Makebi enters this conversation with something different: a serious legal mind, legislative experience, and actual executive exposure from inside government. In politics, the music can fool people. But when the music stops, the file remains. And Makebi Zulu’s file is stronger than many of the men who came before him at the point they first stepped into office, particularly Hakainde Hichilema. 

The endgame is not to win a convention hall. The endgame is to win the country. That means the PF must stop behaving like a club choosing a chairman and start behaving like a machine preparing to sell a presidential brand to millions of Zambians.

What Zulu was arguing, essentially, is that Zambia is not simply dealing with policy disagreements between competing parties. His argument is that the country’s governing system has drifted outside our constitutional boundaries, and that what is needed is not cosmetic adjustment but structural recalibration.

Perhaps the most emotional moment of the interview came when Dr Kasase-Botha spoke about the unresolved burial of former President Edgar Chagwa Lungu. Nearly nine months after his death, the matter remains unsettled. For her, the issue is no longer about legal positions or political arguments. It is about something more fundamental.