ZAMBIA ELECTION NOTE: The Last Open Channel

Part 1: Before the Vote. What the 13 August Ballot Tests

AI-illustration: Four channels barred. One open. Zambia votes tomorrow. The Last Open Channel, Part 1: Before the Vote.

The Last Open Channel is a two-part series. Part 1 prices what the 13 August ballot tests, before the vote. Part 2, After the Count, reads the result through the same framework.

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1. The Underpriced Ledger

Thursday’s contest is being fought principally inside a single ledger. The incumbent’s case is the dashboard: restructuring substantially complete, inflation back inside the target band, reserves rebuilt. The challengers’ case is the kitchen table: a price level that has not come down and employment that has not come through. Growth against diffusion is the headline argument.

The second ledger, the channel that runs from citizen to state, is present in the campaign on different terms. Brian Mundubile, the leading opposition candidate of the NRPUP-led Tonse Pamodzi alliance, has said the election must not be conducted under fear. His campaign has gone further, pledging to repeal the Public Order Act and the 2025 cyber laws within months of office, a pledge his running mate repeated in July. Gary Nkombo, formerly this government’s local government minister and elections chairman and now an independent parliamentary candidate, has described 2026 as a national struggle for freedom in the lineage of 1964 and 1991. The second ledger is priced low rather than ignored. The offer to reopen the channel is explicit, and its credibility is the open question. Mundubile served in the PF administration that enacted the predecessor cyber architecture, and his alliance supplied this week’s own evidence on democratic restraint. When the governance charge lands on the incumbent, the available answer is a trade-off claim: economic stability on one side, democratic norms on the other, one purchased with the other.

Two framing failures follow. The headline argument prices half the system. The trade-off claim asserts that one half must be surrendered to keep the other.

On Tuesday I ran a small, unscientific poll on X and on the Canary Compass WhatsApp channel. One question: which consideration should carry the greatest weight in choosing the president. On X, 244 responses: macro stability 39.3 per cent, jobs and living standards 27.5, democratic freedoms 18.0, the Constitution 15.2. On the channel, 21 responses: jobs 11, macro 9, the Constitution 1, freedoms 0. The four options reduce to three families: the dashboard, diffusion, and governance, since constitutional compliance and democratic freedom are one category. In both rooms the economic families outpolled governance, two to one on X and 20 to one on the channel.

Participation itself split along identity lines. The pseudonymous room answered in the hundreds. The identity-linked room, where a response attaches to a phone number and a name, answered in the tens and returned zero votes for democratic freedoms. The reticence is documented elsewhere. Freedom House’s 2025 Zambia assessment describes an environment of self-censorship built by arrests for online speech. The surveillance literature records the same withdrawal: measured disengagement from politically sensitive expression wherever the participant can be seen. A quieter mechanism runs through employment, where a public political position carries professional cost. A room that returns zero votes for freedoms may be measuring fear of the question as much as indifference to it.

The poll cannot show whether recognition lags erosion. It shows that, asked to choose one weight, both rooms placed economics ahead of governance. Graham and Svolik’s candidate-choice experiments in the American Political Science Review found that only a small fraction of voters prioritise democratic principles at the ballot, trading them against policy and partisan interests. The second ledger below documents what that ranking prices low. A ranking of that shape is the condition under which protections are cheapest to remove, whatever its cause.

2. The Framework: One Pipe, Two Directions

The framework is a transmission system with two directions. Downward, policy must pass through banks, prices, and credit to reach household budgets and farm gate prices. The state can also reach those endpoints directly, through administered prices and fiscal programmes. Direct delivery is bypass, not transmission: it works while financed, accumulates on a public balance sheet, and builds no transmission channel that survives it, whatever else it leaves behind. Upward, information must pass from citizens through speech, the press, and assembly to reach the state, including information the state does not want. Failure in the first channel produces improving aggregates without improving households. Failure in the second produces a state that receives only confirmation, which removes its capacity for correction.

One scope condition applies. The upward channel is not required for every downward outcome. Macro stabilisation is negotiated with creditors and the IMF and can be delivered without citizen feedback. Diffusion and integrity are different: knowing where households are failing requires demand signals, and detecting diversion requires functioning error reporting.

