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Mail & Guardian
27-05-2025
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Unpacking the dangers of proposed amendments to Zambia's Constitution, Part 1
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 Some argued that it is too early to change a Constitution that was only repealed and re-enacted in January 2016 with the full support of Hichilema's MPs.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.
Zawya
19-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
A High-level Delegation from Xinjiang Visited Zambia
A high-level delegation from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China visited Zambia from 14 to 17 May, headed by Mr. Erkin Tuniyaz, Governor of the People's Government of the Autonomous Region. On 15 May, the delegation paid a courtesy call on H.E. Hakainde Hichilema, President of the Republic of Zambia, at the State House. Mr. Erkin Tuniyaz conveyed the warm greetings from Ma Xingrui, Secretary of the Xinjiang Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China, to President Hichilema and spoke highly of the bilateral friendship. He stressed that this visit was aimed at implementing the outcomes of FOCAC Beijing Summit and the consensus reached by the two Heads of State and expressed readiness to deepen cooperation in multiple sectors, including agriculture, energy, mining, tourism, and transport and logistics. President Hichilema expressed his gratitude for the cordial hospitality of the Autonomous Region during his visit last September and conveyed his warm greetings to his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping. He further commended China's decision to open up its market, viewing it as a significant opportunity for African countries, including Zambia, to enhance their exports to China without any restrictions. He highlighted his appreciation for the Zambia-China relations and reaffirmed Zambia's commitment to the one-China principle and bilateral cooperation amid shifting global geopolitical dynamics. During the visit, the delegation also met with Hon. Frank Tayali, Minister of Transport and Logistics, and Hon. Makozo Chikote, Minister of Energy, signed the Letter of Intent on the Establishment of Friendly Relationship with Eastern Province of Zambia, held Zambia-China (Xinjiang) Business Cooperation and Exchange Conference and visited a number of Chinese companies operating in Zambia. H.E. Han Jing, Chinese Ambassador to Zambia, was present at these events.
Zawya
14-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
President Hakainde Hichilema to open the 4th Canada-Africa Business Conference in Zambia sponsored by Hatch
We are delighted to announce - thanks to the headline sponsorship of Hatch - that the 4th Canada-Africa Business Conference will take place in Lusaka from September 29-30, 2025. President Hakainde Hichilema is set to open the two-day program on September 29 th at the InterContinental Lusaka ( during the Official Opening Ceremony, underscoring the country's commitment to Canadian and international trade and investment and drawing attention to Zambia and African markets as a whole, through Zambia's role as both a business destination and gateway market to the continent for Canada's dynamic private sector. The conference will include keynote addresses, interactive panels and a closing reception, followed by a Day 2 program for members of the Chamber to deepen relationships and explore collaboration in trade and investment. The most recent Canada-Africa Business Conference took place in Zimbabwe this past October and once again convened leading decision-makers to accelerate economic ties. Following the conference program on Day 1, welcoming hundreds at the Cresta Harare, members of the Canada-Africa Chamber of Business joined a dynamic site visit program on Day 2, focused on mining and energy at Zimplats in the country's Mashonaland West Province - showcasing Hatch's proudly Canadian partnership with one of Zimbabwe's leading corporations. 'Zambia is well known for their rich mineral resources and some of the world's highest-grade deposits. There are many opportunities for global partnerships and collaborative investments to help grow Zambia's economy and improve the quality of life for residents' said Joe Lombard, Vice Chairman at Hatch. 'We are committed to helping create positive change in the region.' According ( to the High Commission of the Republic of Zambia in Ottawa, led by H.E. Kenneth Shepande, the 'Zambian government has successfully privatized most of the previously state-owned enterprises, thus encouraging an entrepreneurial culture'. 'We are delighted to host the next Canada-Africa Business Conference in Zambia', said Garreth Bloor, President of The Canada-Africa Chamber of Business. 'Canada and Zambia stand to accelerate commercial ties through private sector partnerships and investment, building on the momentum already at play in this exciting market – a great country in which we are honoured to hold our upcoming two-day program' Read More ( Distributed by APO Group on behalf of The Canada-Africa Chamber of Business.
Reuters
09-05-2025
- Health
- Reuters
US to cut health aid to Zambia over 'systemic theft'
LUSAKA, May 9 (Reuters) - The United States said it would cut $50 million in annual aid to Zambia's health sector because the government had failed to stop "systemic theft" of donated medicines and medical supplies. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is finalising a broader review of its foreign aid, but the cut for Zambia is "wholly separate from that process," U.S. ambassador to Zambia Michael Gonzales said in a statement. "I am disappointed to share publicly today that since 2021 we have uncovered systemic theft of life-saving medicines and other products that were intended for free for the Zambian public," Gonzales said, adding medicines stolen included antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV. Zambia's health ministry responded in a statement acknowledging the U.S. ambassador's concerns and said recurrent theft of medicines was a "persistent challenge" dating back to before 2021. After he was alerted to the issue Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema commissioned an independent forensic audit of the entire medicines supply chain, the ministry said. A number of officials found to have been involved had been removed from office or suspended, while others were arrested and are set to appear in court. "We want to assure the public that Zambia currently maintains sufficient stocks of essential medicines, including antiretroviral, antimalarial, and other critical drugs, with no immediate risk of shortages," Zambia's health ministry said. Gonzales said he had recommended to Washington that the U.S. continue to procure and deliver lifesaving medicines and medical supplies to Zambia until January 2026 to provide time for the government to develop a transition plan. After January, the U.S. will still offer technical and logistics assistance to support humanitarian activities and prevent drug resistance and disease transmission, he said.
Zawya
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Zawya
Statement on letter of urgent appeal on environmental contamination in Kabwe, Zambia
On 23 April 2025, the Chairperson of the Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations (WGEI) of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (African Commission), transmitted a Letter of Urgent Appeal to His Excellency, Mr. Hakainde Hichilema, President of the Republic of Zambia. The appeal expressed serious concern over the hazardous lead contamination in Kabwe, Central Province, and its grave impact on the health and rights of local communities, including children. The Working Group highlighted alarming findings regarding the elevated blood lead levels among children and the environmental degradation caused by continued mining waste activities. The Chairperson urged the Government of the Republic of Zambia to take immediate measures including suspending hazardous operations, conducting an independent environmental and public health assessment, implementing clean-up and remediation efforts, and establishing medical and livelihood support systems for affected populations. The African Commission reaffirmed its commitment to collaborating with the Government of Zambia to promote environmental justice, safeguard human rights, and advance the objectives of Africa's Agenda 2063. Honourable Commissioner Solomon Ayele Dersso Chairperson, Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations (WGEI) African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR).
