Unpacking the dangers of proposed amendments to Zambia's Constitution, Part 1

Mail & Guardian

6 days ago

Zambia's President Hakainde Hichilema seeks to control the National Assembly by adding 92 new seats and creating 55 new constituencies in areas that have historically voted for him
A national constitution is a social contract that sets out the rules by which the people agree to govern themselves. This explains why the making of a constitution or any amendment to it must always come from the people, bottom up. Constitution-making or amendment has been a subject of fierce contestation between the people and the officials entrusted to manage public affairs — in this case, Zambia's presidency.
Those in the executive arm of government often want to change, abuse or simply ignore the rules in the constitution so that they can pursue their narrow interests while the people always insist that the constitution reflects their aspirations and that the officials should respect it and promote the public good or common interests.
This battle for greater control over the constitution is at the heart of the latest attempt by President Hakainde Hichilema to change Zambia's Constitution, a year before the country goes to the polls and less than 10 years after it was passed.
On 23 May 2025, the government published the Constitution of Zambia (Amendment)
The first is timing. Some argued that it is too early to change a Constitution that was only repealed and re-enacted in January 2016 with the full support of Hichilema's MPs. Others suggested that the exercise, coming so close to the 13 August 2026 general election, risks being clouded by partisan considerations and should be deferred to 2027.
The second reason is that changing the Constitution now is premature. Many of its provisions are yet to be tested, an essential way of identifying any possible shortcomings that might require attention. Those that have been tested so far have acquitted themselves well.
But some of the institutions and statutes that are supposed to be created to support the Constitution are yet to be actualised. An example is the Political Parties Bill which, according to Article 60 (4) of the Constitution, should provide for: the establishment and management of a Political Parties' Fund to provide financial support to political parties with seats in the National Assembly; the accounts of political parties which are funded under the Political Parties' Fund and the submission of audited accounts by political parties;
the sources of funds for political parties; and the maximum amount of money to be used for campaigns during elections.
The third criticism rests on priorities: that constitutional reform, if at all it is necessary, is not an urgent concern of most Zambians who are grappling with a cost-of-living crisis, 17-hour daily power cuts, and corruption in government that has seen the United States cut aid to Zambia's health sector.
The final criticism is about lack of wider public participation. Unlike previous efforts, the latest effort at rewriting the constitution is primarily driven by the executive. None of the latest proposals were agreed upon through broad consensus. As a result, they reflect the aspirations not of citizens but of those in power, primarily the president and governing party.
In what has become his trademark response to public concerns, Hichilema simply ignored these combined objections to his plans, and the result is Bill 7.
If enacted into law, the proposed changes would have dreadful consequences because they encourage corruption and undermine the principles, values and legitimacy of the democratic system. Eight major themes run through the Bill. These include securing the president's desire to control parliament; the exclusion of rival candidates through court-engineered disqualification of duly nominated candidates; giving political parties greater control over elected officials by abolishing by-elections; and political cadrisation of the civil service from the top by lowering the constitutional qualifications for the role of secretary to the cabinet.
Other themes are the extension of the presidential term of office by removing references to a five-year fixed term of parliament and changing the meaning of a term; and the elimination of the risk of disqualification from seeking elective public office by removing corruption or malpractice from the Constitution as a sufficient ground on which anyone may petition a court to invalidate the completed nomination of a candidate. Corrupt incumbent presidents are vulnerable targets here.
The remaining themes are facilitating the use of public resources for political campaigns by moving the date of the dissolution of parliament from the current three months to a day before the general election while requiring MPs to do no official work during the final three months; and increasing centralisation of government operations by reversing the 2016 amendment that barred MPs from being councillors, a move that weakened their powers over local authorities and undermined their ability to profit through increased business opportunities.
Over the course of this and the next weeks, I will analyse these themes, showing how the Bill's main proposals are all linked to Hichilema's partisan interests. Today, let us start with the first one.
Theme 1. Securing control of parliament
The first benefit that Hichilema seeks to achieve through Bill 7 is control of the National Assembly after the next general election or potentially even before. After using the executive-friendly constitutional court to block his main rival, former president Edgar Lungu, from contesting the 2026 election, Hichilema is relatively confident of winning.
But he is greatly concerned that he could win the presidential election but lose control of parliament, where rigging is harder, even with his supporters in charge of the country's electoral management body. To avoid this, the president has proposed to alter the composition of the National Assembly by adding 92 new offices of MPs. After spending a decade and half in opposition politics, Hichilema won the 2021 election with a clear mandate of 59%, defeating then incumbent president Lungu, who polled 39% of the total votes cast.