One evidentiary rule governs both ledgers. The incumbent is assessed on state power exercised. Challengers are assessed on record and conduct. The standard of evidence applied to both is identical. The test throughout: whether systems work, whether citizens advance, and whether dignity, economic and political, rises.

3. Ledger One: The Economy

The credit entries. The UPND inherited a sovereign in default, with arrears that had been insufficiently disclosed and inflation in the mid-twenties. Restructuring agreements covered about 94 per cent of the debt perimeter on the IMF’s May assessment. Inflation was 6.5 per cent in July, inside the target band. Reserves stood at USD6.4bn at end-April, or 4.4 months of import cover on the IMF’s measure; the Bank of Zambia’s own measure runs higher. Growth has averaged 4.5 per cent across 2022 to 2025, came in at 3.8 per cent in 2025 after revisions, and ran at 7.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2026.

The administered maize price rose from K150 to K347 per 50kg bag, a 131 per cent rise against a general price level up about 68 per cent. In real terms that is about 38 per cent higher. The improvement is a bypass, and the last two seasons flatter it. The administered price is one number set against a weather cycle. In the 2024 drought, private buyers paid K350 to K400 against FRA’s K330, and regional prices ran higher still. The floor sat below the market, and the agency struggled to buy in the year reserves mattered most. In the surplus seasons since, the market has priced below the floor, and the premium has been the support, at a cost the IMF now flags on FRA’s balance sheet as a quasi-fiscal risk. A fixed price fails in both directions across the cycle.

What the gate lacks is the infrastructure that would track the cycle: organised price formation, hedging instruments, and financing. The collateral routes exist in law: a movable property registry that is underused, and a warehouse receipts regime on the statute book since 2010 that has never financed a harvest at scale. A modernising act, No. 7 of 2026, followed this April; use at scale is untested. The IMF programme anchored the adjustment period and performed its function.

The debit entries are four, each a downward-transmission failure.

First, diffusion. The latest national poverty estimates, from the 2022 LCMS, record 78.8 per cent rural and 31.9 per cent urban poverty. Inflation measures the change in prices; households pay the accumulated level. From July 2021, the last month before this government took office, the general price level has risen about 68 per cent and the food price level almost 90 per cent. A 25kg bag of breakfast mealie meal averaged K141.77 then on ZamStats data; the July 2026 national average is K252.13, down from K275 a year earlier. Mean earnings of paid employees rose 53 per cent between the 2021 and 2024 Labour Force Surveys. A mean is pulled by its top earners and says little about the middle. More than half of paid employees earned K2,700 or less per month in 2024, and rural earnings grew materially more slowly than urban.

Electricity was the term’s most widely felt failure. On Afrobarometer’s 2024 fieldwork, published this May, only 28 per cent of households were connected to the grid, and among the connected, only 15 per cent said power worked most or all of the time. Combining connection and reliability, 4 per cent of Zambians had reliable grid supply. 83 per cent rated the government’s performance on electricity badly, double the 2022 disapproval. Households substituted privately: 47 per cent drew power from outside ZESCO, most of it rooftop solar.

The generation record runs the other way. Solar grew from 88MW in 2021 to 841MW this year on the ministry’s own count; Chisamba’s 200MW complex, completed in July, is the largest. The 750MW Kafue Gorge Lower, contracted under the PF in 2015, was fully commissioned in 2023. The IMF attributes part of its 2026 growth projection to recovering generation, and the fieldwork above predates the newest plants; the disapproval it records is what this electorate lived through. The critique concerns composition rather than effort. Solar was the fastest deployable answer to a hydro drought, and an emergency reaches for whatever deploys quickest. But the build layers variable supply on a hydro system whose failure mode is seasonal: daytime power added, evening peaks and the next drought still exposed. Firm alternatives ran on comparable clocks. Open-cycle gas delivers in one to two years, combined-cycle in two to three, and Mozambique’s gas-fired generation can reach Zambia through the Southern African Power Pool. Zambia has no domestic gas, so that route carries import exposure. Firm routes nonetheless ran on this term’s clock, and the build chose speed in one lane only.

