Miles Sampa Source of PF Mess

By Nedson Katete

The internal collapse of the Patriotic Front can be traced to a single, decisive rupture: the unlawful party convention convened by Miles Sampa. That event was not a footnote in the party’s decline. It was the starting point.

Sampa is often presented as a peripheral actor in the PF crisis, a participant swept up by events beyond his control. That portrayal does not withstand scrutiny. The convention he convened was widely rejected within the party, challenged in court, and never resolved through a lawful constitutional process. By proceeding regardless, Sampa fractured the party’s legal and organisational order and created the conditions that made subsequent capture possible.

From that moment, the PF ceased to function as a coherent political organisation.

The disputed convention introduced parallel claims to leadership and authority, undermined internal discipline, and forced the party into prolonged litigation. What followed was not confusion born of disagreement but instability rooted in illegality. Once constitutional continuity was broken, the party became vulnerable to manipulation through external institutions.

The later Chabinga episode, which further embarrassed and weakened the PF, did not arise independently. It was a direct consequence of the earlier breakdown. When a party’s leadership is unresolved, impersonation and substitution become feasible. Authority becomes administrative rather than political, determined not by members but by paperwork.

It is important to state this plainly: neither Miles Sampa nor Chabinga could have executed this level of political damage acting alone. The speed and coordination with which party ownership and recognition shifted point to powerful interests operating beyond the PF itself. Administrative decisions at the Registrar of Societies, including the removal of an earlier registrar who reportedly declined to validate disputed changes, were decisive. These actions occurred without final judicial determination of the convention’s legality.

Institutional delay played a critical role.

As State Counsel Chifumu Banda has argued publicly, unresolved political litigation does not preserve neutrality. It reshapes outcomes. By failing to conclude PF-related cases, the courts allowed contested arrangements to harden into operational reality. Time replaced judgment. Silence became effect.

Yet the most troubling development is not the initial illegality. It is what followed.

Rather than holding accountable those whose actions triggered the collapse, the PF’s current leadership has absorbed them. Miles Sampa, the convenor of the unlawful convention, is now positioned as a senior executive figure within the party. The individual whose actions dismantled internal legitimacy has been elevated as part of the solution.

This is not reconciliation. It is political amnesia.

Sampa did not resolve the crisis he created. He did not reunify the party through lawful process or judicial clarity. He benefited from the disorder. His elevation signals a deeper failure within the party’s leadership, particularly under Given Lubinda, to distinguish between survival and principle.

The question this raises is unavoidable:
Is the PF being rebuilt, or is it being managed into irrelevance?

You cannot claim to represent the masses while rewarding those who dismantled your own organisation. You cannot speak of renewal while anchoring the party’s future to figures whose actions enabled its capture. Trusting Miles Sampa with the PF’s recovery is not strategy. It is surrender.

The alignment of Miles Sampa, Given Lubinda, and Chishimba Kambwili represents a convergence of ambition unrestrained by accountability. Together, they have presided over the internal neutralisation of what was once Zambia’s strongest opposition party. The ruling party did not need to outlaw the PF. The PF dismantled itself from within.

This has consequences beyond partisan politics.

When a major opposition party is weakened through unresolved illegality, administrative intervention, and internal accommodation of those responsible, democratic competition suffers. Elections remain procedurally intact, but political choice is diminished.

Any serious revival of the opposition requires a clean break with the architects of collapse. That means acknowledging responsibility, not rewarding it. Without such a break, the PF will remain operational in name but hollow in purpose, active in rhetoric yet ineffective in influence.

Zambia does not lack political voices. It lacks principled opposition.

As long as those who broke the party are entrusted with leading it, the Patriotic Front will remain a shell of its former self, unable to offer a credible alternative to the Zambian people.