Zambia's Election Was Clean Enough for Washington. It Wasn't Clean.

Hakainde Hichilema was sworn in for a second term as Zambia's president on September 1, and the numbers his government likes to cite are real: inflation down from a 2021 peak above 24 percent to roughly 6.6 percent this spring, the kwacha up nearly a fifth against the dollar, growth ticking toward 7-8 percent. It is the story the IMF wants told about debt restructuring done right. It is also, entirely separately, the story of a government that raided its main challenger's home the day after the vote, watched a former minister die in the operation, and jailed the challenger himself on treason charges he has called fabricated.

Both things happened. Zambia's electoral commission gave Hichilema roughly 60 percent of the vote on August 13. Opposition candidate Brian Mundubile put his own share at 38 percent and said tally papers went missing from polling stations before counting was suspended for six hours amid violence at counting centres. An observer mission later found that 30 constituencies had votes added after the fact, artificially inflating turnout — while concluding, conveniently, that the padding didn't change who won. That is the kind of finding that looks rigorous right up until you ask why a clean election needs its irregularities graded on a curve.

The day after the vote, security forces raided a property linked to Mundubile's circle. Eleven people were arrested, weapons were reportedly found, and former minister Mutotwe Kafwaya was killed in the operation — a killing Amnesty International called "deeply alarming." Mundubile and his running mate Makebi Zulu took refuge in a UN building in Lusaka before turning themselves in and being charged with treason. The UN's own human rights chief said he was concerned about arrests of opposition figures, some of which predated the election entirely. None of that reads like the record of a government confident it won cleanly.

What it reads like is a familiar trade: deliver macroeconomic stability that foreign creditors and Western governments can point to, and buy a permission slip for whatever happens to the people who get in the way domestically. The Trump administration sent an assistant secretary of state to Hichilema's inauguration and met with him separately, even as members of Congress raised alarms before the vote. Copper matters more to Washington than a Zambian opposition leader's treason charge. It is the same calculus applied to plenty of client states — repression is a domestic affair, growth figures are everyone's business.

The inflation chart Hichilema's government hands out at investor conferences is accurate. That's precisely the point: a state can post real, defensible economic numbers and be, at the same moment, a state that disappears its critics into pretrial detention on invented security threats. Nothing about a falling CPI print excuses a body count from an election-week raid or a UN building used as a refuge from your own police. The two facts don't cancel out. One is the receipt Western governments wanted to see before they looked away from the other.

Sources

BBC: Zambia election opposition leader detained over treason allegations
AP via ABC: Zambia opposition leader sought refuge, now accused of treason
Zambia's president sworn in for second term while opponent detained
Zambia bonds shrug off election turmoil as Hichilema starts second term with rival facing treason charge
Trump administration warming to Hichilema following disputed reelection
afriref.dev: Zambia CPI inflation year-on-year, ZamStats data
Trading Economics: Zambia Inflation Rate