The standard rejoinder is that diffusion is second-term work. The chosen instruments, free education with school meals, CDF at scale, and social cash transfers, are bypass instruments: direct fiscal delivery in place of transmitted income. The transfer rolls stand at 1.5 million households this year, about 8.4 million people, against 880,000 households at the 2021 handover. A drought emergency layer paid K400 monthly to new households for 12 months on World Bank financing and has closed. The Vice President cited the expansion on the trail this week. All are broad-coverage programmes with high measured approval. In the 2024 Afrobarometer survey, 84 per cent rated the government’s handling of education positively, the highest score on the continent, and 80 per cent reported a family member benefiting from free education. Coverage and approval measure reach. Lift would be measured by a national poverty survey, and none has measured this term: the 2022 LCMS remains the last word. A state that has not counted its poor since then cannot demonstrate diffusion, and the absence of measurement is itself a feedback entry.

Breadth requires less listening than targeting. Choosing which sectors and households to reach demands local information, and a narrowed upward channel carries less of it. These instruments face their first Zambian electoral test on Thursday. CDF at K40m per constituency and school meals at 4.6 million learners existed at nothing near this scale in 2021, and the transfer rolls have grown by 70 per cent. The cross-national precedents for this instrument class are unfavourable. Kenya’s first CDF election returned 77 of 183 sitting MPs, with the losers having run more projects than the winners, and Ghana’s school feeding incumbents lost a cost-of-living election in December 2024. Thursday supplies the first Zambian evidence on the instrument class.

Second, translation. The economic programme has been communicated to creditors, investors, and multilateral institutions, and not in terms accessible at household level. A programme its intended beneficiary cannot follow does not generate belief, and belief is a voting variable.

Third, monetary transmission. Genuine Kwacha private credit, defined as lending net of foreign currency loans and government exposure, stood at 7.4 per cent of GDP, computed on Bank of Zambia September 2025 data. Banks held government securities equal to roughly half of local currency deposits on the same basis. Under these conditions the policy rate mainly prices sovereign rollover rather than household and firm credit.

The counter-entry is legislative. SI 62 of 2025, the Banking and Financial Services (Capital Adequacy) Rules, took effect in January. The Banking and Financial Services Act, No. 9 of 2026, carries the close-out netting provisions a money market needs. Its own commencement clause leaves the operative date to a ministerial statutory instrument, and legal commentary dated 5 August still treated that order as pending.

The warehouse receipts modernisation passed as the Agricultural Credits and Warehouse Receipts Act, No. 7 of 2026, dated 8 April on the national law database. The Zambia Deposit Insurance Corporation Act, No. 11 of 2026, also dated 8 April, is enacted but not yet in force on the same database. Passage is not commencement, and commencement is not use: the 2010 regime and the banking act’s pending commencement are the proof. No administration in a generation has legislated transmission this substantively, and the framework is available to whichever government inherits it.

Fourth, the fiscal anchor. In July 2025 the government announced it would seek a 12-month extension of the IMF programme, an anchor through the election. The request submitted and approved was for three months. The government then dropped the extension route, completed the final review in January 2026, and entered the election year without a programme.

The IMF’s May staff statement records the outcome: fiscal pressures intensified by pre-election spending, a civil service wage adjustment, and agricultural subsidy overruns of about 1.3 per cent of GDP. The primary surplus is projected to fall from 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2025 to 1.1 per cent absent corrective measures. The outturn has already overtaken the projection. On the end-May numbers, the overall deficit reached 2.1 per cent of GDP, the full-year target consumed in five months, and the primary surplus stood at 0.2 per cent.

The sequence is a reversal of the government’s own stated request, at the point in the cycle where spending pressure was predictably highest. The authorities have reaffirmed commitment to a successor programme after the elections. That sharpens the finding: the anchor is wanted on both sides of the vote and absent only for it. The agricultural overruns in that finding are the bypass bill arriving. The support story and the fiscal pressure are the same policy viewed from opposite sides.

