Nevers Mumba makes careless statement over ECL’s burial

Nevers Mumba makes careless statement over ECL’s burial
By Brian Matambo | 6 February, 2026

I have just listened to a clip of former Republican Vice President Nevers Mumba preparing his audience for what he described as a careless statement. The words that followed were more than careless. They were reckless. No one expects Dr Mumba to be generous in tone toward anything connected to the late Sixth Republican President Edgar Chagwa Lungu, his family, or the Patriotic Front. That reality has long been accepted by many.

What cannot pass without correction, however, is the quiet rewriting of facts and law that Dr Mumba attempts to slip into the public conversation under the banner of moderation and unity. He suggests that government has merely sought to ensure President Lungu is buried in Zambia, that there has been no insistence by President Hakainde Hichilema to see the body, and that the dispute has been inflated by suspicion and misunderstanding. This framing misleads.

There is no legal obligation on President Hichilema to view the body of his predecessor, nor is there any legal obligation on the family to facilitate such an act. Burial decisions, in law and custom, begin with the family. The State’s role is facilitative, not coercive. Dr Mumba’s emphasis on what the President has or has not said about seeing the body distracts from the real issue. The family’s concern has never been voyeurism. It has been dignity and non-interference.

Dr Mumba’s attempt to reduce the matter to a light, almost administrative issue collapses when placed against reality. For eight months, the Lungu family has been dragged through an aggressive court process in a foreign jurisdiction. That fact is not peripheral. It is central. One cannot speak of honour, respect, or unity while the full force of the State bears down on a widow and her children. Minimising that reality is not neutrality. It is wilful blindness, particularly troubling from a man of the collar who should understand compassion.

The naivety on display is uncanny. Dr Mumba strains to avoid offending President Hichilema even where candour is required. He acknowledges there was no friendship between the two men. He concedes the President does not need to attend the funeral. He admits the relationship was cold and professional at best. Yet he stops short of the obvious conclusion. If the President does not need to be present, and if there was no personal bond to honour, then the family’s insistence on privacy should have been respected from the outset. A vuvuzela remains a vuvuzela, period.

Most troubling is Dr Mumba’s warning that President Lungu should not be remembered as someone buried in bitterness. That raises a simple question: whose bitterness? In public life, only three men have displayed a visible and unresolved bitterness toward ECL: Nevers Mumba himself, President Hichilema, and Wynter Kabimba. The Lungu family has shown none. They have asked for no favours, demanded no spectacle, and sought only to mourn in peace and dignity. Perhaps that single piece of advice would have been better directed elsewhere.

It is disingenuous to suggest the family is staining ECL’s legacy. Legacies are not preserved by force, protected by court orders, or enhanced by dragging grief through litigation. If bitterness has been injected into this moment, it is through the disproportionate use of State power against a bereaved family. That is what the world has seen. That is what history will record.

Dr Mumba says he made a careless statement. He did. But carelessness in moments like these is not harmless. It becomes a shield for excess and a soft landing for injustice. The law does not compel what he implies. The family owes the State nothing beyond the respect already shown. Dignity, which Dr Mumba himself invokes, cannot coexist with intimidation.

The Lungu family seeks no validation from State House, no reconciliation ceremonies, no public theatre. They seek space, quiet, and the simple right to lay a husband and father to rest without the shadow of power hovering over the grave. That is not bitterness. That is humanity.