Zambia’s president won by a million votes, his rival now faces the gallows charge

By Damian Ugwu

Zambia’s own history makes the present moment sting more, not less. This is the country where Kenneth Kaunda, having ruled for 27 years, accepted defeat in 1991 rather than cling to power through force, a moment still cited as one of the great peaceful transfers of authority on the continent. It is the country whose founding motto, “One Zambia, One Nation,” was built precisely to hold more than seventy ethnic groups together without the fractures that scarred so many post-colonial states.

Hakainde Hichilema’s landslide re-election has been followed by a six-hour blackout in vote counting, a deadly raid on the opposition, weeks of UN-brokered sanctuary, and now a treason charge against the man he defeated. The particular cruelty is that Hichilema knows exactly what that charge feels like; he faced one himself

There is a version of the story coming out of Lusaka that is easy to tell and, on the surface, reassuring. Hakainde Hichilema, Zambia’s president since 2021, has won a second term with a commanding 60% of the vote, seeing off his main rival, Brian Mundubile, by more than a million ballots. No run-off was needed. International observers, including a European Union mission, called the vote itself largely peaceful. By the low bar so often set for African elections, this looks like a good news story: an incumbent submitted himself to voters, and voters returned a clear verdict.

Then you follow what happened to the man who lost.

The day after results were announced, security forces raided a property in Lusaka’s Kabulonga area linked to Mundubile. Officers say they recovered firearms and tactical gear connected to a planned insurrection. Mundubile tells a different story: that his unarmed allies were shot at by security personnel. What is not in dispute is that a former transport minister, Mutotwe Kafwaya, was killed in the raid,  a death Amnesty International has called deeply alarming. Mundubile and his running mate, Makebi Zulu, went into hiding and, days later, sought sanctuary inside a United Nations building in the capital. They stayed there for roughly two weeks while the United Nations, church leaders and diplomats from the EU, the African Union and SADC negotiated the terms of their eventual surrender to police, reportedly on a state pledge of due process. On the final day that Zambian law allowed for an election petition to be filed, the courts were sealed off, closing the one legal route by which Mundubile could have contested the result he says was manipulated.

He surrendered to police at the end of August. Days later, his lawyers announced that he had been formally charged,  alongside seventeen others, including Zulu, a businessman, and the son-in-law of the late former president Edgar Lungu, with treason. In Zambia, treason is not bailable, and it can be heard only by the High Court, meaning Mundubile cannot even apply for release at a lower court while the case grinds forward with no trial date set. He and his co-accused have since been moved, under armed guard, to Mukobeko maximum-security prison. All of this unfolded in the same week that Hichilema was sworn in for his second term at the National Heroes Stadium, under heightened security. The UN’s own human rights chief, Volker Türk, said afterwards that he was concerned about the arrests of Zambian opposition figures, some of whom, he noted, had been detained even before the vote took place.

There is a bitter irony sitting underneath all of this that Zambians will not have missed. Hichilema himself was charged with treason once, in 2017, as an opposition leader, after his motorcade failed to give way to that of then-president Edgar Lungu. The charge was widely seen at the time as a political weapon, and it was eventually dropped as part of a Commonwealth-brokered dialogue between the two men. Hichilema knows, in other words, exactly what it is to have the machinery of a capital charge deployed against you for being the wrong side’s leader. That his own government has now revived the identical instrument against the man he just beat by a million votes is not a detail; it is close to the whole story.

None of this proves that Hichilema stole an election he was, by every account, always likely to win comfortably. It suggests something else, and arguably something more corrosive for African democracy: a governing party that no longer needs to steal a vote, because it can neutralise the loser afterwards through means that never quite have to be called political. A raid becomes a counter-insurgency operation. A refusal to grant bail becomes a point of criminal procedure. A sealed courthouse becomes a security precaution. Each step arrives with its own bureaucratic justification; together they add up to an opposition leader facing the gallows rather than a seat in parliament.

Zambia’s own history makes the present moment sting more, not less. This is the country where Kenneth Kaunda, having ruled for 27 years, accepted defeat in 1991 rather than cling to power through force, a moment still cited as one of the great peaceful transfers of authority on the continent. It is the country whose founding motto, “One Zambia, One Nation,” was built precisely to hold more than seventy ethnic groups together without the fractures that scarred so many post-colonial states. It is the country where Levy Mwanawasa stripped former leaders of immunity in the name of clean governance, and where Michael Sata’s 2011 victory showed that Zambian voters could use the ballot box, not the barracks, to reset their government’s priorities. Zambia has supplied some of the continent’s best evidence that democracy can work here, which is exactly why an opposition candidate now sitting in Mukobeko prison on an unbailable capital charge deserves more attention than the tidy 60% headline invites.

Zambia is not an isolated case; it is a data point in a wider pattern. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the tools of democratic backsliding have grown more sophisticated and less crude than the coups and stuffed ballot boxes of an earlier era. Constitutions get amended to clear the field of rivals. Court calendars mysteriously clog at the exact moment an appeal is due. Losing candidates find themselves facing capital charges rather than a seat in the legislature. Each individual step is defensible in isolation, wrapped in the language of security or procedure; taken together, they hollow out the substance of an election while leaving its form intact. This is harder to condemn than a junta seizing a state broadcaster, and that is precisely the point, it is designed to be hard to condemn.

The response from the continent’s institutions and from Western governments has, so far, been the diplomatic equivalent of the topline vote share: congratulations issued, “largely peaceful” repeated, quiet diplomacy behind a UN building’s walls substituted for public pressure once the cameras moved on to the inauguration. That imbalance matters. Every time a government facing this level of documented irregularity is allowed to move straight from a swearing-in ceremony to a treason trial against the man it defeated, without serious consequence, it teaches the next incumbent facing re-election exactly which levers are safe to pull.

A country that once taught the region how to lose an election gracefully should not now become a case study in how to make sure the loser never gets to challenge you again, let alone one where the president doing it once stood exactly where his rival now stands.

Damian Ugwu can be reached on damianugwu2@gmail.com