Democratic Progressive Party president Antonio Mwanza has demanded that the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) publish a detailed report on why it suspended the counting and announcement of results during the general election. He said the credibility of the process will stay in question until the commission accounts for what happened in those missing hours.

Mr Mwanza said he had no doubt that President Hakainde Hichilema won the election and would always have crossed the 50 per cent plus one threshold. His quarrel, he said, was not with the winner but with the way the contest was run, and with an electoral body he believes cannot act independently because of how it is set up.

“The outcome of the election was never in doubt,” he said. “But the election itself raised very critical issues that we must address going forward.”

The first of those issues was the suspension of counting on what the commission described as security grounds. He said the ECZ had never told the public how widespread those concerns were, nor what took place between the moment counting stopped and the moment it resumed.

“The Electoral Commission of Zambia did not give us a detailed account of what happened between this period,” Mr Mwanza said.

He then turned to Mandevu constituency, where no election was held after the commission said ballot papers and other electoral materials had been stolen. Weeks after the polls, he said, the public still did not know whether anyone had been apprehended for the theft.

He also raised the death of a Socialist Party election agent. He said neither the commission nor the Zambia Police had explained what happened to him, and warned that the same failures would return at the next national vote unless all three matters were answered.

“If we don’t get to the bottom of this and to the extent of how widespread it was and to what extent it affected the outcome of the elections, we will have a repeat of this in 2031,” he said.

Mr Mwanza was careful to separate the question of who won from the question of how the result was produced. He pointed to the Christian Churches Monitoring Group (CCMG), whose members include the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection, the Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Council of Churches in Zambia and the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia. He said he respected its finding that the President won.

“There’s no doubt about him winning the election,” he said. “We’re talking about the credibility of the process.”

For the opposition leader, the root of the problem lies in how commissioners are appointed. ECZ commissioners are appointed by the President, who is also a candidate in the same election the commission is meant to referee, and he said that placed the body in an impossible position.

“It is extremely difficult for the Electoral Commission of Zambia to act in an independent, impartial manner when they are appointed by a President who also happens to be part of the election process,” he said.

His party is proposing that commissioners be selected by an independent and impartial body through an accountable and transparent process, with their appointments ratified by Parliament. Only then, he said, would the commission have the confidence to enforce the rules against everyone, including the governing party.

He said the conflict showed most plainly in the commission’s failure to enforce the Electoral Code of Conduct on media coverage. The code requires public media to give equal, fair and balanced coverage to all contestants. Yet in his view every state outlet, from ZNBC to ZANIS, Times of Zambia and Zambia Daily Mail, leaned towards the ruling party.

“It is not the first time,” Mr Mwanza said. “It has always been like this from time immemorial. And this must change.”

He blamed the editorial policies of publicly owned media houses, which he said left their journalists no room to give the opposition fair and balanced airtime or space.

The second structural failure, he said, was the campaign timetable. Mr Mwanza said he accepted its purpose, which is to keep rival presidential candidates apart and prevent clashes. The problem was that the sitting President, who is also a candidate, is exempt from it.

“The President is given a free will to campaign and to be anywhere he wants,” he said. “That disadvantages the other candidates who don’t have that free will.”

He said opposition candidates were at times turned away from areas because their timetables placed them elsewhere. In a campaign of about 90 days, where every hour counts, he described enforcement of the electoral code as “extremely selective”.

“He cannot be a candidate but is given preferential treatment by virtue of him being the President,” he said. “The election must be free, must be fair, and everybody must be on an equal footing.”

Mr Mwanza made three proposals. First, the ECZ must publish its report on the suspended count and the scale of the threats it cited. Second, commissioners must be appointed by an independent body and confirmed by Parliament. Third, the timetable must bind every presidential candidate, including the incumbent, and public media must be compelled to give all contestants fair coverage.

He added that the commission was also under-resourced, lacking the money and staff to carry out voter education across the country. Reform of its governing law, he said, must come with the funding to match.

The Democratic Progressive Party did not field candidates in the general election. Mr Mwanza said registering the party took more than a year, leaving it too little time, manpower and money to mount a credible challenge against the United Party for National Development (UPND).

The party has instead begun preparing for 2031, and Mr Mwanza said electoral reform would be central to that effort. His demand for a full report now sits with a commission that has yet to publicly account for the suspended count, the stolen Mandevu materials or the death of the Socialist Party agent.

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