How did voters, the opposition and civil society manage to defeat an entrenched and repressive regime?
In Zambia Election, Opposition Leader Storms to Decisive Win Over President
Voters picked Hakainde Hichilema, a businessman who had lost five previous bids for the job, to take over from Edgar Lungu, who has led the southern African nation since 2015.
The opposition leader, Hakainde Hichilema, a businessman who had lost five previous bids for the presidency, captured more than 2.8 million votes in the election, which was held Thursday, unseating Edgar Lungu, who drew 1.8 million votes. Mr. Lungu had governed the southern African nation since 2015.
Analysts saw the victory by Mr. Hichilema, 59, who leads the United Party for National Development, as a resounding rebuke of Mr. Lungu’s shepherding of an economy that was in tatters. Zambia, a copper-producing nation, has been marred by huge inflation, stifling debt, rising food prices and unemployment.
On top of the economic problems, activists and opposition politicians warned that increasingly repressive tactics from Mr. Lungu’s government would cause an erosion of the country’s democracy, which was seen as a model across the continent after Zambia’s founding father, Kenneth Kaunda, reluctantly stepped aside when he lost the first multiparty elections in 1991.
We know that a healthy and functioning democracy is one in which the voices of citizens can be heard freely,” he added. “We will listen to those voices rather than seeking to silence critics.”
Zambians were “anxious about the possibility of another five years under such a dysfunctional regime,” said Laura Miti, director of the Alliance for Community Action, a nongovernmental organization based in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, that works on public accountability. That made people even more vigilant in the face of the Patriotic Front’s efforts to sway the election toward Mr. Lungu, she said.
“I think, in a way, the attempts to subvert the election worked against them,” Ms. Miti said. “I think more people turned out.”
Although voter registration was higher in Mr. Lungu’s traditional bases of support, turnout there was lower than in the regions that tended to favor Mr. Hichilema, analysts said. And Mr. Hichilema’s party generally lost by narrow margins in Mr. Lungu’s strongholds, while winning handily the constituencies most favorable to him.
As the first rounds of election results were released, Mr. Lungu issued a statement declaring that the voting was “not free and fair.”
He claimed that violence at polling stations on Thursday had kept his supporters away. Mr. Lungu posted a lengthy thread on Twitter condemning the killings of two of his supporters and railing about the effect that he said it was having on the elections.
Mr. Lungu’s Twitter feed leading up to the voting had been laced with calls for prayer and images of infrastructure projects during his tenure as he sought to portray his re-election as necessary to continue that progress. But that messaging stood in contrast to the everyday realities of Zambians, said Nicole Beardsworth, a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who has been in Zambia since early last month studying the election.
“I heard this from a lot of people, that ‘you can’t eat the roads,’” she said. “And what point is a school if you don’t have a teacher, and what’s the point of a clinic if you don’t have medicine? That was really the thing that turned the election against the P.F. and against Lungu.”
Also, like in the last two presidential elections, the results in 2021 humongous not easy to rig . In the 2015 presidential by-election, President Lungu beat Hichilema by just 1.68%. In 2016, he scraped over the line in the first round with 50.35%. Hichilema, who received 47.63%, filed an ultimately unsuccessful petition calling for the election to be nullified, citing irregularities and allegations of fraud.
Much about the 2021 campaign therefore is familiar to Zambians. But will the result be too?
For me Zambia is a democracy. It means the people have decided and the people's voice was followed and respected and I am also proud of my leader President Edgar Lungu for conceding defeat and choosing peace over violence," says 50-year-old Rose Mumba, a supporter of ex-president Edgar Lungu.
While Hichilema won by a landslide, some analysts have now pointed to irregularities in the election. Cheeseman said the Zambian election was of "poor quality" and was manipulated. Hichilema only won because his margin was so big, adding the results "could easily have been rigged for the ruling party."
Change of power from incumbency to the opposition is not that common in southern Africa. In recent years, only Malawi's President Lazarus Chakwera upset the ruling party in the country's recent election. In Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique, the ruling parties have not lost power since the 1990s, and neighboring Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa was quick to warn any opposition parties from harboring similar ambitions.
Zambia itself was facing questions over its democracy, as the outgoing President Edgar Lungu was accused of becoming increasingly authoritarian. Citizens and opposition figures who publicly criticized government policy were arrested. Even Hichilema was once tried for treason charges after allegedly blocking Lungu's presidential motorcade during Zambia's previous election. In 2019, another opposition leader Sean Tembo of Patriots for Economic Progress (PEP) was arrested on charges of defamation for questioning the purchase of a $400 million (€340 million) presidential jet amid a ballooning national debt crisis.