But Hichilema's party secured only 82 out of the available 156 seats in parliament. Even when the eight nominations the Constitution allows the president to appoint to parliament were added, the ruling United Party for National Development (UPND) was still about 20 seats short of the two-thirds majority (111) needed to make changes to the Constitution. The former ruling party, the Patriotic Front (PF), won 60 seats while independent candidates secured a record 13 seats.
To build the majority that his party was denied at the ballot, Hichilema has spent much of the last three and a half years stealing seats from the main opposition PF and independent MPs. To do this, he has abused state institutions such as the police and the judiciary, whose susceptibility to executive influence has enabled a record seven lawmakers to lose their parliamentary seats under dubious circumstances.
Despite these manoeuvres, Hichilema is yet to achieve a clear parliamentary majority, which he now hopes to secure through Bill 7 with three proposals. The first is to create 55 new constituencies by dividing the existing ones into two or three constituencies based on a delimitation report that has been generated by his supporters in the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ).
The report is yet to be made public, but sources in the electoral body disclosed that most of the constituencies that are earmarked for subdivision are in areas that have historically voted for Hichilema. These include Itezhi-tezhi and Namwala in Southern Province, Keembe in Central Province, Chongwe in Lusaka, Mufumbwe, Mwinilunga and Kasempa in Northwestern Province, and Senanga and Mulobezi in Western Province.
Through gerrymandering, the president is hoping that his party will win most of these new seats, facilitating an even greater majority for the UPND and making it easier for it to make further changes to the constitution in the future.
The second proposal is the introduction of proportional representation that would see the creation of 35 new parliamentary seats that are reserved for women (20 seats), youths (12) and persons with disabilities (3). No explanations have been offered on how these numbers were arrived at. Although the Bill says further mechanisms of how this proposal would work out will be spelt out in subsidiary legislation, it states that these seats will be distributed by the electoral body to political parties 'in proportion to the total number of votes obtained by a political party on the proportional representation ballot'. Here, Hichilema is again confident that his party would receive the larger percentage of the votes on proportional representation for political parties and increase its overall majority in parliament.
The third proposal is the increase in the number of nominations to parliament that the Constitution allows the president to make. This number is eight and has been since 1991. Hichilema is proposing to add two nominations to make it 10.
Altogether, he is seeking, through Bill 7, to increase the total number of MPs from the current 164 to 256 in the hope that most of the new 92 seats would belong to his party, giving the president the elusive two-thirds majority that he has long sought and greater control over parliament. Should these proposals pass, they will enable Hichilema to make further changes to the Constitution after conducting either the by-elections that could be created by the passage of Bill 7 or the next general election.
Hichilema's administration has tendered two reasons for the first two proposals. According to Justice Minister Princess Kasune Zulu, the decision to redraw constituency boundaries is meant to make them smaller, because some MPs have blamed their failure to deliver services and the high turnover at elections on the large size of their constituencies. This reason is misplaced because the constitutional role of MPs in Zambia is to make laws, not to deliver services — a responsibility of the local authorities.
The official justification for the proposed proportional representation is to guarantee seats for women, youths, and persons with disabilities in the National Assembly. This too is unpersuasive, because Article 259 of the Constitution already provides for the appointment of members of these groups to the National Assembly and other public bodies to promote inclusion and diversity.
It states that 'Where a person is empowered to make a nomination or an appointment to a public office, that person shall ensure: that fifty percent of each gender is nominated or appointed from the total available positions, unless it is not practicable to do so; and equitable representation of the youth and persons with disabilities, where these qualify for nomination or appointment.'
If women, youths, and persons with disabilities are currently underrepresented in the National Assembly and other public offices, the problem is not the Constitution, but the lack of respect for it by Hichilema and his officials who are empowered to make appointments.
For instance, even though the Constitution calls for equal gender representation in public offices, only four of Hichilema's 24 cabinet ministers are women, a contravention of the Constitution. To address electoral imbalances, the Constitution allows the president to nominate eight people to parliament (all of whom could have been females and appointed to the cabinet), but Hichilema filled all the slots with older men except one, the 76-year-old Mutinta Mazoka. Only one of Hichilema's 10 provincial ministers is female, another violation of the Constitution.
