CONTEXT | Win Lusaka, Win Copperbelt, Still Lose State House
Antonio Mwanza knows something about electoral confidence. As a senior media figure in the Patriotic Front before the 2021 election, he belonged to a political establishment convinced it could retain power. The PF had incumbency, money, structures and control of government. It still lost. Five years later, now leading the Democratic Progressive Party, Mwanza is offering Brian Mundubile and the opposition a rather different message: study 2021 carefully, because Zambia’s electoral arithmetic does not bend to campaign confidence.
His central argument deserves attention six days before voting. Lusaka and the Copperbelt matter enormously, but they are not Zambia. The 2021 register contained 1,243,619 voters in Lusaka and 1,025,897 on the Copperbelt, together accounting for roughly 32.3 percent of registered voters at the time. The remaining provinces contained more than two-thirds of the electorate. The map has expanded again for 2026. This means any strategy built around simply “taking Lusaka and Copperbelt” immediately encounters a mathematical problem: what happens across the rest of Zambia?
There is another problem with the claim. Brian Mundubile has never previously contested a presidential election, so there is no presidential voting record from which anyone can conclude that Lusaka or the Copperbelt “belongs” to him. He may win either province next Thursday. He may win both. Hichilema may retain them. Until ballots are counted, all three remain possibilities. Rally attendance and social-media enthusiasm cannot establish ownership of an electorate containing millions of registered voters.
History provides a useful restraint. Zambia’s two largest urbanised provinces are competitive political markets rather than reliable presidential sweep provinces. In 2021, Hichilema won the Copperbelt, but his victory was substantial rather than absolute. The ECZ constituency returns show the two principal candidates continuing to divide the vote even inside heavily contested urban seats. In Nkana, for example, Hichilema received 58.41 percent against Edgar Lungu’s 39.06 percent. In Wusakile, the split was 53.10 percent against 44.14 percent. These were victories, but the losing candidate remained very much present.
Go backwards and the same competitive character appears under different political circumstances. In 2016, Edgar Lungu defeated Hichilema nationally by only 100,530 votes, 1,860,877 against 1,760,347. The Copperbelt and Lusaka were important to that contest, but neither eliminated the need to accumulate votes elsewhere. In 2011, Michael Sata’s urban strength was formidable. In Matero, for example, ECZ records show him taking 68.49 percent against Rupiah Banda’s 24.58 percent. Even during the PF wave which carried Sata into State House, substantial minorities continued voting for competing candidates. Zambia’s urban politics has historically produced winners and losers, not empty territory.
This is where Mwanza’s phrase, “lose intelligently”, becomes politically useful. Hichilema’s eventual pathway to State House was not constructed merely by protecting Southern, Western and North-Western provinces. Over successive elections, the UPND worked on reducing its deficits elsewhere until those losses became survivable. By 2021, Hichilema could lose a province and still collect a meaningful share of its vote. National elections reward precisely this behaviour. Losing 55 to 40 is fundamentally different from losing 85 to 10. A campaign does not always need to capture hostile territory. Sometimes it simply needs to stop bleeding there.
The lesson applies directly to Mundubile. Winning Lusaka and Copperbelt narrowly would be useful but insufficient if Hichilema simultaneously builds enormous buffers elsewhere. Winning them 60 to 35 would be considerably more valuable, but even this would not remove the requirement to perform competitively across Central, Eastern and the Northern circuit while suppressing UPND margins in Southern, Western and North-Western.
Mundubile therefore needs several electoral events to occur together. He needs to reconstruct much of the former PF coalition, expand beyond it, flip important battlegrounds and avoid catastrophic losses in UPND heartlands. None is impossible. The difficulty lies in accomplishing all of them on the same ballot.
The rural vote makes this calculation even more consequential. Mwanza estimates roughly 5.2 million voters are in rural Zambia against about 3.5 million in urban areas. Whatever the precise classification methodology behind those figures, the strategic principle is sound: Zambia cannot elect a president through metropolitan politics alone.
Lusaka Province itself extends beyond central Lusaka, while the Copperbelt contains agricultural and rural communities whose political priorities may differ markedly from those dominating Facebook discussions in Kitwe, Ndola or Lusaka. Free education, FISP, Social Cash Transfers, CDF projects, feeder roads, teacher recruitment and access to health services can carry greater political weight in such communities. Cost-of-living pressure remains real, but Zambia does not experience it through one uniform political lens.
Mwanza’s warning is particularly striking because it comes from someone who witnessed the opposite assumption from inside government. The PF entered 2021 with incumbency and formidable organisational advantages. Hichilema nevertheless finished with 2,852,348 votes nationally against Lungu’s 1,870,780 according to the ECZ results portal.
The lesson was not simply that the PF lost. It was that a party can appear dominant from inside its own political ecosystem while the national electorate is assembling a different verdict outside it.
This is why neither camp should approach August 13 believing victory has already been delivered. Mundubile’s crowds do not prove that he has inherited Edgar Lungu’s electorate. Hichilema’s incumbency does not guarantee that his 2021 coalition remains intact. Lusaka and Copperbelt do not belong to the opposition. Southern, Western and North-Western should not be treated as votes already counted for the UPND. Voters are citizens, not political inventory.
The serious question for both campaigns is how much of their historical base they can retain, how deeply they can penetrate hostile territory and how efficiently their structures can convert political sympathy into actual turnout.
Mwanza’s most important contribution, therefore, is not a prediction about who wins next Thursday. It is a reminder of how presidents are actually elected. Zambia has ten provinces, millions of rural voters and an electorate with a history of splitting differently across regions. A presidential candidate can lose provinces and still win Zambia. What becomes dangerous is losing them badly.
Winning State House is built from accumulated margins, including votes collected where a candidate knows he will finish second. Campaign noise can obscure this arithmetic. The ballot does not.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The People’s Brief approaches electoral analysis by interrogating the numbers behind political claims. We review Electoral Commission records, historical election databases, voter distribution, provincial margins and previous voting behaviour before drawing conclusions. Our purpose is neither to manufacture certainty nor declare winners before Zambia votes. It is to give readers enough evidence to distinguish political confidence from electoral probability and to approach August 13 with realistic expectations.
© The People’s Brief | Ollus R. Ndomu