents thieves while government insiders profit from state institutions.

Addressing journalists alongside his running mate Makebi Zulu, Mundubile said the UPND had created a company under ZNS for the sole purpose of siphoning government resources through the sale of maize and mealie meal. He described the arrangement as corruption of the highest order, arguing that senior UPND officials and former ministers had been sharing contracts to extract large sums of money from government institutions.

“It was hypocritical for Hichilema to call his opponents thieves when his own officials were busy stealing huge amounts of money from government using ZNS and the Food Reserve Agency,” Mundubile said, referring to remarks the President made during recent campaign engagements in which he accused opposition figures of being unfit to govern because of past association with alleged mismanagement.

The NRPUP leader’s comments came shortly after Hichilema, during his inspection of the Lusaka-Ndola dual carriageway, told supporters that voters should reject “the government of thieves” and instead back UPND. Mundubile’s response sought to turn that framing back on the ruling party, positioning it as the more culpable side in ongoing disputes over the management of public resources.

Green Party president Peter Sinkamba added his own criticism of the ruling party in a separate interview, arguing that the UPND government has become more corrupt than the Patriotic Front administration it replaced. Sinkamba pointed to what he described as alarming revelations that politically connected individuals linked to the ruling party owe state institutions, including the Food Reserve Agency and Zambia National Service, colossal sums of money.

“So the liquidity of FRA is in total shambles as a result of that. Now we have a party called UPND which attacked the PF that there was no prudent management of resources, that they were thieves, that they were using cronyism to rule the country,” Sinkamba said, arguing that the same pattern of politically connected individuals benefiting at the expense of the nation had simply repeated itself under new management.

Sinkamba further claimed the UPND government had “tormented” one of its own former vice presidents, alleging he was jailed over failure to declare interests connected to his dealings with government while serving as a cabinet minister. He also suggested that military personnel had been permitted to borrow resources for personal use, straining the Zambia National Service’s liquidity position further.

Democratic Union president Ackim Njobvu offered a different perspective, arguing that if Zambians want to reset the country’s political direction, they should consider giving a chance to political newcomers such as himself or Socialist Party presidential candidate Fred M’membe, neither of whom has previously served in government.

Government has not yet issued a detailed public response to Mundubile’s specific allegations regarding the ZNS-linked maize trading arrangement, though State House has generally dismissed opposition corruption claims as attempts to distract from its development record. UPND spokespersons have consistently framed the party’s economic management as a marked improvement on the PF era, citing debt restructuring, expanded social protection and increased Constituency Development Fund allocations as evidence of prudent governance.

The exchange forms part of an intensifying pattern of mutual corruption accusations between Zambia’s major political parties in the closing weeks of the campaign, with both UPND and NRPUP seeking to portray the other as the greater threat to public resource management ahead of the 13 August vote. Neither Mundubile’s claims regarding the ZNS company nor Sinkamba’s allegations concerning the former vice president’s prosecution have been independently verified through court records or government statements cited in this report, and both remain, at this stage, political assertions rather than adjudicated findings.

The dispute is likely to feature prominently in subsequent campaign engagements, with both sides expected to press their competing narratives on corruption and accountability as polling day approaches. Analysts have noted that corruption allegations, whether substantiated or not, tend to carry significant weight with voters weighing competing claims about which party can be trusted with public funds over the next five-year term.

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