Will it be this June, Hichilema made it clear he believes he would win if there was a level playing field. “In a free, fair and credible election, [Lungu] has no chance,” he said. “People will be looking at how the economy has collapsed, the job losses, declining health services sector, how difficult it has become to survive and just put food on the table.” He also made it clear, however, that he does not consider this election to be free and fair. Indeed, there are several causes for concern.
The first is the violence perpetrated by ruling party cadres and with the complicity of the police. In the run-up to elections, the media has reported on several instances of violence. Most of these incidents are started by PF activists attacking members of the opposition, especially the UPND. The situation is made worse by police who display by failing to apprehend the perpetrators.
The second is the unfair and selective application of the Public Order Act. This colonial-era legislation was supposed to have been expunged from the statute books. Instead, it is used to restrict opposition activities such as holding of public meetings, rallies, and demonstrations. While the PF has been allowed to campaign continuously since 2016, members of the opposition are subjected to arrests and harassment when they try to meet supporters. Hichilema has been detained 15 times, including from April to August 2017.
The third was the decision by the Electoral Commission to compile a new voter register in a period of just 38 days at the end of 2020. The result of this process is that the number of registered voters in areas considered to be PF strongholds is an estimated 345,000 higher than before, while the size of the electorate in perceived UPND strongholds is 70,000 lower. According to an by News Diggers, there are also 20,000 illegally registered Malawians on the roll who have been bribed to vote for the ruling party. An alleged discrepancy has also been detected between the physical register and the electronic register, whereby 420,000 voters cannot be accounted for. The Electoral Commission has refused demands to conduct an independent audit of the voters’ roll.
The fourth is the introduction of biometric verification to process voters at polling stations with high turnouts. This scheme was hatched late in the electoral cycle and has been widely condemned as it appears to be aimed at reducing numbers of voters especially in areas likely to support the opposition.
Deploying the military
In the final days of the campaign, more reasons for concern have emerged. On 30 July, two PF supporters were found hacked to death in Kanyama constituency in Lusaka. In response, President Lungu ordered in the army to help the police maintain law and order. The next day, the Electoral Commission banned the UPND from engaging in campaign activities in Kanyama.
Opposition parties and other groups condemned the deployment of the military as unwarranted. They have raised the fact that Zambia’s military has a of harassing and intimidating members of the public when called upon to maintain law and order.
ZAMBIA has done it again. On 17 August, President Edgar Lungu and congratulated Hakainde Hichilema on a remarkable victory. In the election five days earlier, the long-time opposition leader had won in a landslide, defeating the incumbent along with 14 other candidates. For the third time in the country’s history, power changed hands via the ballot box – not just democratically but peacefully. Along with , Zambia is now leading the way as one of a very small number of countries to move away from authoritarianism during the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to the fact that it happened as democracy is generally receding worldwide, Zambia’s achievement is particularly striking for two reasons. First, it came after a period of growing repression that had and led to fears the country could become the “new Zimbabwe”. Second, despite President Lungu enjoying so many advantages of incumbency that the opposition was effectively competing with one hand tied behind its back, Hichilema won comprehensively. While several commentators were predicting a second-round run-off would be needed, the opposition figure garnered 2.8 million votes, or 59% of the valid votes cast. That was 1 million votes more than Lungu in a country with just 7 million registered voters, or a winning margin of over 20 points.
After every opposition victory in Africa, there is a wave of optimistic media coverage wondering whether further transfers of power are about to be unleashed across the continent. With the 2021 Zambian elections, this has been heightened by the emphatic nature of Lungu’s defeat. However, while there have been moments when events in one country have inspired those in another – such as the impact of the freeing of Nelson Mandela on pro-democracy movements across Africa in 1990 – there is a tendency to exaggerate the spill over effects of a democratic process in one country. Nothing that happened in Zambia shifts the political reality in Cameroon, Uganda, or Zimbabwe. Hichilema’s success can only be repeated if the conditions that gave rise to it are also replicated.
Put another way, Zambia’s democratic success story will only inspire change elsewhere if the political context and the strategies used by opposition parties and civil society groups are reproduced. That will be extremely difficult in more authoritarian states with less experience of the will of the people determining who holds power – and in some countries it will be all but impossible in the near future. This caveat notwithstanding, the lessons of the Zambian election about how entrenched authoritarians can be removed from power are worth learning – for opposition parties, civil society groups and all those who care about democracy.
It’s the economy, stupid
The most obvious lesson from Zambia is that economic crisis can undermine the hold on power of genuinely repressive regimes. This might seem obvious, but the focus on ethnic, regional, or racial voting in Africa has often obscured the extent to which people vote on the economy. Swing voters are more likely to line up behind the opposition, and ruling party supporters are most likely to stay at home, when they blame the government for economic pain.