4. The Hinge: A Parabola

Corruption sits in both ledgers. The comparable index series begins in 2012, when the methodology changed; Zambia scored 37 that year. Across the PF decade the score slid to 33, with the trough reached under Lungu in 2020 and held through the handover. Under this government it rose to 37 in 2023 and 39 in 2024, the highest score Zambia has recorded on the index. It fell to 37 in 2025, the rank down seven places, the first decline in five years. The decline belongs to the PF decade; the recovery and the reversal belong to this government. The 2025 score equals the 2012 score: 14 years of movement net to zero, with the direction at the vote pointing down. Transparency International Zambia attributed the reversal to diversion of public funds through strategic business interests and political supporters ahead of these elections. That is the index custodian’s attribution, published in February.

The institutional record runs in two dated phases. July 2024: the ACC director general resigned amid kickback allegations. The board, whose chair, former Attorney General Musa Mwenye, had described the Commission’s management as pliant and answerable elsewhere, was dissolved within days. Commissioner O’Brien Kaaba turned whistleblower, alleging corruption within the state’s law offices. February 2026: the Commission, under new leadership, cleared Solicitor General Muchende, Copperbelt Minister Matambo, and Permanent Secretary Kawana. It announced that no cabinet minister was under active investigation, a declaration criticised by civil society and the former US ambassador. Kaaba’s dispute with the Solicitor General was settled out of court. The record therefore shows investigations reaching serving officials at the political tier and ending, in every high-profile instance, in clearance. One late case tests the pattern. In the campaign’s final fortnight, the outgoing Copperbelt police commissioner was charged with theft by public servant over copper cathodes worth USD448,596, alongside a magistrate and four others. The charge reaches the uniformed hierarchy; it does not reach the tier the clearances covered. The Lungu family faces prosecution. In the high-profile record, no serving member of the political executive has. The asymmetry, prosecution directed backwards and downwards, clearance directed inwards, is the operative finding.

The mechanism links the two ledgers. Sustained diversion becomes easier under two conditions: a delivery channel weak enough to feed on, and an error-reporting channel quiet enough to hide in. The corruption reversal and the legislative narrowing documented below occurred in the same period.

The precedent is 2006. Mwanawasa held the strongest macro position and the most credible anti-corruption record of any incumbent. He lost Lusaka and the Copperbelt to a campaign built substantially on the gap between a falling inflation rate and an accumulated price level. Household conditions decided the urban vote. This election runs under a threshold of 50 per cent plus one that no sitting president has comfortably cleared. Four indicators matter on Thursday night. The first is the urban vote, where diffusion is tested. The second is the threshold, where the Constitution binds. The third is the distance from the incumbent’s 59 per cent of 2021, which will show whether that result was a realignment or a receding wave. The fourth is the constituency vote in areas where CDF and school feeding penetrated deepest, where the breadth programmes face their first conversion test.

5. Ledger Two: The Upward Channel

April 2025: two statutes. The Cyber Security Act requires providers to install real-time interception capability and places the cyber security agency under the Office of the President. Interception requires a court order, obtainable ex parte as interception orders are. The concern is the breadth of the powers and the compulsory capability itself. The US embassy issued a surveillance advisory to its own citizens. The Cyber Crimes Act criminalises categories of online speech: harassment and humiliation, hate speech, and incitement of ethnic divisions, the last carrying life imprisonment. The terms are not defined. In a campaign analysed in regional blocs, the boundary of lawful comment on ethnicity sits with the prosecutor rather than the statute. The apparatus that classifies the speech answers to the office the speech would criticise. The UPND opposed the 2021 predecessor law from opposition; in office it re-enacted the architecture with shortened reporting lines.