In the understanding of the UPND, proportional representation is meant to increase the participation of underrepresented minority groups in decision-making positions. Given that women constitute the majority demographic in Zambia, the proposal to reserve 20 out of the 256 seats for them is an anomaly and an attempt to water down the existing constitutional provisions on gender parity.
Hichilema has made no appointments of either youth (between the ages of 18 and 35) or persons with disabilities to the cabinet, the National Assembly and provincial ministerial leadership — a clear violation of the Constitution.
Taken together, this concerning record shows that Hichilema is suffering from a disability of a mental kind: the incapacity to follow the Constitution. If the president cannot do what the Constitution currently demands of him, why should anyone believe that the addition of 20 women, 12 youths and three people with disabilities — who will come from different political parties — is the cure to his demonstrated lack of respect for the Constitution?
It is also worth noting that the low number of women, youths and people with disabilities in parliament has little to do with the Constitution; it is a consequence of a long-standing patriarchal culture in the main political parties that does not favour the adoption of members of these groups during nominations for elective public office.
For instance, both the UPND and the PF adopted the lowest number of female and youth parliamentary candidates in the 2021 general election. As detailed in nearly all the reports of different election observation missions, smaller opposition parties such as the Socialist Party and the Democratic Party had more women and youths than male parliamentary candidates in 2021.
Hichilema and the UPND's lack of respect for women, youths, and persons with disabilities is further illustrated by the fact that they have not adopted a single representative of these groups in any of the five parliamentary by-elections that have been held since the 2021 election. Only yesterday, the ruling party announced that it has adopted an older, non-disabled, male person as its candidate for the forthcoming Lumezi parliamentary by-election in Eastern Province. How does Hichilema hope to fix a problem on a national scale that he has failed to address in his own party?
Based on current evidence, the problem of low representation of women is clearly not the law; it is entrenched patriarchy, which, for Hichilema, regularly finds public expression in his language and behaviour.
Because the Constitution already provides for gender parity in public appointments and for the inclusion of marginalised groups such as persons with disabilities, what is needed is to enact subsidiary legislation that would give expression to these constitutional principles such as compelling political parties to adopt more women, youths and people with disabilities during elections. A more effective response is for UPND to take to parliament the long-awaited Political Parties Bill that can require all political parties contesting in a general election to ensure that at least 50% of their adopted candidates for all elective public positions are women, youths and people with disabilities.
There is clearly no need to change the Constitution for the purpose of providing what is already provided for in the current law. Proportional representation is a ruse meant to hoodwink women, youths, and persons with disabilities into supporting Bill 7 based on the false premise that it advances their interests when, in fact, it does not.
Moreover, in the run-up to the 2021 election, Hichilema's predecessor, Lungu, took to parliament a constitutional amendment Bill, infamously known as Bill 10, which sought to increase the number of parliamentary constituencies through delimitation, introduce proportional representation for women, youths and people with disabilities, and to raise the number of nominations to parliament that the president is allowed to make. Ironically, Lungu used the same justifications that Hichilema and his officials are employing today in support of Bill 7.
At the time, Hichilema commendably instructed his MPs to reject Bill 10 on the ground that the proposals represented a partisan rather than national exercise and were intended to help Lungu achieve a majority in parliament that the now former president was denied at the ballot. What has changed today? Why are the same proposals bad when presented by Lungu, but good when presented by Hichilema and the UPND?
Is there any principle or belief that Hichilema held prior to the 2021 election — and which earned him the support of many — that he has since not abandoned? What exactly does Hichilema stand for? Is it even worth exposing his hypocrisy on other key issues since he appears to enjoy immunity from shame? Put differently, does Hichilema ever feel guilt, shame or embarrassment for all the lies and horrible things he says and does?
For even his most ardent supporters must concede that he is behaving disgracefully in power. Zambia has a president who constantly tells lies and easily changes his position on many subjects whenever it is politically expedient but does not seem bothered by how this conduct erodes public trust in his leadership. If Hichilema can feel shame, now would be a good time to start showing it in his actions, speech, and behaviour. Failure to do this, citizens with an active conscience may have to assume the burden of feeling embarrassed on his behalf, in addition to enduring the many hardships that his administration has unleashed on them. If God gave me an opportunity to ask Him only one question, it would be this:
Mwelesa, bushe Hichilema mwamufumishe kwisa?
(Dear God, where did you get Hichilema from?)
Sishuwa Sishuwa is a senior lecturer in the department of history at Stellenbosch University.