NRPUP DRAMA: YOU CAN OWN THE PARTY, BUT CAN YOU OWN THE POLITICS?
NRPUP DRAMA: YOU CAN OWN THE PARTY, BUT CAN YOU OWN THE POLITICS?
By Bill Hamapumbu Jr.
Let me act dumb on this one. I honestly thought NRPUP belonged to Brian Mundubile. I didn’t even know Ezra Tembo was the sole owner of the party.
But looking at how everything has played out, I have to give Ezra some credit. The man made a very interesting deal. He brought in BM and Makebi Zulu, and suddenly NRPUP had political relevance. I don’t think choosing those two was accidental.
But here is where politics is very different from business.
In business, you can make a deal based largely on numbers, contracts and what each side brings to the table. If one person becomes more valuable, the terms of the deal can be renegotiated or the partnership can simply end.
Politics doesn’t work that cleanly.
People don’t follow politicians only because of the position they hold. They follow personalities, history, loyalty, ideology and, most importantly, the political support that person commands. Once people develop that connection, you can’t simply say, “I own the party, therefore I own the followers.”
Ezra Tembo may have had the party structure, but BM came with political weight and people who identify with him.
Maybe that’s the part nobody fully anticipated when the arrangement was made. Sometimes you bring someone into a political platform to strengthen the party, only to discover that the person eventually becomes one of the biggest political forces within that same platform.
The interesting part is that Ezra Tembo could have expected to become Leader of the Opposition in Parliament. But Article 74(2) says the opposition party with the largest number of seats elects the Leader of the Opposition from among opposition MPs. Standing Order 45(1) says the same thing.
So if Ezra Tembo wants to be leader of opposition in the house, who exactly is going to chose him? over Stephen Kampyongo and other veterans MPs in NRPUP.
That’s where this gets interesting.
You can technically own the party and still find yourself becoming a stranger in your own political home.
For me, the real challenge now is not simply who legally owns NRPUP. It’s whether the party can maintain its political relevance while managing the reality that the people Ezra Tembo brought into the arrangement may have developed a political following of their own.
Because politics has a funny way of doing this; you can create the platform, but you can’t always control who becomes bigger on it.
Maybe the best way forward is to put the party first and allow the constitution and the convention to determine who leads.
At the end of the day, owning the platform is one thing; having the political support to lead from that platform is another.