Zambia’s 2006 elections: The ethnicization of politics?

By: Jeremy Gould

On 28 September 2006, Zambia went to the polls in its fourth general elections since the restoration of political pluralism in 1991. Like in the previous tripartite elections in 2001, the presidency was heatedly contested, as were parliamentary and local government seats in most constituencies. Thirteen parties participated at some level, and five fielded a presidential candidate. The ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) incumbent, Levy Mwanawasa, retained his seat at State House with 43 percent of the ballot, while his two main opponents, veteran firebrand Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front (PF) and newcomer Hakainde Hichilema of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) received 29 percent and 25 percent of the vote respectively.

MMD won 73 of the 150 parliamentary seats to be filled by the ballot. It only retains control of the legislature by virtue of eight deputies appointed directly by the president. The ruling party’s mandate decreased only little in comparison to its pre-election status, and it avoided the embarrassing implosion predicted by the opposition. Yet, with its razor-slim majority in the National Assembly and a minority President in State House, its legitimacy is a far cry from the three-quarters’ quorum it enjoyed throughout the 1990s. Given the frequency of by-elections in Zambia (due to the high mortality of office holders), MMD’s parliamentary majority is very tenuous indeed.

More critically, perhaps, MMD has been completely marginalized in the major municipal councils along the line of rail. The Patriotic Front has hegemonic control of local government institutions in Lusaka, in the influential Copperbelt towns and in Kasama in the populous Northern Province. The UDA controls Livingstone. In principle, local political institutions are in opposition hands in all of the main population centers of the country.

Local and international monitors generally hailed the elections as free and fair, albeit not without their share of technical problems. The turnout was a respectable 71 percent and the actual polling proceeded peacefully without major incident. All in all, it would seem that basic democratic procedures are becoming routine in Zambia. This overall impression was marred by a brief flare-up of mob violence in Lusaka, the national capital, as frustrated supporters of unsuccessful presidential aspirant Michael Sata took to the streets, accusing the ruling MMD of election fraud.

The Sata factor
Notwithstanding its failure to capture the presidency, the uncontested victor of the elections was the Patriotic Front under the leadership of sixty-nine-year-old veteran politician Michael Sata. Increasing its share to a walloping 43 seats, up from a mere two in the previous parliament, PF’s success was most striking in influential urban centers where it swept both parliamentary and local government seats.

PF’s explosion into the major league of Zambian politics came as a surprise to most Zambians. As little as ten months before these elections it was difficult to muster even lukewarm support for Sata among Lusaka’s political illuminati. Just days before the elections, the independent and influential Post newspaper – considered a mouthpiece for the progressive middle-class, and definitely no friend of the ruling MMD – ran a scathing attack on Sata. For once, it seems no-one was reading The Post.
Sata began his career as a political lieutenant to founding president Kenneth Kaunda in the heyday of his United National Independence Party’s (UNIP) ‘one-party participatory democracy’. Nick-named ‘King Cobra’ by friends and detractors alike, Sata soon carved out a distinctive niche for himself as an aggressive, rough-mouthed muscleman, incessantly poised to attack dissidents within the ruling party. It was a role he subsequently sequelled at the elbow of Kaunda’s usurper, President Frederick Chiluba of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy.

Swept into power in 1991 by throngs of near-ecstatic citizens fed up with Kaunda, UNIP and incessant economic decline, Chiluba espoused the rhetoric of liberalism and democracy. Once in power, however, the MMD gradually sank into a morass of corruption and abuse. In 1994, then Vice-President (and current State House incumbent) Levy Mwanawasa quit government in protest over growing corruption in the MMD. Mwanawasa’s resignation was in direct reaction to a shady deal he attributed to Sata. A very personal animosity between the two men has continued to the present day.
Sata remained adamantly loyal to Chiluba almost up until the end. Chiluba was constitutionally obliged to step aside in 2001, having served the maximum two terms at State House. Sata clearly expected to be anointed as his successor. But Chiluba procrastinated in declaring his intentions, and in doing so incited popular mobilization against an alleged Third Term bid by the president. The nation-wide ‘Green Ribbon’ campaign, spearheaded by the activist Oasis Forum (a loose alliance of all major Christian church bodies, the women’s movement and the Law Association of Zambia), proved incontrovertibly that the Zambian people would not countenance another five years of Chiluba.
As time ran out, Chiluba sidelined the unpredictable Sata and identified ex-Vice-President, lawyer Levy Mwanawasa, as his heir apparent. It was a surprising and unconventional move that Chiluba lived to regret. After several years of barely concealed abuse of public assets, Chiluba needed desperately to ensure that his successor would protect him against accusations of financial impropriety. His choice of Mwanawasa demonstrated a serious failure of character assessment on Chiluba’s part. Apparently he believed that Mwanawasa – estranged from MMD inner circles and who, it was rumored, had never fully recovered from a head injury in the early 1990s – would be easy to control. As it turned out he was mistaken.

