Zambia elections haunted by ghost of incumbent president’s arch-rival
By Nikhil Raghavan ·
The mechanics of modern democracy, when examined closely, often reveal that the most volatile variables aren't policy disagreements but unresolved historical grievances.
When the State’s Narrative Becomes an Ancestral Feud
The mechanics of modern democracy, when examined closely, often reveal that the most volatile variables aren't policy disagreements but unresolved historical grievances. In Zambia, this is playing out in real time: a general election pitting incumbent Hakainde Hichilema against a challenger backed by the family of his arch-rival, Edgar Lungu. The political drama has been so thoroughly saturated with personal history—the court battles over Lungu’s burial reported by The Guardian, and the allegations of raiding opposition offices cited by Al Jazeera—that it threatens to eclipse any discussion of governance. This isn't a contest about infrastructure or energy policy; it is fundamentally an attempt to settle scores that should have been adjudicated decades ago, turning the ballot box into a venue for old-school vengeance.
The Macro Indicators Fail the Micro Reality Test
The rhetoric focuses on who was denied free speech and which private stations were shut down (a point raised by the ruling party spokesperson). But state legitimacy is not built on the absence of censorship; it is built on equitable resource distribution. Al Jazeera notes that more than 70 percent of Zambia’s 22 million people live on less than $3 a day. While macro-indicators might show inflation falling to 6.8 percent, the World Bank data reveals prices almost doubled between 2021 and 2025. This chasm—the gap between reported economic improvement and acute lived scarcity—is where political capital erodes. The question posed by Mputa Ngalande is not a rhetorical flourish; it’s an accounting query: if the state claims success, why does the ground reality remain one of profound difficulty accessing three meals a day?
Unresolved Divisions Always Precede State Fragmentation
The current emotional volatility in Zambia—the insistence on settling old scores via electioneering—is structurally predictable. It mirrors the mechanism seen during the Dissolution of Yugoslavia. When a central authority’s legitimacy falters or key figures are removed, latent ethno-national identities and historical grievances do not simply vanish; they resurface with destructive force, leading to fragmentation. The political energy is not driving towards consensus; it is merely channeling decades of unresolved tension into the ballot box.
The system cannot sustain itself on personal vendettas or the memory of who ran a private station. It requires technical capacity and institutional trust, neither of which are present. The state must move beyond managing political feuds and instead focus its entire apparatus on building verifiable, distributed economic resilience. Until the mechanisms for equitable resource distribution are demonstrably functional—and not merely promised in a press release—Zambia remains structurally unstable, perpetually haunted by the ghosts of its own unresolved history.