Zambia: The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections of 2001

Extracted from: "Zambia" IN Compendium of Elections in Southern Africa (2002), edited by Tom Lodge, Denis Kadima and David Pottie, EISA, 401-402.

Zambia's third multiparty elections since the advent of democratisation were held on the 27 December 200 1. For the l1fSt time, to cut costs, presidential, parliamentary and local government elections were scheduled for the same day, an unprecedented administrative challenge for the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ).

After the 1996 election, the legal status of the electoral commission was altered to enhance its independence from government. A high court judge, Bobby Bwalya, was appointed as its chairman. However, as shall be seen, more was needed than a change in leadership to guarantee the commission' s freedom from political interference.

The most significant political development betwe.en the 1996 and 2001 elections was the 'third term' debate which split the ruling Movement for MultiParty Democracy into two factions either against or in support of a proposed amendment to the constitution which would have allowed President Chiluba to run for a third term. A Party conference was held in Kabwe in June to address the issue, but this only deepened divisions with anti-third term delegates barred from entry. Chiluba supporters prevailed on this occasion and changed the party's constitution to allow him to be elected for a third time as the party's president. A number of senior party figures resigned and formed two more organisations, swelling the number of Zambian political groups to 32. With insufficient parliamentary support to alter the republican constitution and confronted by mounting intemational criticism, the pro-third term grouping eventually conceded defeat and in August, the MMD vice-president, Levy Mwanawasa, was elected as the Movement's presidential candidate. Frederick Chiluba would retain his position as MMD president, though.

Meanwhile, the ECZ began its preparations with voter registration extending the deadline three times after apparent lack of public interest and criticism of its poor publicity from civil society monitors. Voter registration was additionally hampered by a requirement for eligible voters to possess a national registration card before they could receive a voter registration card. The difficulties in obtaining these documents barred more than half the adult population from voting. Voter registration itself secured only a proportion of those citizens who did hold national registration cards -about I 000 000 of these remained unregistered. The ECZ efforts in the field of voter education were correspondingly desultory. Last minute regulations imposing charges for domestic monitors and fees for registry copies increased public suspicion that the commission was hostile to any independent evaluation of its performance.

In general, polling day was managed very poorly indeed. One quarter of stations opened late and many ran short of supplies. Voting queues could last up to 16 hours - a reflection of high turnout among the registered voters - and significant numbers of voters were turned away or left the queue before voting. Constituency-level tabulation of votes was as administered as badly. Counting took place sometimes in unsecured venues and observers noted ballot boxes arriving-at counting stations either unsealed or with their seals broken. The dispatch of constituency results to the ECZ in Lusaka was frequently subjected to inexplicable delays. Extra boxes of ballots arrived at certain Copperbelt stations after the count had been completed.

The official results indicated a parliamentary majority for the combined opposition parties of 80 out of 150 seats (to the MMD's 70) and a narrow victory for Levy Mwanawasa in the presidential contest he obtained the largest share of the vote of the ten candidates with a meagre 29% (see 2001 National Assembly election results and 2001 Presidential election results for more detail).

Several weeks later, it was still the case that the ECZ had failed to address discrepancies in verification and tabulation. These discrepancies included major differences between the numbers of votes cast for the presidential and parliamentary candidates, a very high number of constituencies in which no invalid votes appeared to have been cast, and, most importantly of all, divergencies between the aggregated voting statistics figures obtained from constituencies and the published national total. A European Union mission found a 100% turnout at certain stations 'incredible'. The ECZ's subsequent refusal to publish station results provoked further scepticism about the officially declared outcome.

All these shortcomings seem to provide reasonable grounds for believing that the authorities falsified the outcome of the Zambian elections, charge made by six opposition parties in their petitions filed in the Supreme Court. To date, the Supreme Court has yet to make a finding on the evidence submitted in the petitions.