Feature Zambia
Zambia’s general election is expected between September and October. But campaigns are already under way even as the credibility of the Electoral Commission is at stake. Austin Mbewe reports from Lusaka.
Fighting for power T
HIS WILL NO DOUBT BE THE MOST tightly contested election since 1991 when the country reverted to multiparty politics after 17 years of one-party rule. The rul-
ing Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) will have been in power for 20 years this year and is determined to stay on. The election will thus be a plebiscite on the party’s two decades in power. Con- versely, the opposition is strongly con- vinced that this year is their year and it is time for change. The stakes could not be any higher – and both sides know it. But the body organising the elections
has already been embroiled in contro- versy. In January, the chairperson of the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ), Judge Florence Mumba, resigned. It was a long-running saga. In late 2010, Mumba suspended the ECZ CEO, Dan Kalale, on unspecified grounds, and finally sacked him in January. But Kalale fought back, claiming that he had been fired for op- posing the award of an auditing tender worth $200,000, which Mumba had alleg- edly sanctioned without following tender procedures. Workers at the Commission sided with Kalale and staged a boycott de- manding his reinstatement and Mumba’s removal. Ordinarily, the government is harsh with striking workers but in this case, curiously, it gave a sympathetic ear to the workers. Te state-owned media followed suit, which lent weight to the view that the government was fanning the confusion at the ECZ in a bid to get rid of the chairperson, a charge the government denied. Mumba, a former Supreme Court judge and vice president of the Interna- tional Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, initially stood her ground, but she finally left quietly, perhaps sensing a
36 | April 2011 New African
conspiracy against her. President Rupiah Banda said he had “reluctantly accepted” her resignation. Ten the striking work- ers returned to work, but their demand of Kalale’s reinstatement was not met. Although the ECZ has always had cred-
ibility problems, this is not helped by the fact that all this happened in an election year. Under the constitution, the president nominates the chairperson of the ECZ for ratification by parliament. Tus the next chairperson will be tightly scrutinised and will, as always, be in the unenviable position of balancing the many delicate interests arising from the enormity of the task at hand as the Commission tries to prove that it can run a credible election.
MMD Te ruling party will field the incumbent Rupiah Banda. Te party holds its national convention in the first week of April to elect party leaders, but Banda’s supporters have made it clear they will not entertain challengers to the throne and have de- clared him “the sole presidential candi- date”. Tus, the convention will involve a crowning ceremony, not an election. Infrastructure development is the key
theme the party is promoting. State televi- sion is replete with documentaries about schools, hospitals and roads that are un- arguably being built at an increasing pace. Te president is taking every opportunity to commission new works or inaugurate completed projects. In February, he launched a five-year
Sixth National Development Plan that will require over $26bn to implement. Te overall target under “Vision 2030” is to turn the country into a middle-income country. Targets are now common par- lance among government departments.
Te Ministry of Education, for instance, has targeted building 100 new high schools by 2015, and recruiting 200,000 additional teachers. According to the government, “this is the biggest infrastructural develop- ment that Zambia has ever seen”. On the economic front, foreign reserves
at the central bank at the end of last year stood at $2bn, inflation has hovered below 10% – although a recent increase in fuel prices will certainly push it higher – while economic growth for 2010 was at 6.6%. In response to criticism of Banda’s
numerous foreign trips, the government boasts that his travels are yielding fruit as the business deals struck abroad have now translated into actual investment in various sectors of the economy. “For the first time since independence,
we have seen our economy grow year in, year out,” says finance minister Situm- beko Musokotwane. However, one thing the government candidly agrees with its critics is that the economic gains have not filtered to the masses. Te level of poverty, especially in rural areas, remains high and this is the message the opposition is trumpeting. Tey argue that the reported gains on the economic front are a mirage – and enough reason to vote out the MMD. Given the achievements the government
has scored, the opposition’s claim that the MMD “has done nothing” is as excessive as it is unfair. But who expects them to praise the government anyway? However, equally overstated is the
MMD’s strategic claim suggesting that all the successes they are enumerating are the work of the president.
The Chiluba factor Tere is an overwhelming view that Ban- da’s government tolerates, rather than ab-
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