Edgar Lungu wrote;
MwaUKA Fellow Zambians, Friends and Compatriots,
This morning, l want to share with you and respond to Dr. Sishuwa Sishuwa’s quite long enough article dubbed: “How President Hakainde Hichilema is using lawfare to subvert democracy in Zambia” where he among other things suggests that “Zambia experienced democratic backslide between 2011 and 2021 under the PF with the deliberate use of legal mechanisms to weaken opposition parties”.
In his article, Sishuwa concludes that “Hichilema has orchestrated an assault on human rights and democracy to the extent that he must be treated like an “Edgar Lungu with a better PR”.
Honestly, I find this observation and conclusion both unfair and quite inaccurate as he (the author) seeks to compare our moderate rule then to HH’s “unapologetic lawfare” regime of today.
Reading this article as published in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspapers, I am shocked that he likens me to the current president-HH and I take great exception to this. Going forward I will advise bo Sishuwa to try by all means necessary to resist the temptation of having to compare apples with oranges as the two cannot be the same. Yes, I admit I had faults, but certainly not of this magnitude.
While I don’t dispute the existence of “Lawfare” in many jurisdictions, I don’t think it is suitable and correct comparison to mirror my political leadership as Republican President then to the current full scale authoritarian regime we have now in the so called UPND alliance.
Anyway, for objective understanding of my concerns, agreements and disagreements with the author, allow me to share with you fellow citizens the full article as penned down by bo Sishuwa Sishuwa as shown below:
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HOW PRESIDENT HAKAINDE HICHILEMA IS USING LAWFARE TO SUBVERT DEMOCRACY IN ZAMBIA
By Sishuwa Sishuwa
When Zambia experienced democratic backsliding between 2011 and 2021, the deliberate use of legal mechanisms to weaken opposition parties played a central role. Lawfare has been a constant theme of Zambian politics in the era of multiparty democracy.
This use of the law by the executive to achieve partisan goals has historically been aided by structural conditions such as a poorly institutionalised party system and recurrent disregard for the Constitution and other laws by state actors. The defeat of Edgar Lungu and his Patriotic Front (PF) in the August 2021 election raised prospects for a stronger legal foundation that would address the conditions that enabled the previous government to engage in legal autocracy.
Nearly three years after the election of President Hakainde Hichilema and his United Party for National Development (UPND), the situation has hardly changed. Like his predecessors, Hichilema, faced with the prospects of defeat in August 2026 owing to a faltering economy and a country deeply divided on ethnic-regional lines by his actions, has employed lawfare to weaken his political opponents and secure re-election.
The president has devised specific strategies for this latest wave of legal autocratisation using five key institutions: the judiciary, police, parliament, electoral commission and the civil service.
1. The judiciary
The strategic use of Zambia’s courts to win political competition has four elements to it. The first is electoral exclusion. The leading target here is former president Lungu, who, having initially retired from politics in August 2021, made a political comeback in October last year, seeking to capitalise on growing dissatisfaction with his successor.
Several days later, a ruling party activist petitioned the constitutional court, seeking a declaration that Lungu is not eligible to stand in any future election because of the constitutional two-term limit. The same court has ruled on three previous occasions, including just before the 2021 election when I sued him, that Lungu is eligible because his first term of office, which lasted for 18 months after he took over following the death of the previous elected president, did not count as a full term.
Hichilema had expected Lungu’s comeback long before it happened. He appointed four new judges to the same court in February last year, beefing up the number to 11. Soon after, in September 2023, the minister of justice promised to find a petitioner who would move the court to revisit the previous pro-Lungu rulings which he said had been secured using “the arrogance of numbers”. The judges the president has appointed are the ones he is counting on to deliver a favourable verdict that would exclude Lungu from the 2026 election. The matter remains before the concourt for determination.
Hichilema has also targeted nearly all other opposition leaders for electoral exclusion using the courts. These include Fred M’membe of the Socialist Party, Edith Nawakwi of the Forum for Democracy and Development, and Sean Tembo of the Patriots for Economic Progress.
Although their parties have neither parliamentary representation nor a clear power base, Hichilema fears that any of these leaders may benefit from both the support of an excluded Lungu, who still commands a significant following, and the growing revulsion against his own leadership. In anticipation of this prospect, the government has, over the last three years, arrested M’membe, Tembo, Nawakwi and other opposition leaders on a truckload of politically motivated charges such as libel, espionage, hate speech, and “acts intended to cause grievous bodily harm”.
Zambia’s Constitution provides that “A person is disqualified from being nominated as a candidate for election as president if that person is serving a sentence of imprisonment.”
Through the trumped-up charges, Hichilema hopes to find a pliant judge who would convict and send his political rivals to prison before the next election. Once this is done, the next stage would involve exerting pressure on the courts to delay the determination of the likely appeal cases that would follow the convictions.
Failure by the opposition to overturn their sentences before the nomination for the 2026 election would then empower the electoral commission — a body led by ruling party supporters — to exclude the candidacy of M’membe, Nawakwi or Tembo on the argument that they are “serving a sentence of imprisonment” and are merely on appeal.