Be that as it may, Sata was visibly shaken by this unexpected turn of events and left the MMD with doors banging. He quickly formed the Patriotic Front along with Guy Scott, an offspring of Zambia’s numerically insignificant troupe of white settlers. The hastily assembled PF did poorly in 2001, nor was its performance in subsequent by-elections impressive. On the eve of the 2006 polls PF held only two parliamentary seats, in contrast to main opposition party UPND’s 49. For the first time in his political career, Sata was on the outside looking in and he didn’t like it.

It is hard to link Sata to any clear ideological platform. He is known as a fixer and a hard worker. While District Governor for Lusaka in the late eighties, for example, he provided affordable housing to many urban residents and achieved the Herculean feat of cleaning up a decade of accumulated rubbish on the city’s streets. He can also work a crowd better than any contemporary Zambian politician. His defining trademark is gravelly populist rant, never far from the gutter, that revels in hyperbole and political taunt. When explosives were discharged in July 2005 at Konkola Copper Mines, in connection with worker-instigated protests against a privatization scheme, Sata rushed to the scene to claim complicity in the bombing. (As a result he was arrested on sedition charges, a case that is still pending.) And on the eve of the recent elections, he praised Robert Mugabe’s violent land seizures in troubled Zimbabwe, while in the same breath threatening alien (Asian and Lebanese) businessmen in Zambia with deportation.

Such brutal demagoguery is rare in Zambian political society. Yet, Sata’s campaign maintained a counter-intuitive upward swing as the 2006 elections approached. PF rallies pulled large, buoyant crowds wherever he spoke. Major opposition politicians like former UPND Vice-President Sakwiba Sikota and firebrand Given Lubinda defected from their mother party to join the PF bandwagon. The diplomatic corps was nervous. Murmurings about the ‘Zambian Mugabe’ circulated in the capital with increasing anxiety.

Come election day, PF went to the polls confident of victory. Amazed citizens stayed glued to their radios and TVs as the preliminary count pointed to a PF landslide. Early returns from urban constituencies had Sata leading Mwanawasa almost 2:1. In the final count, PF swept Lusaka and the mining towns of the Copperbelt, and garnered substantial support in the ‘Bembaphone’ northeast. Elsewhere – with the exception of the Tonga-speaking Southern Province, where UDA candidates harvested all but one seat – MMD prevailed. Since the Copperbelt population is also predominantly ciBemba speaking, one might argue that PF’s victory is evidence of the ‘ethnicization’ of Zambian politics. The fact that the UDA’s electoral success was limited to one, ethnically homogenous region also lends credence to such an interpretation. Closer inspection, however suggests that the ethnic explanation may be too simplistic. I return to this point further on.

It is probably fair to say that PF’s success at the polls was to a large part due to pre-election fumbles by both MMD and UPND/UDA. MMD’s main liability is Mwanawasa himself. Zambians have little genuine affection for, much less fear of, ‘Levy’. Once a successful Copperbelt lawyer, Mwanawasa’s public persona exudes impulsiveness and arrogance, coupled with a propensity for alienating legalese. He also suffers from periodically debilitating health problems. Hot on the heels of his 2001 victory, Mwanawasa won some popular sympathy by bringing his mentor Chiluba to trial on corruption charges. He nevertheless quickly squandered this windfall popularity through inconsistent policies, nepotism and petty squabbles with civil society groups like the Oasis Forum.

Mwanawasa is also out of touch with popular demands for delimiting presidential powers and expanding socio-economic rights. After vowing to honor the recommendations of the Constitutional Review Commission he appointed in 2003, Mwanawasa distanced himself from the draft constitution they produced which, among other things, required that the President win more than half of the popular vote. Having squeaked through on a (highly contested) 29 percent plurality in 2001, Mwanawasa was understandably uneasy about his chances for re-election in 2006 under such a provision. Through filibustering and political manipulation, MMD stalled constitutional reforms with the result that the 2006 elections were held under the simple majority clause introduced by Chiluba in 1996. From the MMD’s perspective this was a prudent tactical move. It is anybody’s guess how Mwanawasa would have fared against Sata had the recent elections gone into a second round.

