Lungu’s Final Wishes or Family Fiction? Laura Miti Questions

Lungu’s Final Wishes or Family Fiction? Laura Miti Raises Doubts Over Funeral Narrative

By Laura Miti | Lusaka

Here is to you a bold and thought-provoking critique. governance activist Laura Miti has questioned the public narrative surrounding the late former President Edgar Lungu’s funeral arrangements, particularly the claims being made by his family in the wake of his passing. Her reflections, shared in a widely circulated statement, challenge the logic and cultural plausibility of some of the family’s assertions and has brought fresh debate about respect, politics, and truth in national mourning.

At the heart of Miti’s critique is the suggestion that the Lungu family has attributed peculiar instructions to the late President, allegedly given before his death in South Africa. Chief among these is the claim that Lungu explicitly instructed his body not be flown back to Zambia aboard a government aircraft, a demand that Miti finds both implausible and inconsistent with presidential dignity.

“Do you know how strange it is that anyone would bother too much about how their body will be transported after they die?” Miti asked rhetorically. “To leave strict instructions about which plane his dead body will use… That’s a really bizarre claim, you will have to agree.”

Miti also casts doubt on the family’s other reported claim , that Lungu did not want President Hakainde Hichilema to come near his remains. She questions the emotional logic behind such a directive, suggesting it reflects poorly on the former President’s legacy. “You’re saying that when a whole former President was dying, his thoughts were not on his wife, his children, or even God, but rather on his political rival?” she writes. “That his final moments were preoccupied with vengeance?”

Beyond the personal, Miti takes issue with what she sees as a contradiction in state precedent. Lungu’s government famously defied Kenneth Kaunda’s family to secure a state burial at Embassy Park for Zambia’s founding president. Yet now, the former President’s family appears to have insisted on undermining similar state protocols allegedly following his own posthumous instructions. “You are saying he used his last days and weeks to say ignore the court ruling I asked for myself?” Miti questions.

In a particularly emotive passage, she appeals to the late President’s widow, Esther Lungu. “When will poor Esther get to sit on a mattress to let out her grief and receive condolences?” she asks, referencing the traditional mourning practices that have been stalled by the prolonged funeral impasse.

While acknowledging that elderly family members have since emerged in the negotiations, Miti wonders whether they genuinely supported the decision to withhold the body from the state, or whether cultural expectations were overlooked entirely. “Do you know what a strangely willing-to-go-against-culture that makes the whole extended Lungu family?”

Miti’s critique walks a careful line between political commentary and cultural introspection. While she refrains from direct political attacks, her message is unmistakable: the story being told by the family may not only undermine Lungu’s own legacy but also strain Zambia’s collective capacity to mourn with dignity.

Her closing line lingers with intention: “Are you really claiming that this drama is all because EL hated HH so much that he was willing to turn his own funeral into a circus for the ages…? Rethink your story, mwe.”

As Zambia prepares to lay its sixth president to rest, such questions though uncomfortable are prompting deeper reflection on what it means to honour leadership, tradition, and the truth.