By Moses Kachali

There is a pattern worth watching as Zambia counts down to August 13, and it has less to do with what Brian Mundubile is saying than with how quickly his opponents feel the need to answer it.

Take the Solwezi episode. Mundubile links an alleged altercation involving musicians to the ruling party. Within hours, UPND’s media machine is out with a statement accusing him of “manufacturing lies and desperate tactics,” insisting the opposition is “panicked” because “defeat is imminent.”

Read that statement twice. It spends more energy describing the opposition’s supposed psychological state than addressing the substance of the claim. That is not the language of a campaign that feels safe. It is the language of a campaign that has noticed the ground shifting and wants to say so before anyone else does.

Contrast that with what Mundubile has actually been offering voters this week. In Kasisa, he is standing before a chief, promising to restore the ministry that traditional leaders say has fallen away, and putting a specific number on it: royalties from minerals extracted in their own chiefdoms. In Solwezi, he is not shouting slogans. He is naming Mufumbwe, Kikonge and Kasenseli by name, telling young miners who have faced guns instead of support that a government of his would organise, train and protect them instead of confronting them.

Whatever one thinks of the promises, they are promises about roads not yet built and mines not yet regulated. They are forward-looking. UPND’s response, by comparison, has been backward-looking, an accusation about intent, a demand that Mundubile hand over footage, a statement about who is “panicking.” When the incumbent’s loudest answer to a policy pitch is a character claim, it tells you something about which side feels it is losing the argument.

And there is a bitter irony sitting in plain sight for anyone tempted to trust the machinery of order over the substance of an argument. Mwala Yuyi was, until recently, the man in charge of policing an entire province, one of the very officers this government leaned on to keep the peace it now insists it has delivered. He is now charged alongside a magistrate, a clerk of court and fellow officers over copper cathodes that vanished from evidence and turned up at a private auction.

If the institution meant to guard against exactly this kind of decay could not keep its own house honest, voters are entitled to ask how much weight to place on assurances about who is “manufacturing” trouble and who is not. An accusation is cheap. A commissioner in handcuffs is not.

Zambians do not need slogans from either side over the next thirteen days. They need to see whether a party seeking a fresh mandate can make its case on delivery, and whether a party seeking to unseat it can make its case on specifics rather than grievance. So far, it is Mundubile naming mines, chiefs and mineral royalties by name. It is UPND naming Mundubile’s motives, while its own former enforcer awaits trial.

If the ruling party has done the work, that work will hold up without anyone needing to accuse the other side of panic first. Let the record argue for itself. Right now, the record includes a commissioner in the dock.

This is an opinion column. The views expressed are the author’s own.

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