By Brian Matambo | 6 February, 2026

Dear Readers,

I am just from listening to a clip of former republican vice president Nevers Mumba preparing the audience that he was about to make a careless statement. And I must say the statement he made was more than careless. It was reckless. To be honest, no one expects Dr Mumba to be gracious in word towards anything that has to do with the late Sixth Republican President Edgar Chagwa Lungu, his family, or his political party the Patriotic Front. That I made peace with a long time ago, as have many people.

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

First, there is no legal obligation on President Hichilema to see 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 role of the State is facilitative, not coercive. Dr Mumba’s repeated emphasis on what the President has or has not said about seeing the body is therefore a distraction. The family’s concern has never been about voyeurism. It has been about dignity and non-interference.

Second, Dr Mumba’s description of the matter as light, almost administrative, collapses when placed against reality. For eight months, the Lungu family has been dragged through an aggressive court process in a foreign land. This is not a footnote. It is the central fact. You cannot speak of honor, respect, or unity while the full force of the State is trained on a widow and her children. To minimize that reality is not neutrality. It is willful blindness on the part of a man who is supposed to show the compassion of a man of the collar.

Dr Mumba’s naivety in this matter is childlike and uncanny. He strains to avoid offending President Hichilema, even where the evidence demands candor. He admits there was no friendship between the two men. He admits the President does not need to attend the funeral. He admits the relationship was cold and professional at best. Yet he fails to follow his own logic to its natural conclusion. If the President does not need to be there, if there was no personal bond to honor, then the family’s insistence on privacy should have been respected from the start. But a vuvuzela is a vuvuzela. Period!

Most troubling is Dr Mumba’s warning that President Lungu should not be remembered as someone buried in bitterness. That statement begs a simple question. Whose bitterness are we talking about. In public life, there are only three men we know of whose bitterness toward ECL has been consistently visible and unresolved. Nevers Mumba himself, President Hichilema, and Wynter Kabimba. The Lungu family has shown no bitterness. They have asked for no favors. They have demanded no spectacle. They have simply asked to mourn in peace and dignity. Perhaps Nevers Mumba should direct that single piece of advice at Hakainde Hichilema.

It is therefore disingenuous to imply that the family is staining ECL’s legacy. Legacies are not preserved by force. They are not protected by court orders. They are not enhanced by dragging grief through litigation. If anything has injected bitterness into this moment, it is the incommensurate 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. And dignity, which Dr Mumba himself invokes, cannot coexist with intimidation.

The Lungu family does not seek validation from State House. They do not seek reconciliation ceremonies. They seek space. They seek quiet. They seek to lay their husband and father to rest without the shadow of power hovering over the grave. That is not bitterness. That is humanity.