Priscilla Lungu and the question Lusaka must ask
By Mast Reporter
LUSAKA has never suffered from a shortage of politicians. What it has too often lacked is politics grounded firmly in competence, discipline, administration, and measurable civic results.
That distinction matters as Councillor Priscilla Lungu of Mulungushi Ward, elected under the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity (NRPUP) seeks Lusaka’s Deputy Mayoral office today formally.
The immediate temptation will be to reduce the contest to political arithmetic: who commands numbers, who has influence, who owes favours, and which alliances can deliver victory.
But Lusaka deserves a more serious question, one stripped of factional calculations and political theatre: who possesses the competence, temperament, and administrative discipline to help govern effectively?
The Deputy Mayoral position should not become another trophy distributed through political negotiation. Lusaka is simply too large, complicated, demanding, and important for merely ceremonial leadership today.
The capital confronts waste, flooding, congestion, informal settlements, deteriorating roads, overcrowded markets, drainage failures, sanitation pressures, land disputes, uncontrolled trading, and increasingly impatient residents demanding urgent solutions.
These problems are not theoretical. They sit outside people’s gates, fill potholes, choke drainage channels, overwhelm markets, disrupt businesses, frustrate commuters, and test household patience almost daily.
Against that demanding background, Priscilla Lungu presents an interesting proposition because her professional life was shaped significantly before politics, inside classrooms, institutions, management systems, and public administration.
Her career includes lecturing in business, management, accountancy-related programmes, logistics, transport, purchasing, supply, and professional studies linked to respected national and international examining and training institutions nationally.
She has taught programmes associated with ABE, ZICA, CIM, NCC, CBA, and the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, developing substantial experience across varied professional education settings.
Her professional experience includes the Zambia Centre for Accountancy Studies, the Zambia Institute of Management, and the National Institute of Public Administration, institutions demanding organisation and professionalism.
That matters, not because lecturers automatically make good politicians, but because effective teaching requires preparation, organisation, communication, assessment, patience, planning, accountability, and consistent attention to measurable outcomes.
Zambia has produced enough educated failures to prove that certificates alone cannot govern cities, collect refuse, repair roads, unblock drains, supervise contracts, or guarantee integrity in office.
Qualifications are useful only when they improve judgement, discipline, problem-solving, communication, leadership, and the capacity to convert knowledge into visible public benefit for ordinary citizens more consistently.
Look closely at Lusaka’s difficulties and one repeatedly encounters the same disease: weak systems, inconsistent implementation, fragmented accountability, administrative delays, poor coordination, and persistent institutional indiscipline everywhere.
A drainage problem may also be a planning problem. A waste crisis may expose procurement weaknesses. Congested markets may reveal failures of enforcement, design, supervision, or coordination.
Land disputes frequently expose poor records. Traffic congestion reflects infrastructure and enforcement failures. Uncollected garbage may reveal contract management weaknesses rather than merely having insufficient trucks alone.
This is precisely why local government cannot be treated as a retirement home for slogans, patronage, factional settlements, or political personalities seeking titles without serious administrative responsibility.
Lungu’s background deserves attention because she has worked within systems where schedules matter, preparation matters, records matter, standards matter, performance matters, and failure carries clearly identifiable consequences.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Library and Information Studies from the University of Zambia (UNZA) and has undertaken postgraduate studies in management and business-related professional development programmes.
Information management may sound unglamorous politically, yet modern government depends upon accurate records, reliable data, accessible documentation, institutional memory, transparency, and traceable decision-making every single working day.
Who owns which property? What did council resolve? Where is the file? What was paid? Which contractor was engaged? Who authorised the decision, and when exactly officially?
A council unable to retrieve reliable information eventually becomes governed by memory, influence, improvisation, and confusion, conditions which inevitably weaken accountability and broader public confidence over time.
Lungu’s exposure to logistics is equally relevant because municipal government is, in many respects, an enormous logistical exercise disguised beneath political language, procedures, speeches, meetings, and ceremonies.