The prosecution record across the term, under these and older statutes, is itemised and dated. May 2024: the PF secretary general was convicted of defaming the president and sentenced to 18 months with hard labour. Human Rights Watch recorded the conviction as coming despite the repeal of that offence in 2022. The repeal is a genuine credit. The conviction that followed it anyway is the entry beside it. 2024: journalist Thomas Zgambo was arrested twice and charged with sedition, a colonial-era offence, over posts about government transparency. January 2025: three people were arrested over statements about the president’s health. May 2025: former MP Munir Zulu was sentenced to 18 months with hard labour for a 2023 social media post. March 2026: two presidential candidates were charged under the cyber laws in one month. M’membe of the Socialist Party was arrested on 2 March over radio remarks on the delayed Lungu burial. Mundubile was detained at Kenneth Kaunda International Airport on 19 March and charged. May 2026: a 21-year-old blogger was arrested for sharing a video insulting the president. July 2026: a ZNBC journalist was arrested under the Cyber Crimes Act weeks before the vote, an arrest Amnesty International described as intimidation of journalists.

The Public Order Act, the colonial statute long used to restrict opposition assembly, remains in force. The current president was himself tear-gassed at home in 2017 and detained for four months on a treason charge later dropped. Parliament passed a replacement in May 2026. The President declined assent, citing inconsistency with judicial precedent. Whatever that reason’s merit, the statute remains available through this election.

December 2025: Bill 7. The Constitutional Court voided the original amendment process in June 2025 and directed a people-driven process led by an independent body. The government appointed its own technical committee, conducted nationwide consultations in the final quarter, revised the bill, and passed it with near-unanimous support, including PF members expelled by their party for voting in favour. The later process is fully on record, and the consultations were real. On the Court’s own language, neither satisfies the judgment. A government-appointed committee is a contested fit for the required independent body. Consultation conducted after the direction is fixed shapes the text, not the agenda. No further ruling has tested that reading. The same legislative period cut the voter register inspection window from 90 days to 14.

Below the statutes sits an unlegislated failure. The feedback reaching the state from its own side, its advisers, allies, and adjacent commentators, has become consistently favourable. Flattery and censorship produce the same output: approved information replacing accurate information.

The ledger carries credits. The Constitutional Court ruled against the state on Bill 7; the judgment stands, and its authors remain on the bench. The newspapers that condemned the Mongu police operation this week published freely in Lusaka. In the Zambia Election Research Network’s March survey, 51 per cent of respondents expected a completely free and fair election. Zambia is not an autocracy. Three days before the vote, on 10 August, Amnesty International published a briefing, based on May fieldwork, on what it called authoritarian practices eating away at human rights in Zambia. The documented finding is narrower: the upward channel has been restricted by statute, chilled by an itemised record of prosecution, and degraded by favourable filtering. Five years, under a government elected on a commitment to widen it.

6. The Closing Week

Democratic damage is recorded against whoever causes it. Both sides generated entries this week.

The documented record: Mundubile’s motorcade was blocked and stoned at Luampa, injuring a police chief inspector. Rallies at Mongu and Kalabo were dispersed with tear gas, and the Inspector General has ordered the operation reviewed. Campaign entourage members, including musicians and journalists, were detained at Mongu, 17 of them initially held without charge by the alliance’s count. Days before the vote, police raided the alliance’s media centre in Lusaka. More than 20 campaign staff were detained, by the alliance’s account without charge. Detaining performers, journalists, and the operators of a campaign’s communications in its final week is direct action against the carriers of the upward channel, whatever charges are eventually filed. The Barotse Royal Establishment, Western Province’s traditional authority, condemned the breach of order on its territory.

The reported and unresolved record sits between tiers, and it centres on two women: former ambassador Martha Lungu Mwitumwa, a campaign administrator, and Hannah Katontoka, who runs the candidate’s online platforms. The accounts conflict. Alliance-side reporting placed them among those detained in the raid. The family’s formal letter to the Inspector General describes an armed street seizure with live fire, and states that police stations confirmed neither woman was in custody, with no record of arrest. Videos of a street seizure circulated; they do not establish the men’s identity. On the campaign’s final day, the alliance reported members of its media and security teams still missing. A detention account and a no-custody confirmation cannot both stand, and the conflict between them is itself the entry. Detention becomes a process failure when its legal basis is undisclosed, custody goes unrecorded, or lawful time limits are breached. A seizure with no custody record is a category graver: the channel’s carriers do not face charges, they disappear from process altogether. On 10 August, Mwenye stated that Zambia now holds political detainees extra-judicially and appealed for their release or presentation to court. A published response disputed the characterisation, maintaining that fundamental freedoms remain intact. That the country’s former chief legal adviser and the government’s defenders are contesting the existence of extra-judicial political detention, in public, days before a vote, is itself an entry in this ledger. Resolving this record is a policing obligation that stands regardless of the result.