Mazoka’s ghost
PF’s dramatic advance benefited directly from the collapse of the hitherto most credible opposition force, the United Party for National Development. In 2001, UPND founding president, ex-Anglo-American executive Anderson Mazoka lost to Mwanawasa by less than two percent of the popular vote. In reality, Mazoka probably had the greater share of popular support, but was deftly out-manoeuvered by the MMD which ruthlessly exploited its control of state resources during the campaign period. (The Supreme Court ruled against UPND’s petition to overturn Mwanawasa’s 2001 election on the grounds of unfair practices, yet the protracted hearings brought forward massive evidence of MMD manipulation as well as rigging by all parties.) Mazoka fell seriously ill soon after his defeat and spent much of Mwanawasa’s first term of office under intensive care in South Africa. He returned to Zambia in 2005 and resumed leadership of UPND. Despite his evident frailty he succeeded in suppressing efforts to replace him by divisive factions within the party.

After Mazoka’s death in May 2006 at age 63 things fell apart, and UPND split over a secession crisis that had two debilitating consequences. One, the sidelining of senior UPND stalwarts in favor of political novice Hakainde Hichilema as party president reaffirmed popular conceptions of UPND as an ethnically-grounded Tonga party. Second, the split saw the defection of popular UPND mainstays Sakwiba Sikota and Given Lubinda into an alliance with PF. Although Hichilema’s 25 percent share of the presidential vote is a respectable achievement for a political unknown, UPND’s share of seats in the new parliament decreased by almost two-thirds. All of its current seats are in the Tonga-speaking constituencies of the Southern Province.

Primordialism resurgent?
All in all, the technical quality of these elections was a clear improvement on previous multiparty polls. This time around, the MMD government made a concerted effort to allay accusations of pre-election machinations. Cabinet was dissolved well ahead of time and Ministers were not permitted to use government resources for their campaigns. There are 20-odd court petitions pending in contest of constituency-level results but given the technical complexities involved in an exercise of this scope, this is hardly unusual.

Did these elections signal the ethnicization of Zambian politics? ‘Tribalism’ is a register generally eschewed in public political discourse in Zambia. The fact that UNIP managed to rule for 27 years with few or no signs of ethnic tension is still considered an unmitigated virtue in Kaunda’s complex political legacy. That said, some observers are convinced that ethnic identity and rivalry simmer ominously beneath the surface of Zambian politics (e.g. Posner 2005). The fact that more than half of the popular vote went to candidates with strong ties to Bemba or Tonga constituencies would appear to lend support to this claim.

While deepening political pluralism is bound to enhance the currency of many sorts of ‘primordial’ identities – of race, gender, religion as well as of birth-place and language – I doubt that ethnicity was a decisive factor in the electoral outcome. Both Mazoka’s untimely exit and Sata’s last-minute upward leap are primarily contingent as against tendential, structural factors. In some parts of the country – in Loziland to the West and Ngoniland to the East, for example – ethnic alignment in electoral politics seems to be, if anything, on the decline. What is indeed striking about PF’s campaign was not so much its ‘ethnic’ character but its brash contrarianism, and the appeal of such demagogic radicalism to members of the urban underclass across ethno-linguistic boundaries. For all his populist bravado, Michael Sata has brought real issues of concern to the urban poor into the political arena.

Given the strong role of contingent factors in the election results it is unusually hard to project far-reaching trends. It is clear, however, that a sea change of sorts is underway. In a conventionally winner-takes-all political culture, the nominal winner, the MMD, lost more than it won. Two sites of struggle emerge: one, the politically volatile urban councils, where PF has an unprecedented opportunity to institutionalize its grassroots support through improved performance in water, sanitation and housing – the main demands of the urban poor; and two, parliament itself, where a united opposition can force the government’s hand on, among other things, constitutional reform.

At root, the 2006 polls should be seen as a protest election and not a retreat into primordial politics. Sata’s uncanny avalanche was a clear message to the political class in general and Mwanawasa in particular. ‘We wanted to rub salt in the wound’, as one Sata supporter put it. Deepening social and economic disparities are generating anger and frustration. Zambians want leadership, not excuses.

Select reading
Baylies, C. and M. Szeftel, ‘Elections in the One-Party State’. In Gertzel, C. et al. (eds.) The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Burnell, Peter, ‘The Party System and Party Politics in Zambia: Continuities Past, Present and Future’. In African Affairs, vol. 100, 2001.

Gould, J., ‘Contesting Democracy: The 1996 Zambian Elections’. In Cowen and Laakso (eds) Multi-party elections in Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.

Phiri, B.J., Democratisation in Zambia: The 2001 Tripartite Elections. Africa Institute Occasional Paper, no 67. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2002.

Posner, Daniel N., Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Rakner, L., Political and Economic Liberalisation in Zambia 1991–2001. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2003.

Sichone, O. and B. Chikulo (eds), Democracy in Zambia; Challenges for the Third Republic. Harare: SAPES Books, 1996.

Van Donge, Jan Kees, ‘Reflections on donors, opposition and popular will in the 1996 Zambian general elections’. In Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 1998.