Zambia is bracing for a tight presidential election that will test the health of democracy in the southern African nation and could further delay talks on a vital IMF bailout in the event of a drawn out dispute.
President Edgar Lungu has already sent the army on to the streets ahead of Thursday’s poll after police said two of his supporters were killed in clashes with suspected opposition members. Critics accuse Lungu of being ready to rig and intimidate his way to victory over his main opponent, Hakainde Hichilema. The president has rejected the claims.
Voting is likely to go to the wire amid the backdrop of the country’s worst economic crisis in decades. Many observers consider it to be the most important election since Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s founding president, was removed in a trailblazing multi-party poll 30 years ago.
Zambia, Africa’s second-largest copper producer, defaulted on $3bn of dollar bonds last year, part of more than $12bn of external debts that turned sour after the government spent heavily on infrastructure projects. But negotiations on restructuring have been on hold ahead of the vote.
Zambia needs access to IMF loans as soon as possible after the election as stopgap financing and to catalyse talks with its creditors. The fund said in May that “there was broad agreement on the macroeconomic framework”, signalling a deal was close, but that it was waiting for more details on policy reforms.
The livelihoods of ordinary Zambians have already been marked by the fallout from the debt crisis after the government ran out of money to pay its creditors and the borrowing taps were turned off. Under Lungu, greater state control of the country’s copper mines, the main export earner, has also hit operational problems despite this year’s surge in prices for the metal.
The Zambian kwacha had tumbled against the US dollar over the past two years, before a partial revival. Inflation rose to more than 24 per cent in July. The economy is forecast to grow less than 1 per cent in 2021, according to the IMF, after the pandemic last year plunged Zambia into its first recession since the 1990s.
Lungu, who first won the presidency in a 2015 by-election after the death of the incumbent, has made opening debt-funded airport terminals and power units a cornerstone of his campaign and compared his record with that of Kaunda.
“They’re telling the people, we built this bridge, we built this hospital, so vote for us,” but the hospitals cannot afford nurses or drugs because of the failure to solve the debt crisis, said Ng’andu Magande, a former finance minister. The ruling Patriotic Front “don’t know the purpose of the IMF . . . they don’t know what to do” to negotiate with bondholders, and are “losing friends”, Magande added.
Opposition leader Hichilema, a wealthy businessman, has pledged to prioritise a debt restructuring and to bring foreign investment back to the mines, albeit on terms that he says would favour Zambians. When the ruling party first took power a decade ago, Zambia was one of the continent’s fastest-growing economies with a long record of political stability.
This week’s contest is too close to call and will be “possibly the most unpredictable elections in Zambia yet”, said Zaynab Mohamed, a political analyst for NKC African Economics. “Uncertainty, in turn, raises political tensions.”
Hichilema’s United Party for National Development has had its traditional power base in Zambia’s south and west. Lungu’s strongholds are in the north and east. Lusaka, the capital, and the Copperbelt mining heartland are in play and could dictate the outcome, analysts said.
This year marks Hichilema’s sixth run for high office and his third against Lungu, who defeated him with a majority of less than 15,000, barely more than half of the vote, in 2016. If no candidate gains more than 50 per cent this week, a runoff must be held.
The 2016 poll led to a long stand-off that damaged Zambia’s reputation for political stability after Hichilema alleged vote-rigging and was then jailed for several months in 2017 on treason charges.
In the last five years, civil rights have “deteriorated markedly” with “silence and self-censorship” by media and civil society, Amnesty International said this year. Last year a teenager was arrested for libel after criticising Lungu on Facebook.
Lungu has dismissed accusations that he is preparing to rig this year’s vote in front of international observers. Teams from the African Union and the Commonwealth will be in Zambia for the vote but pandemic restrictions will limit even the number of local observers at polling stations, analysts say.
If Lungu loses, the ruling party has already said that it plans to challenge the result.
In a country with a median age below 18, the economic frustrations of Zambia’s youth are set to play a big role in the vote.
Kaunda had only a hundred or so graduates to help him build Zambia after independence, but now there are hundreds of thousands struggling to make headway as the economy buckles, said Magande, the former finance minister. “The country has no workable plan,” he added. “You just feel so frustrated.”
Source: Economy - ft.com