The further alleged record: Mundubile claimed cadres have operated in police uniforms and said Southern Province had been flooded with security personnel ahead of a planned visit. The alliance further alleged that funds raised to pay its polling agents were seized on 10 August, with police offering no comment by press time. Nine civil society organisations raised reports of SMS messages linking cash transfer payments to a vote for the president. These claims were unverified at the time of writing. The last allegation, resolved either way, bears directly on the results-chain demand.

The opposition’s entry: responding to ECZ guidance on ballot marking, Binwell Mpundu, the alliance’s presidential affairs chairman, stated on video that he was ready to die and ready to kill over the election. The video was deleted and attributed to AI generation and a hacked account. Mundubile publicly endorsed that explanation. Within a day, Mpundu confirmed the video was authentic and attributed the AI claim to his media team. Three distinct failures follow. The first is the threat itself, from a senior official of an alliance seeking state power. The second is the false AI attribution, which establishes that recorded evidence can be publicly disowned as machine-generated, degrading the country’s shared evidentiary baseline. The third is the candidate’s endorsement of a claim he could not verify, reversed by his own official within a day. The state restricts the upward channel by statute. The false attribution degrades it by precedent.

The count: three days out, the validity of ballot marks was still in legal dispute between the Commission and the alliance’s lawyers. The Commission has set 17 August as the expected announcement date, described by its own official as an administrative measure not prescribed by law. Its Chief Electoral Officer has committed to declaring the presidential result within 72 hours of the last station closing. Station results are announced and posted, and party agents receive signed forms. The narrower unresolved question, pressed by the opposition, is whether the progressive chain between station and national declaration remains continuously public. Zambian election credibility has historically rested on progressive announcement, verifiable by agents and observers as totals build. Disputed elections typically originate in the interval between polling and declaration. Claims made in that interval should be assessed on evidence, not affiliation.

7. The Cycle

The standard defence of the second ledger’s entries is that the same instruments were used against Hichilema. They were, and worse. The defence fails on its own structure: it measures the incumbent against his predecessor rather than against his commitments, which is the mechanism by which the instruments persist. State House defended this campaign’s violence as incomparable to the PF era. That is the same substitution, performed officially. The Public Order Act has served every administration since before independence. Over 60 years, the instruments that matter most have outlived every incumbent who condemned them. The repeal pledge now on offer has its own precedent: Hichilema promised repeal from opposition, delivered the defamation repeal, then re-enacted the cyber architecture. The stock behaves like the price level: the rate of abuse varies between administrations, and the stock does not fall. The alliance seeking to inherit that stock supplied this week’s own demonstration of how it handles restraint. The cycle requires no particular incumbent, only a successor willing to inherit.

The strongest argument against that successor is restoration risk, and it deserves full weight. The 2020 default, the under-disclosed arrears, and the institutional hollowing occurred under the PF. Mundubile and Makebi Zulu are products of that government. Markets would likely reprice Zambian risk within hours of a restoration. No single entry in either ledger carries more downside than an unmanaged restoration. Weighting it heavily is rational.

Three qualifications reduce it without removing it. First, the personnel are not confined to one side: the UPND has absorbed PF defectors into its ranks and candidate lists throughout the term. Second, a change of government is not a return to the past. Zambia has changed government three times: 1991 carried liberalisation forward, 2011 began the borrowing this ledger opens with, and 2021 produced the repair this ledger credits. Bleck and van de Walle’s comparative study of African electoral politics since 1990, with Zambia among its country cases, records continuity rather than rupture as the norm across alternations. Whoever wins inherits the constraint set rather than the predecessor’s choices: restructuring contracts with state-contingent clauses, a committed successor-programme path, and reserves that need markets willing to fund them. Third, structural reform does not prevent reversal; it raises its cost, slows it, and makes it visible. A repair that depends on its author retaining power indefinitely is not structure.

