Keypoints:
- Hichilema begins second term amid vote concerns
- Monitors say irregularities did not change winner
- Investors favour continuity despite democratic strains
ZAMBIA’S President Hakainde Hichilema has begun a second term under a political cloud, with his main election rival behind bars on treason charges and independent observers questioning significant parts of the process that produced his re-election.
The controversy does not mean Hichilema was the wrong winner. Independent monitoring indicates he still comfortably crossed the threshold required for victory. But irregular official tallies, military deployments at counting centres, opposition arrests and the closure of the country’s highest courts have turned his new mandate into a wider test of Zambia’s democratic institutions.
Victory leaves troubling questions
Hichilema was sworn in on September 1, 2026, extending the United Party for National Development’s rule after the August 13 presidential election.
His principal challenger, Brian Mundubile, was not part of the political spectacle surrounding the inauguration. He remained in detention after his lawyer, Kambwa Aongola, said Mundubile and running mate Makebi Zulu had been formally charged with treason.
The authorities have provided little public detail about the precise conduct underpinning the charges. The two opposition politicians deny allegations linking them to an armed threat against the state and are expected to challenge the case through the courts.
The circumstances carry uncomfortable historical resonance for Hichilema.
In 2017, while an opposition leader, he spent four months in prison on a treason charge under former President Edgar Lungu’s government before prosecutors discontinued the case.
Hichilema went on to defeat Lungu in 2021, promising a cleaner democratic break with a political culture he said had used state institutions against opponents.
Nine years after his own imprisonment, his principal election challenger now faces the same category of offence.
That parallel does not establish political interference in Mundubile’s prosecution. But it puts the conduct of Zambia’s police, prosecutors and courts under unusually intense scrutiny.
Africa Briefing has been following the escalation from the election dispute into the criminal justice system, including the treason case involving Mundubile and Zulu.
Monitors confirm win but flag flaws
Any assessment of the election must make one distinction clear: evidence of serious irregularities does not amount to evidence that Hichilema lost.
The Christian Churches Monitoring Group, one of Zambia’s leading domestic observer coalitions, deployed 1,500 observers for its Process and Results Verification for Transparency exercise.
Its statistically representative estimate placed Hichilema on 56.0 percent of the vote, with a margin of error of 1.7 percentage points. Mundubile was estimated at 42.3 percent.
That meant Hichilema should still have received the most votes and cleared the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a run-off.
But CCMG also found that the official national figures for turnout and the two leading candidates fell outside its statistical ranges.
The organisation identified 30 constituencies where votes had been added, artificially increasing turnout and undermining confidence in the accuracy of parts of the official tally.
Crucially, CCMG stressed that those discrepancies did not alter the overall presidential outcome.
That finding makes Zambia’s controversy more complex than a straightforward claim of a stolen election.
The stronger question is why manipulation or serious discrepancies could occur in parts of a process when the eventual winner appears to have had enough genuine support to win anyway.
Tabulation deteriorated after suspension
The European Union Election Observation Mission reached a similarly nuanced conclusion.
Its observers described election day as generally calm and found that voters had a competitive choice, although restrictions on campaigning and advantages associated with incumbency contributed to an uneven playing field.
The greater problems emerged during tabulation.
The Electoral Commission of Zambia suspended counting and the announcement of results nationwide for six hours on August 14 after violence targeting election officials and reports of stolen electoral material.
Africa Briefing reported at the time how Zambia’s nationwide count was halted as concerns shifted from economic policy towards the credibility of the electoral process itself.
After counting resumed, EU observers said the overall conduct of tabulation deteriorated significantly.
They documented failures to record announced figures promptly, extended interruptions and weakening safeguards around the entry of results.
A heavy military presence at some totalling centres was described as intimidating by people interviewed by the mission and coincided with fewer political party agents and citizen observers being present.
The EU later said serious incidents and procedural irregularities during counting and tabulation had affected the transparency and credibility of the electoral process.
None of those findings established that Mundubile received more votes nationally than Hichilema.
They did, however, provide substantial grounds for demanding a transparent explanation of how the official totals were produced.
Court closure deepens institutional test
The political dispute became even more sensitive when Mundubile’s allies sought to challenge the presidential result.
Zambia’s Supreme Court premises, which also house the Constitutional Court, were closed on August 24 — the final day available for filing a presidential election petition.
A judiciary memorandum cited security concerns.
The closure prevented physical access to the country’s top courts at a moment when the opposition was attempting to pursue the constitutional mechanism created to resolve presidential election disputes.
Africa Briefing examined the legal implications when Zambia shut its highest courts on the petition deadline.
The closure does not by itself prove that authorities intended to block Mundubile’s challenge. But it raised an unavoidable question about whether an effective alternative filing mechanism was available while the constitutional clock was running.
The Cabinet Office subsequently announced that the seven-day petition period had expired without the Judiciary receiving a presidential petition and confirmed Hichilema’s September 1 inauguration.
Those facts sit awkwardly beside one another: the opposition wanted judicial review, the country’s top courts were physically inaccessible on the final filing day, and the government subsequently said the deadline expired without a petition being received.
For a government that has promoted Zambia as a democratic success story, the handling of that sequence may prove almost as consequential as the numerical argument over the election itself.
Investors choose continuity
Financial markets, however, have so far reacted very differently from election observers.
Zambia’s eurobonds returned about 0.8 percent in dollar terms following the election, outperforming the broader African average of about 0.3 percent, according to JPMorgan bond index data.
Citi upgraded Zambia’s international bonds to overweight shortly after the vote and indicated an interest in local government debt.
The reason is straightforward.
Hichilema spent much of his first term pulling Zambia through an extraordinarily difficult sovereign debt restructuring, rebuilding relations with creditors and restoring a measure of macroeconomic stability after the country’s 2020 default.
Investors broadly see his re-election as offering continuity in fiscal and mining policy.
But that enthusiasm creates a striking contradiction.
Markets can overlook political turbulence when economic policy remains predictable. Over the longer term, however, credible courts, transparent institutions and political stability are themselves part of the investment environment.
Weakening them can eventually become an economic risk.
Copper raises the global stakes
The implications extend beyond Zambia.
Copper dominates the country’s exports and has made Zambia increasingly important as governments and companies compete for the minerals needed for electricity grids, electric vehicles, digital infrastructure and the global energy transition.
China remains deeply embedded in Zambia’s mining economy, while the United States has sought a larger strategic role in the region through infrastructure and critical-minerals initiatives.
The competition gives Lusaka considerable geopolitical value.
It also means major international partners have strong incentives to preserve working relations with Hichilema regardless of domestic political controversy.
That may help explain why economic and diplomatic engagement has remained resilient even as election observers and civil society organisations raise concerns over Zambia’s democratic direction.
Hichilema faces a harder second-term test
Hichilema therefore begins his second term with two contrasting verdicts.
Investors see the president who helped stabilise Zambia after default and offers continuity at a time of rising global demand for copper.
Election monitors see a contest whose likely winner was clear but whose official tabulation contained discrepancies and whose aftermath placed unusual pressure on opposition figures and institutions responsible for legal redress.
The next test is no longer simply electoral.
How prosecutors handle the treason cases, whether the evidence against Mundubile and Zulu is made public, how Zambia addresses observer recommendations and whether electoral authorities provide greater transparency around disputed results will shape the credibility of Hichilema’s new mandate.
His first term was largely defined internationally by economic recovery.
His second may ultimately be judged by whether Zambia can preserve the democratic institutions that made his own rise to power possible.
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