Lusaka. A review of the Electoral Commission of Zambia’s (ECZ) own nomination records has turned up two discrepancies ahead of the 13 August general election. One is an undercount in the number of uncontested National Assembly seats. The other is the unexplained disappearance of an entire constituency from the Commission’s official candidate list.

In a public announcement this month, ECZ told stakeholders that, apart from the presidential race, several candidates had been declared unopposed across the mayoral, National Assembly, and local government by-elections. The Commission recorded six unopposed mayoral candidates out of 116 districts, seven unopposed National Assembly candidates out of 226 constituencies, and 176 unopposed candidates for local government out of 1,858 wards.

A check of ECZ’s own Notice of Validly Nominated Candidates for the 2026 Parliamentary Elections, dated 22 July 2026, tells a different story. Eight constituencies carry only one validly nominated candidate each, not seven. All eight went to the United Party for National Development (UPND): Keembe West in Central Province, Zambezi West and Liuwa in the west, and five constituencies clustered in Southern Province, namely Choma South, Dundumwezi, Kalomo South, Kazungula North, and Sinazongwe.

The gap is one seat. But it sits inside a document that candidates, party agents, and voters are meant to treat as authoritative. ECZ has not publicly clarified which figure is correct.

A separate and more serious gap concerns Lumezi North constituency in Eastern Province’s Lumezi District. The constituency does not appear anywhere in the 22 July nomination notice. It is missing from the contested seats, missing from the unopposed seats, and missing without a single explanatory note.

The reason traces back to a death. Three candidates had lodged nominations for Lumezi North in May: Anderson Banda of the ruling UPND, Nebby Manda of the Leadership Movement, and Clement Mwale, standing for the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity (NRPUP) under the Tonse Pamodzi Alliance banner. Mwale had served as Lumezi Council Chairperson between 2016 and 2021. He died in the early hours of 16 July 2026. Tonse Pamodzi Alliance’s Eastern Province chairperson, Maxson Nkhoma, confirmed the death in a statement.

Zambian election law changed significantly in 2025. Under Constitutional Amendment No. 13 of that year, a candidate who resigns or is disqualified by a court after nominations close no longer forces the Commission to cancel that election. The reform was designed to stop late withdrawals from disrupting the vote. Death, however, was kept as a distinct exception. Article 52(6)(c) of the Constitution still requires ECZ to cancel the poll for that constituency and give the candidate’s sponsoring party thirty days to nominate a replacement. ECZ’s own nomination guidance sets out the same rule. ECZ Commissioner McDonald Chipenzi, briefing reporters in Dubai on ballot paper printing, confirmed that this obligation applies to Lumezi North following Mwale’s death.

The legal process is not in question. What is missing is any acknowledgement of it in the document meant to inform the public. Anyone working from the 22 July notice alone, a resident of Lumezi North, a journalist, a party agent, would have no way of knowing why their constituency is not there. It could just as easily read as a printing fault, a missed submission, or an unresolved dispute. The notice does not say otherwise.

Neither issue is, on its own, a major scandal. An undercount of one seat is an administrative slip. A constituency’s absence, once explained, turns out to rest on a lawful and defensible basis. That is precisely the point. These are small, answerable questions, and ECZ has not answered them.

Zambian elections run across 226 constituencies, 116 districts, and 1,858 wards, at enormous cost and under real time pressure. Nobody disputes that ECZ is stretched thin. But a national election depends on public confidence in the paperwork as much as in the polling itself. That confidence is built one clarified query at a time. It is not damaged by any single unanswered question so much as by a habit of treating small questions from the public as beneath a response. A one-line note explaining Lumezi North, or a corrected figure in the unopposed count, would have cost the Commission almost nothing and closed both matters before they became a story.

ECZ should treat no query as too small, no discrepancy as too minor, and no member of the public raising one as a nuisance. That habit of responsiveness, more than any single correction, is what keeps an electoral process credible in the eyes of the people it serves.

This publication has sought clarification from ECZ on both the correct number of uncontested National Assembly seats and the current status of the Lumezi North re-nomination process. This story will be updated with the Commission’s response.

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