The ruin of a nation begins in the home of its people, and so does its salvation. The cycle ends when citizens stop measuring their side against the other side’s record.

8. The Last Open Channel

The headline argument prices half the system. The challenger offers to reopen the other half. His record and his alliance’s conduct price the offer. The trade-off claim fails on the scope condition: macro stabilisation never required the upward channel; diffusion and integrity did, and those are where the record fails. The corruption reversal and the narrowing of the channel occurred in the same period, and that co-occurrence is itself an entry.

Every other channel a citizen holds can be intermediated: posts interceptable under one statute, assemblies dispersible under another, journalism subject to investigation, submissions received after decisions are fixed. The ballot is the one signal a citizen originates without permission. Its carriage from station to declaration belongs to the Commission.

Vote with both ledgers open. Weigh the restructuring against the accumulated price level, and the transmission framework against the anchor requested and then dropped. Weigh the corruption reversal, the sequence of Bill 7, and the itemised record of detention against the credits the second ledger still carries. Hold one demand above the rest: the results chain, station by station, remains continuously public.

To whoever takes the oath in September: president after president inherited the instruments, condemned them, and retained them. The exit from the cycle is to dismantle an instrument while it retains its power. Dignity and order are the same system. Govern accordingly.

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Sources

Afrobarometer, Dispatch No. 1178: Amid Electricity Crisis, Zambians Favour Ending State Monopoly, Investing in Solar and Wind Power (7 May 2026).

Amnesty International, Authoritarian Practices Eating Away at Human Rights in Zambia (London, 10 August 2026).

Bank of Zambia, monetary and credit data (Lusaka, September 2025).

Bleck, Jaimie and Nicolas van de Walle, Electoral Politics in Africa since 1990: Continuity in Change (Cambridge University Press).

Canary Compass, prior publications including the fiscal update of 31 July 2026, and author’s calculations.

CIPESA, analysis of the 2025 cyber laws (Kampala, May 2025).

Constitutional Court of Zambia, judgment on the constitutional amendment process (Lusaka, June 2025).

Electoral Commission of Zambia, public statements on results procedures (Lusaka, August 2026).

Freedom House, Freedom on the Net: Zambia (Washington DC, 2025).

Global Network Initiative, statement on Zambia’s cyber laws (2025).

Graham, Matthew and Milan Svolik, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” American Political Science Review 114(2), 2020.

Human Rights Watch, reporting on the 2024 defamation conviction (2024).

International Monetary Fund, staff statement on Zambia (Washington DC, 14 May 2026).

International Monetary Fund, Sixth Review under the Extended Credit Facility, Country Report 26/21 (Washington DC, February 2026).

Ministry of Community Development and Social Services, social cash transfer caseload data (Lusaka).

Ministry of Energy, generation and access data (Lusaka, 2026).

Oxford Improving Institutions for Growth, briefing on Kenya’s Constituency Development Fund (Oxford).

Parliament of Zambia, legislative records (Lusaka, 2025 to 2026).

Press reporting: Bloomberg, JURIST, Lusaka Times, News Diggers, Open Zambia, Zambia Monitor, and Zambian Observer.

Transparency International Zambia, Corruption Perceptions Index commentary (Lusaka, February 2026).

World Bank, drought response financing under the Crisis Response Window (Washington DC, July 2024).

Zambia Statistics Agency, CPI releases and retail price series (Lusaka, July 2026).

Zambia Statistics Agency, Living Conditions Monitoring Survey 2022 and Labour Force Survey reports 2021 and 2024 (Lusaka).

ZambiaLII, Acts of Parliament Nos. 3 and 4 of 2025 and Nos. 5, 7, 9, and 11 of 2026 (Lusaka).

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About the Author

Dean N. Onyambu is the Founder and Chief Strategist of Canary Compass, a financial research publication focused on African monetary architecture and financial sovereignty. He brings 18 years of experience across trading, fund leadership, and economic policy, with senior roles at Standard Bank, First Capital Bank, and Opportunik Global Fund.

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