Ahead of the election, nearly all of Zambia’s key economic indicators were extremely poor. Unemployment was high and particularly acute among the youth, one of the groups that helped swing the outcome in Hichilema’s favour. Corruption was endemic, inflation was in the double digits, and . The staggering external debt – $12 billion, up from $1.9 billion in 2011 – took money away from social services, while service delivery was so poor that sporadic protests flared up in urban centres.
Exploiting this favourable economic context, Hichilema positioned himself as the business savvy leader that Zambia needed, giving people hope that the country can overcome the recent debt default and put money back into people’s pockets. Against this backdrop, Lungu’s efforts to buy support by channelling money through “empowerment schemes” proved to be ineffective. As in the famous opposition victories of 1991 and 2011, Zambians took money and gifts from whoever offered them, but voted with their hearts and their brains.
Opposition learning and unity
These elections were Hichilema’s sixth attempt at winning the presidency and, crucially, he had learned at least three key lessons from previous defeats. First, the opposition was more coherent this time, after Hichilema persuaded eight opposition parties to back his United Party for National Development (UPND) ahead of the election. Although the allying parties were small and lacked clear power bases, they were led by . Importantly, these individuals were united in their opposition to the governing Patriotic Front (PF) and seen as credible by many voters. This elite pact legitimised Hichilema as an inclusive national leader and presented the UPND as the most viable vehicle for removing the PF from power.
Second, Hichilema made a real effort to expand his support base beyond his traditional constituencies in the Western, Southern and North-western provinces. He targeted the urban areas of Lusaka and the Copperbelt, where he focused on unemployment and rallied youths on social media, speaking in their language and using the popular moniker “Bally”. He also appointed Mutale Nalumango, an experienced politician from the Bemba-speaking Muchinga and Northern province – ruling party bases – to be his running mate. While the opposition was becoming broader, the PF was beset by factionalism, driven by dissatisfaction with Lungu’s decision to run for a third term and his deeply unpopular choice of running mate, Nkandu Luo.
Third, the UPND protected the vote. Unlike in 2016, when UPND election monitors had a limited presence in key areas, the opposition appears to have deployed agents in almost all the 12,152 polling stations in 2021. This made it very difficult for the government to manipulate the vote. Once the counting was done and the votes were tallied at constituency level, party agents faxed the signed results forms to their representatives at the national totalling centre in Lusaka to make sure their figures matched those announced by the electoral commission. An early intervention by UPND representatives during the official announcement of results to stop the release of disputed figures for the Feira constituency laid down an important precedent and shut down the opportunity for electoral fraud.
Civil society matters
Civil society groups in Africa have often been criticised for being too aggressive on the one hand or too pliant on the other. They are regarded as too elitist by some, or too reflective of the divisions in society by others. Similarly, international funding for civil society has often been branded a waste of resources by those who lament “Dead Aid”. Zambia, however, shows just how important civil society groups can be, and why it is essential to support them through hard times.
In 2021, they played several critical roles. First, civic organisations campaigned throughout the country to raise awareness on the importance of voting and vote protection. Institutions like Alliance for Community Action (ACA), Governance, Elections, Advocacy, Research Services (GEARS) and People’s Action for Accountability and Good Governance in Zambia held a series of meetings on voter education, sensitising the population. Civil society organisations also carefully monitored all 156 constituencies on voting day. While GEARS deployed about 10,000 observers, the Christian Churches Monitoring Group (CCMG), which also deployed 1, 600 monitors, conducted a parallel vote tabulation that captured the election results at polling station level, ensuring that any manipulation would be exposed.
Finally, civil society initiated several court cases against the abuse of state power. The persistent attack on the erosion of the rule of law and human rights raised awareness among voters and helped delegitimise the governing party. Though they did not always win, the cases drew attention to the erosion of democracy. There were also some important victories, not least by legal advocacy group Chapter One Foundation, which successfully obtained a court order that stayed the government’s shutdown of social media platforms on election day.
The diffusion of democracy
These lessons can be learned by opposition parties and democracy activists across the continent. But they will not always be easy to reproduce. While Hichilema’s win was celebrated by other opposition leaders such as Zimbabwe’s Nelson Chamisa and Uganda’s Bobi Wine, the conditions that made it possible are not present in their respective countries.
Although Lungu’s regime was repressive, and there were fears that the army would be used to repress opposition protests, the military remained politically neutral. And while many Ugandans and Zimbabweans demand change, there is no popular memory of replacing the government via the ballot box to give voters confidence that their votes matter, and to empower the electoral commission to believe it is safe to announce an opposition victory. The lessons of Zambia are still pertinent in these countries, but it will take many years of struggle to put them into practice.
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