Emmanuel Mwamba, a former Zambian ambassador who now serves as spokesperson for the opposition Tonse Pamozi Alliance, has accused President Hakainde Hichilema of deploying the military, closing the courts and installing loyalists on the electoral commission to secure his re-election, in one of the most detailed public accounts the opposition has given since the vote. […]
Emmanuel Mwamba, a former Zambian ambassador who now serves as spokesperson for the opposition Tonse Pamozi Alliance, has accused President Hakainde Hichilema of deploying the military, closing the courts and installing loyalists on the electoral commission to secure his re-election, in one of the most detailed public accounts the opposition has given since the vote.
Mr Mwamba made the allegations in a nearly hour-long interview on Around the World with Dane Waters, a podcast that reaches listeners in more than 100 countries, giving Zambia’s post-election crisis its widest international airing yet.
“Severely so,” he said, asked whether democracy in Zambia was under attack.
The claims add detail to a dispute that has already drawn scrutiny from Washington, the United Nations and the European Union, though none of the specific allegations in the interview has been independently verified, and the government has not addressed them directly.
Mr Mwamba traced the crisis to well before the election, arguing that Mr Hichilema’s conduct in office mirrored his rise inside his own party.
Mr Hichilema spent 23 years in opposition and lost six elections before finally winning power, Mr Mwamba said, and after inheriting the party from its founder, Anderson Mazoka, he pushed out senior co-founders and avoided a general party conference for close to 15 years.
“He turned a party that was vibrant, democratic, that had upheld freedom of expression inside into an autocratic rule, unquestionable,” Mr Mwamba said.
He did not dispute the conditions that carried Mr Hichilema to power in 2021: a pandemic-battered economy, heavy debt and a cost-of-living crisis under a governing party he described as arrogant and tolerant of violence by its own supporters.
Mr Hichilema, an economist and businessman, ran as “Mr Fix It.” “He was the only man standing,” Mr Mwamba said.
What followed, in Mr Mwamba’s telling, was a rapid consolidation of power.
The government criminalised speech and assembly through cyber-crime laws, he said, and amended the constitution without following the process set out by the Constitutional Court.
Anti-corruption enforcement became a weapon against rivals, he said, with “nearly every opposition party leader” arrested on what he described as speech or corruption charges.
Those claims track a paper trail of international criticism that predates this year’s election.
A 2023 United States State Department report found Zambia had “quickly slid into authoritarianism,” citing abuses of human rights and restrictions on media and political space, Mr Mwamba said.
The International Monetary Fund flagged similar concerns over political tension even as it approved a 1.3 billion US dollar loan for the country, he said, and by 2024, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Human Rights Council had issued their own warnings, including from a special rapporteur who cited political repression and arbitrary arrests.
Zambia responded with image management rather than reform, according to Mr Mwamba, retaining the Brenthurst Foundation, led by Dr Greg Mills, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to help shore up the government’s standing in London, Paris, New York and Washington.
The sharpest allegations concern the vote itself.
Ahead of polling day, Mr Mwamba said, authorities banned the largest opposition party and disqualified a string of candidates, forcing Brian Mundubile and running mate Makebi Zulu onto a hastily assembled ballot line with little time to organise.
The Electoral Commission of Zambia was chaired, for the first time since 1991, by someone other than a sitting or retired judge, he said, naming the chairperson as the president’s own former personal lawyer and identifying three other commissioners as ruling-party affiliates.
Once early tallies began to favour Mr Mundubile, Mr Mwamba alleged, soldiers entered counting centres, disrupted the process and confiscated Gen 20 forms, the polling-station sheets used to verify results.
Monitors were pushed out of counting centres in major towns, he said, naming the European Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Law Association of Zambia and church “mother bodies” among those forced to withdraw.
Counting was then suspended for six to 12 hours, a delay Mr Mwamba blamed on violence by ruling-party supporters in Lusaka and Kabwe.
Mr Hichilema’s numbers surged once the count resumed, he said, which he linked to a break in the chain of custody over ballots during the suspension. The European Union’s own election monitoring mission, he said, documented gross irregularities affecting the result.
The most serious allegation concerns a raid the night Mr Mundubile addressed the state of the count in remarks the government characterised as a premature claim of victory.
Mr Mundubile was returning from a meeting with African Union officials at a Lusaka hotel when, Mr Mwamba said, a military unit of more than 100 broke down the gate at his residence.
“There was a raid on his house that resulted in the killing of one of our former cabinet ministers,” he said.
Eleven people, including Mr Mundubile, were detained that night, according to Mr Mwamba, who said international pressure secured Mr Mundubile’s release within roughly two hours while others remained held. “It took five days for them to admit that they had killed our minister,” he said.
Mr Mundubile sought shelter at United Nations premises, where a special envoy attempted to broker a resolution, before he was handed to police, Mr Mwamba said.
He and Mr Zulu are now held on treason charges Mr Mwamba dismissed as “threadbare,” tied to three men from the campaign’s protection detail who were sent for defensive-driving training in June and whom the state now casts as militia recruits.
“It is again typical of a man that had decided he was entitled to a second term at all costs,” he said.
As many as 300 people linked to the alliance have been detained since the election, Mr Mwamba said, a scale he said drew two interventions from the UN Human Rights Council within two weeks, including a demand from a special rapporteur for detainees’ immediate release.
Courts, meanwhile, were closed for what he called effectively four days, though officially two, long enough, he argued, to block Mr Mundubile from filing an election petition within the constitutional deadline.
“We are civil,” Mr Mwamba said. “We will not go in the bush. We will not raise a rebellion. We said the election is stolen. We have wide-ranging evidence.”
Asked whether his account amounted to the kind of unsubstantiated fraud claim opposition parties elsewhere in Africa have made after losing, he rejected the comparison outright: “This is not one of those examples. This is a methodic process over years about retaining power.”
He set Zambia’s crisis against a continental backdrop, arguing that the democratic gains of the 1990s have given way to a decade of regression, marked by coups in Niger and Chad and mounting pressure on presidential term limits, with Senegal and Ghana among the few holdouts.
Western governments, alongside China and Russia, have prioritised access to Africa’s critical minerals over democratic standards, he argued, pointing to foreign delegations that attended Mr Hichilema’s inauguration despite adverse findings from their own election monitors, and linking the pattern to migration pressures that push young Africans toward the Mediterranean.
His closing charge targeted the mining sector underpinning Zambia’s economy.
He named First Quantum Minerals, which operates the Trident and Kansanshi mines in North-Western Province, citing an unnamed Global Witness report describing what he called a pervasive relationship between the company and Mr Hichilema.
Tax incentives passed under the president have benefited multinational miners even as copper prices hit historic highs of 13,000 to 14,000 US dollars a tonne, up from a historical range of 3,000 to 5,000 dollars, he said, with no windfall tax in place to capture the gain for Zambia.
“There are mine houses and multinationals that are walking out with billions of dollars from our country,” Mr Mwamba said.
Mr Mundubile and Mr Zulu remain in custody on treason charges. No election petition has been filed before Zambia’s courts, and the government has yet to respond to the allegations made in the interview.
