Africa-Press – Zambia. Zambian elections are not lost in August. They are lost months earlier, quietly, procedurally, and often invisibly. What happens in August is usually just the announcement of decisions already baked into structure, numbers, and organisation. This is the danger the opposition is walking into.
Right now, the opposition is not behaving like a formation preparing to win power. It is behaving like one preparing an excuse. The pattern is familiar. Emotional convergence around a single grievance. Media saturation. Moral absolutism. And the gradual neglect of the mechanics that actually decide elections. When the results come, the cry will be rigging. But rigging thrives where preparation collapses.
UPND understands this terrain because it survived it. For two decades, it lived in opposition, losing repeatedly but learning relentlessly. It learned how ECZ works. How delimitation reshapes arithmetic. How turnout matters more than outrage. How ground organisation beats press statements. Today, this institutional memory is its sharpest weapon.
While the opposition is concentrated on symbolic battles, ECZ is executing its mandate. Constituency numbers are shifting under the amended legal framework. Voter registers are being updated. Administrative boundaries are being locked in. These are not political debates. They are technical processes. Ignore them now, and you will only discover their impact when it is irreversible.
At the same time, UPND is doing what winning parties do in election years. It is redeploying political capital to strategic regions. Northern Province is not trending online, but it is being worked. Kasama is not loud, but it is active. Presidential political operatives are embedded. Structures are being rebuilt ward by ward. PF’s organisational decay there is no longer theoretical. It is visible.
The opposition, by contrast, is centralising its energy around confrontation rather than construction. It is mistaking mobilisation for organisation. It is confusing sympathy with votes. It is turning legal processes into political theatres while neglecting agent recruitment, coalition discipline, fundraising coherence, and constituency-level messaging.
This is how elections are lost.
When August arrives, the opposition will say the system was unfair. That institutions were captured. That democracy was compromised. Some of that may even be partially true. But it will ring hollow because the warning signs were visible months earlier. A distracted opposition is an unprotected opposition. And an unprotected opposition always meets a prepared incumbent.
Politics is not a sermon. It is arithmetic. It is logistics. It is timing. It is attention. Right now, the opposition is spending its attention on the wrong battlefield. UPND is not forcing this mistake. It is benefiting from it.
If this trajectory continues, August will not be a shock. It will be a script. The opposition will lose, then litigate narratives instead of votes. Rigging will become the explanation for failures that were organisational, not electoral.
There is still time. But time in politics is unforgiving. Those who waste it preparing excuses rarely win power.
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