Logistics concerns movement, resources, timing, coordination, people, materials, systems, efficiency, and delivery, precisely the practical elements upon which functioning modern cities depend every ordinary working day effectively.
The refuse truck must arrive. Drainage must be cleared before rains. Markets must function. Workers must be deployed. Contracts must be monitored. Resources must be properly accounted.
The city must move, and when its systems fail, residents experience the consequences immediately through delays, flooding, congestion, waste accumulation, disorder, and steadily deteriorating public services everywhere.
There is another potentially valuable dimension in Lungu’s professional background: she is an educator, accustomed to explaining difficult ideas, managing groups, listening, correcting, and carefully persuading others.
Anyone who has lectured before a demanding class understands that authority alone is insufficient. People must understand instructions, trust processes, respect standards, and see consistency fairly applied.
Those abilities may matter inside a council chamber where political differences, personal ambitions, ward interests, party loyalties, administrative demands, and public expectations constantly compete for serious attention.
Lusaka City Council (LCC) cannot become a miniature Parliament where every drainage pipe, refuse contract, market dispute, or road repair becomes another battlefield between national government and opposition.
Residents do not care which party collected their garbage. They care whether it was collected. They want drains cleared, roads passable, markets orderly, and public services dependable.
Potholes have no ideology. Cholera carries no membership card. Floodwater does not check political affiliation before entering homes, destroying property, disrupting livelihoods, and spreading unnecessary human hardship.
Municipal leadership therefore demands cooperation without surrendering principle, compromise without abandoning accountability, and political maturity capable of distinguishing legitimate disagreement from unnecessary institutional warfare among elected councillors.
Lungu’s political home, the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity, places reconciliation prominently within its identity, but that word must acquire clear practical meaning in governance.
Reconciliation inside a council chamber means sitting with opponents and still solving problems, protecting public resources, sharing information, respecting procedure, and finding workable common ground where possible.
It means politicians may disagree nationally while agreeing locally that markets require sanitation, drainage requires attention, roads need maintenance, and residents deserve essential services without partisan punishment.
The Deputy Mayor should understand that office as a bridge between political leadership, professional administration, councillors, residents, committees, civic representation, and continuity in municipal decision-making processes generally.
The relationship between elected leaders and professional administrators is crucial. Councillors determine priorities and policy direction, while professionals implement decisions through systems requiring expertise, consistency, and discipline.
When politicians recklessly interfere with professionals, institutions weaken. When professionals become unaccountable to elected authority, democracy weakens. Effective municipal leadership therefore requires balance, restraint, and mutual respect.
Lungu’s academic and administrative experience potentially gives her familiarity with institutional systems, documentation, accountability, planning, coordination, and performance, but potential must always be tested against actual results.
If she assumes higher civic responsibility, residents should judge whether council business improves, decisions are followed through, public resources are protected, and communication becomes measurably more accountable.
They should ask whether she works across party lines, challenges incompetence, remains accessible, respects professional advice, strengthens oversight, and understands that council belongs ultimately to ordinary residents.
Her candidature also places women’s representation in local government into focus, but she should not be considered suitable merely because Zambia needs more women in leadership positions.
That argument alone would be patronising. The stronger case is that experienced women should compete for authority on competence, judgement, integrity, preparation, performance, and demonstrable public service.
The Deputy Mayoral office should never be treated as decorative. Properly exercised, it can strengthen coordination, support the Mayor, improve civic representation, and reinforce continuity across functions.
Lungu comes from a professional world where preparation precedes examination, performance is measured, deadlines matter, standards apply, and results ultimately determine whether institutional systems are functioning properly.
That culture would be useful at Lusaka City Council, because the capital does not need more political theatre; it needs institutions capable of working consistently for residents.
The central question should therefore not be who belongs to which faction, who commands the loudest supporters, or who has negotiated the most advantageous political arrangement possible.
The more important question is whether the person seeking leadership understands the machinery of city government, respects systems, values accountability, and can genuinely help make Lusaka work.
Priscilla Lungu’s record now enters that test, not as a guarantee of success, but as evidence that her candidature deserves serious, rigorous, and properly informed public consideration.
