Zambia : Analysis: What The Flood Of Petitions Really Tells Us About ECZ

Political analyst Dr Lawrence Mwelwa has urged the ruling United Party for National Development to abandon its widespread election petitions, warning that challenging opposition wins after declaring the presidential poll free and fair smacks of selective justice. He made the remarks in an interview just as the country marks President Hichilema’s second-term inauguration, with the volume of contested results now spanning provinces well beyond the handful of cases that made early headlines. This situation has significant implications for governance and democracy in Zambia.

Mwelwa argued that if UPND has consistently maintained the presidential election was free, fair and credible, consistency demands the party also respect the verdict of the electorate in parliamentary, mayoral and council elections where it lost. He noted the closure of the Constitutional Court Registry during the presidential petition window, taken over by soldiers, denied the opposition a chance to test the presidential result in court, a decision he said continues to shape public perception of the process and can affect the political landscape in Zambia.

Citing the biblical story of Prophet Nathan and King David, Mwelwa said leadership is measured by fairness and restraint, particularly where a party already enjoys an overwhelming electoral mandate. He warned that justice should never appear selective, especially from a government with little to fear from a strong opposition, adding that a confident administration protects political plurality as an investment in Zambia’s democratic future rather than treating it as a concession. The integrity of Zambia’s political system relies on such principles.

The petitions Mwelwa is referring to extend well beyond the seven cases already before the Lusaka High Court. In Mwandi, UPND’s Sibeso Sefulo lost to independent candidate Iris Kaingu by fewer than 500 votes and has petitioned the result, alleging Kaingu’s agents engaged in vote-buying and interfered with the electoral process. Sefulo has also accused the Electoral Commission of Zambia of failing to properly supervise how results were counted and announced, and is seeking either a full re-run of the election or a recount.

In Ndola Central, former minister Frank Tayali lost by just 819 votes to Resolute Party’s Emmanuel Mulenga and has filed his own petition contesting the result. On the Copperbelt, UPND’s Joseph Kazhila has challenged the outcome in Chingola Central, alleging NRPUP supporters were seen handing out food and money to voters, with one incident reportedly sparking a physical altercation at a polling station. In Kabushi, UPND’s Emeldah Mpumpuni has gone further, alleging that agents for NRPUP’s Tillas Sichinga concealed cash inside pens to distribute to voters undetected.

Further petitions have been lodged in Mwense, Nchanga, Nkana, Kalabo South, Bangweulu, Siavonga and Zambezi Central, while even Lusaka Mayor Simon Mwewa’s own election is now being challenged. Taken together with the Kabuswe, Masebo and other cases already before the courts, the total number of parliamentary and local government petitions filed since polling day now runs into the dozens, a scale of litigation that legal observers say will keep Zambia’s High Court registries occupied for months.

It is worth pausing on what this volume actually signals. A handful of petitions after any election is normal; disputed margins happen everywhere. But when the ruling party itself, the very party that spent weeks insisting the presidential contest was free, fair and beyond reproach, turns around and files petitions against results it lost at parliamentary, mayoral and council level, a fair-minded observer has to ask what changed between the presidential count and everything below it. Either the same electoral machinery was competent everywhere and UPND’s petitions are opportunistic, or something in how ECZ ran this election left enough doubt that even the winning party does not fully trust its own declared outcomes down the ballot.

That question becomes sharper when set against what did not happen. No presidential petition was permitted to be filed and tested in court, in part because the Constitutional Court Registry was closed and taken over by soldiers during the very window the law sets aside for that challenge. If the process was as clean as officials maintain, there was no institutional reason to fear a court testing it. A commission confident in its own numbers does not need the petition window shut by force; it lets the numbers speak in front of a judge. The optics of that closure, whatever the stated justification, invite exactly the scrutiny ECZ has since tried to avoid.

Cases like Mandevu and the Lusaka mayoral contest deserve particular attention in this light. These are races where control of a capital city’s local administration, and by extension patronage, contracts and grassroots political machinery, is at stake in a way that a single rural parliamentary seat is not. If there is anywhere an “underhand method,” as some describe it, would be worth deploying to tilt a result, it is precisely in high-value urban contests like these rather than in far-flung constituencies with little national leverage. That is speculation, not proof, and it should be treated as such. But it is not an unreasonable question for citizens to ask when the party that won comfortably at the top of the ballot is simultaneously contesting results it lost near the bottom.

None of this proves fraud. Zambia’s courts, not newspaper columns, are the proper venue to establish whether any of these petitions have merit, and due process must be allowed to run its course for every single one, Kabuswe’s, Sefulo’s, Tayali’s, and the rest. But an election that produces this scale of litigation, this many allegations of vote-buying and procedural failure, and a shuttered court registry during the one window meant for testing the presidential result itself, cannot honestly be described as Zambia’s smoothest electoral outing. If anything, it may be the most contested since the return of multiparty democracy.

The opposition also has a responsibility in Mwelwa’s assessment. He said it must reject violence, intolerance and reckless language while remaining steadfast in defending democracy and holding government accountable within the law, a balance he argued neither side has fully managed since the election. But healing, he stressed, cannot be achieved through speeches alone, and requires dialogue between political leaders, civil society, the Church and other stakeholders in spaces where difficult issues can be discussed without fear.

Should a party that declares an election free and fair be bound to accept every result on that ballot, even the ones it loses, and should ECZ be compelled to explain why the presidential result alone was shielded from the same courtroom scrutiny it now allows everywhere else?

This is an analysis piece. Views expressed are the author’s own.

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