The Referee Is Wearing a Jersey
How Zambia’s state machinery tilted the playing field before Thursday’s vote
By Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba
On Thursday, Zambians will queue at polling stations across the country and cast their votes, and international observers will watch the counts and, in all likelihood, pronounce the day itself “orderly”. But an election is not a day. It is the months of campaigning that precede it, the rallies held or blocked, the candidates registered or stalled, the journalists who report freely or look over their shoulders. And by that measure, according to a research briefing Amnesty International published on the eve of the vote, this election was compromised long before the first ballot box was sealed.
The briefing, Authoritarian Practices Eating Away at Human Rights in Zambia, is built on interviews conducted in Lusaka this May with human rights defenders, journalists, student leaders and opposition politicians. What they described to Amnesty’s researchers was not the crude vote-rigging of caricature but something quieter and harder to fight: the steady repurposing of neutral state institutions whether it be the police, the prosecutors, the registrar’s office and Parliament itself into machinery that works for the ruling UPND party and against everyone else.
The people Amnesty spoke to had their own vocabulary for it. One called it lawfare. Another described a subtle consolidation of power. A third spoke of repression that had been legalized, dressed up in the language of governance reform.
Consider the most basic act of any campaign: gathering supporters in a public place. The law governing assemblies in Zambia is the Public Order Act, passed by the colonial administration in 1955, which asks only that organizers notify police in advance. The police long ago converted that notification into a permission system, and permission, it turns out, flows along party lines.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression noted last year that opposition and civil society gatherings were being banned or broken up under the Act while ruling party meetings went ahead without incident. The pattern shows up in specific, documented moments. In April 2024, police arrested two television journalists at a ground in Kafue where a new opposition alliance had planned a rally, and made them delete their interviews before letting them go. The rally itself never happened as authorities had banned it on the technicality that the coalition wasn’t registered.
Parliament did finally pass a replacement law this May, but the Law Association of Zambia warned that the new Public Gatherings Bill criminalized peaceful assembly and handed officials sweeping discretion, and President Hakainde Hichilema sent it back in June, citing conflicts with court precedent. That veto sounds like restraint until you notice what it actually accomplished: the 1955 Act, with seven decades of abuse behind it, will govern the final days of this campaign. An opposition that must ask the state’s permission to hold a rally is not contesting an election, it is virtually petitioning for the right to contest one.
Then there is the criminal docket deployed against its critics and those perceived as enemies of the UPND. Amnesty’s briefing traces how sedition, criminal libel, espionage and cybercrime charges have become the standard response to criticism of the government. The names pile up. Thomas Zgambo, a journalist, arrested on sedition charges in 2024 and facing up to seven years. The opposition figures JJ Banda, Emmanuel Mwamba and Munir Zulu.
Social media activists whose offense was posting. One politician told Amnesty what happened after he criticized the government’s handling of a mealie meal shortage on social media: police forced their way into his home, and he spent three days in detention without food or water while his family had no idea where he was. He came away convinced the point of the exercise was never prosecution but the process of crude punishment to demonstrate what could be done to him and others like him.
That reading is borne out by the numbers, because remarkably few of these cases end in conviction. They don’t need to. The arrest, the headlines, the months of court dates, the possibility that any post might be the one that brings officers to the door, this is the punishment, and its real audience is everyone watching.
Journalists told Amnesty they now simply avoid stories about corruption and human rights, not because anyone ordered them to but because the new cyber laws passed in 2025 make it too dangerous not to. Those laws criminalize loosely defined harassment and false information, and they built a monitoring center empowered to intercept communications without a judge’s warrant.
A government that can lawfully read its critics’ messages, and prosecute what it finds under definitions that stretch to fit, has turned the legal system itself into a campaign asset.
Perhaps the starkest story in the briefing concerns the office that decides which parties exist at all. The Registrar of Societies holds broad discretionary power over registration, with few safeguards against its abuse, and this year that discretion fell on the constitutional lawyer John Sangwa, whose new party was tangled in administrative delays so prolonged that it could not be registered in time to contest the election. He eventually pulled out of the presidential race altogether. Strip away the paperwork and the plain fact remains: an arm of the executive determined who would appear on Thursday’s ballot.
The same warped logic shadows civil society. The NGO Act of 2009 – a law Hichilema himself denounced as draconian when he was in opposition – is still on the books, and the bill meant to replace it would have given the state even wider powers to suspend and dissolve organizations on vague grounds. It was shelved after an outcry, but watchdog groups understood the message, delivered as it was in an election year.
Even the legislature’s ordinary work was bent to the calendar. In early May, in the days before Parliament dissolved, lawmakers debated, amended and passed 77 bills, a volume that made real scrutiny arithmetically impossible. Civil society groups who were invited to hearings told Amnesty their submissions vanished without trace into final texts that ignored them; the consultations, one said, were formalities. A legal challenge to the whole rushed process was batted from the High Court to the Constitutional Court on jurisdictional grounds while the clock ran out. Laws that will shape Zambian civic life for years were thus enacted at a speed designed to outrun objection.
And beneath all of it runs the oldest tool: violence, selectively tolerated. Amnesty received credible reports that attacks by people aligned with the ruling UPND routinely go uninvestigated. The opposition politician Sean Tembo says party cadres assaulted him in 2024 inside a police station in Kawambwa, where he had gone seeking protection and that officers responded by asking him to leave while his attackers waited outside.
This April, a journalist named Alfonso Kasongo was beaten by ruling party members for filming them as they thrashed a young man at a party gathering. No elaborate conspiracy is needed here. When police protect one side’s supporters and abandon the other’s, the state has picked a team, and everyone in the country can see which one.
There is a bitter symmetry to all this. Hichilema won the 2021 election promising a new dawn, pledging at his inauguration to free the media and restore the rule of law. Five years later, Amnesty’s researchers found the same laws doing the same work, some of them now reinforced. “Authorities have resorted to the familiar playbook of using the law to criminalize peaceful dissent,” said Tigere Chagutah, the organization’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, launching the briefing.
Whoever is declared the winner this week will inherit an enviable toolkit of repression: a public order law that makes opposition rallies conditional, cyber statutes that make criticism prosecutable, a registrar who can decide which rivals get to exist, and a police force practiced at looking away.
SIMPLY ADMIT DEFEAT. PERIOD