The second element of the strategic use of the courts to eliminate political competition involves the capture of the main opposition party, the PF, using MPs aligned with the ruling party. Last year, PF MP Miles Sampa declared himself the party’s president after a hastily arranged and heavily policed sham meeting. Emboldened by support from Hichilema, Sampa then moved to expel nine PF MPs for alleged gross indiscipline and insubordination. The party’s substantive leaders moved to challenge the legality of Sampa’s convention while the affected MPs contested their expulsion in court.
A Hichilema-appointed high court judge, perhaps afraid that the bogus nature of the meeting that installed Sampa as PF leader would be exposed if the matter proceeded to trial, dismissed the case on a technicality even before it was heard. Sources in the judiciary disclosed that another Hichilema-appointed judge is now set to dismiss, on 27 June and using a preliminary issue, the other case brought against Sampa by the expelled MPs.
Combined, these court decisions would then enable the speaker of the National Assembly, another official with close ties to the ruling party, to declare the MPs’ seats vacant and trigger by-elections. To increase the ruling party’s chances of scooping the seats, the electoral body will probably reject the nominations of aspiring candidates from the PF, unless they are from Sampa’s faction, which lacks legitimacy. Pitted against independents or poorly funded candidates from smaller opposition parties, the UPND will very likely win.
Through these legal manoeuvres, the judiciary — in a remarkable parallel to how Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his ruling Zanu-PF have used proxies to dismantle the main opposition Citizens Coalition for Change — would have effectively enabled Hichilema to take decisive control of Zambia’s main opposition party by indirectly installing a pliant leadership on the PF. After winning the seats, his party would command the two-third majority needed in parliament to make changes to the Constitution such as making it easier for the president to gain re-election, extend presidential terms, or lift the immunity of former president Lungu.
The third element through which Hichilema has sought to emasculate political opponents using the courts is through the introduction of a new division of the high court designed to hear cases of corruption. The economic and financial crimes court was created through a statutory instrument in January 2022. Two years later, the government issued a supplementary instrument that requires the court to hear and determine a matter before it “within five months from the date on which plea is taken”.
Although the law empowers Chief Justice Mumba Malila to establish a court through a statutory instrument, the partisan political motivations behind the creation of this court were exposed by Hichilema who announced its formation way ahead of Malila. The president was also the one who first announced the five-month duration of proceedings three days before the chief justice did, indicating that the judiciary was taking instructions from the executive, itself an unconstitutional action.
Moreover, the requirement for judges to dispose of cases within a limited timeframe only applies to the economic and financial crimes court, not any other, including other branches of the high court where cases take years to be decided.
As one high court judge told me, “The executive needs to prioritise the real cause of the problem of delayed judgements. What is needed is more judges, not more courts. Completing matters within a certain period is dependent on several variables. First, the delays are not deliberate. We are overstretched, as Zambia only has 100 judges at the level of high court and above, servicing the whole country. Second, the case load is unmanageable. For instance, in 2023, in the general division of the Lusaka high court alone, 2400 cases were filed. There are only 12 judges in the division, which translates into 200 cases per judge a year. Dictating the period within which these judges must conclude the cases risks undermining the delivery of justice.”
Such concerns, though valid, are unlikely to bother the president. For Hichilema, the creation of this court and the dictation of the time within which cases must be decided allows him to present those convicted, however chaotically, as evidence of the success of his fight against corruption. Given that the president has ignored reports of corruption among his own high-profile officials, those appearing before the court are generally former administrators under the PF. Convicting these bolsters his constant claims that former PF leaders should never again be entrusted with power because they ran a corrupt regime.
The other motivation for Hichilema is that, once convicted, the sentenced would be constitutionally barred from seeking election to parliament or lose their parliamentary seat in cases of incumbent MPs. This is because their appeal cases, lacking a timeline within which they must be disposed of, are likely to drag on until after the relevant election. Having been in the doldrums of opposition politics for more than two decades, Hichilema and the UPND are progressively showing that they will go to any length — including manipulating the rules and norms of a democratic political game, illegitimately excluding rival candidates from the ballots, and abusing incumbency advantage — to secure electoral victory and retain power.
If the first three elements of this strategic weaponisation of the courts to defeat political rivals are meant to cover the run-up to the 2026 election, the final element is designed to address any post-electoral disputes. Crucial here is the constitutional court, which has the final say on all matters relating to the interpretation of Zambia’s Constitution, including the election of the president. For instance, in the event that an election petition is filed against the president-elect after elections, the concourt has the legal mandate to hear the matter within 14 days of its filing and can dismiss the petition or call for a fresh poll within 30 days. The decision of the concourt on any post-election case brought before it is final. In anticipation of a petition against his possible re-election, Hichilema has moved to reconstitute the court in several ways.
First, the president added four new judges to the court in February 2023 to join the hitherto existing seven who were all appointed by his predecessor. Second, of those Hichilema found, he has promoted to the position of president of the concourt the only remaining judge who had ruled in his favour when he petitioned the re-election of Lungu after the 2016 election.
At the time, Hichilema had not only praised this judge but also accused the other three judges who threw out his petition of “being corrupt and under President Edgar Lungu’s control”. Third, Hichilema promoted one of the new judges he appointed last year — a long-time friend — to the position of deputy president of the concourt. In addition to presiding over the court in the absence of the president, the deputy is also the one who determines the allocation of cases and the composition of the panel that hears cases.
For instance, the full bench of the constitutional court is constituted by an uneven number of not less than five judges. This means that to declare Lungu ineligible to stand in another election or dismiss any post-election petition brought against Hichilema, the deputy president is required only to constitute a panel consisting of at least three of Hichilema’s appointees and two others. It is reasonable to assume that Hichilema strategically placed his friend in this position as a way of “rigging” case outcomes from the beginning.
2. The police
The strategic use of the Zambia Police Service to undermine political competition has three elements to it. The first is the suppression of the right to peaceful public assembly of opposition parties. To hold public rallies, political parties are required by the Public Order Act (POA), a colonial-era legislation that was used to police African nationalists, to “give police at least seven days’ notice”, specifying the date, place and duration for the assembly. If the police indicate an inability to supervise the event for any reason, the POA allows the state institution to inform the convenors to propose an alternative date and time. Violations of this law attract a six-year prison sentence.
The POA insulates members of the executive from its requirements, stating that the notification of any planned rallies “shall not apply to any public meeting convened by or at the request of and intended to be addressed by the president, the vice-president or any minister”. Since his election, Hichilema has exploited this legal tool to prevent his political opponents from exercising the right to peaceful assembly, even when he continues to conduct political meetings.
Over the last three years, the police have blocked all public rallies called by opposition parties outside of by-elections, always citing unspecified security concerns or inadequate manpower. Yet whenever the opposition have threatened to proceed with their rallies, the government has dispatched hundreds of police officers to the designated venues to quash the meetings.
The inspector general of police, Graphel Musamba, recently explained that “we don’t allow opposition rallies because the other side [the ruling party] is always ready to attack them [the opposition]”. This is damning and undeniable evidence of political suppression. As well as dragging his feet in relation to amending the POA as he had promised in opposition, Hichilema has ignored repeated calls from civil society and the opposition for him to dismiss the police chief. Instead, the president has publicly praised the errant official as doing a great job and regretted not hiring him earlier.
By using the police to stop the opposition from campaigning, Hichilema is wrongfooting his critics by claiming that the police, not him, are merely enforcing the existing law. Alongside the deliberate delays by the executive to amend the POA, the reluctance by the judiciary to declare this 1955 law as unconstitutional, whenever they have been presented with an opportunity to do so, sustains the status quo of legal autocracy.
Stopping the opposition from mobilising voters also prevents the raising of political temperature expressed through big-sized rallies that have historically served as a barometer of the public’s desire for change. Large-scale rallies of opposition parties show an incumbent president’s declining political support and serve as a source of courage for elites in formal institutions like the judiciary to do the right thing.
For instance, ahead of Zambia’s 1991, 2011, and 2021 elections, all of which resulted in the defeat of the sitting president and were preceded by well-attended opposition rallies, courts that had all along shown timidity and subservience to the executive suddenly sprang to life and made several decisions against the executive.
The second element of the strategic use of the police to undermine political competition is the suppression of the right to protest. The restrictions on public assemblies have been extended to peaceful demonstrations called by civic groups, however informally constituted, against International Monetary Fund-instigated government policies. A bit of context is important here.
Since his ascension to power, Hichilema has presided over a faltering economy beset by declining revenue from the crucial mining industry because of large tax incentives to foreign multinationals, crippling power cuts that have badly affected production, a steep depreciation of the kwacha against major convertible currencies, a sharp increase in the rate of inflation that climbed to a 26-month high in April this year, and a budget deficit averaging 8% in both 2022 and 2023. As a result of this context and the reckless exports of maize and mealie meal (the national staple), fuel and food costs have risen dramatically, worsening the cost-of-living crisis.
“I have never in my life seen the kind of hunger there is in homes right now. As I wrote that line, tears came to my eyes. God, people are hungry,” wept Laura Miti, a boisterous Hichilema supporter who had only months earlier declared him “the best president of Zambia for this moment”. Miti blamed the current economic problems on adverse climatic conditions such as poor rainfall, an excuse that Hichilema himself dismissed when in opposition: “True leaders attend to problems and not blame anyone or climate change. When you have a challenge, the best way is to attend to it because external factors beyond human control have existed for ages and will remain with us for more years to come. Wonder how people in the Arab world which is mostly desert manage to supply electricity 365 days a year when not a single drop of rainfall has ever dropped? The difference is leadership quality and VISION”, wrote Hichilema in December 2019 when then Lungu was grappling with similar difficulties.
His failure to demonstrate the “leadership quality and VISION” he had demanded from his predecessor has fed growing levels of dissatisfaction, especially in towns and cities, but the police, using the same excuse provided to opposition parties, have vetoed all peaceful protests called against the government’s failure to address the escalating cost-of-living crisis. Full Article
