Built to Last: How the UPND’s 2026 Adoption Process Engineered a Party for the Next 100 Years
By George N. Mtonga, MBA
Great political parties are not sustained by charisma alone. They are built on systems — institutional structures that outlast individual leaders, survive electoral cycles, and renew themselves from the ground up. As Zambia marched toward the August 2026 general elections, the United Party for National Development did something that few African political parties have ever attempted with any seriousness: it ran a rigorous, multi-layered primary adoption process that filtered candidates through grassroots sentiment, internal party structures, documentary verification, and face-to-face scrutiny, all before a single vote was cast in the general election.
This was not merely an administrative exercise. It was an act of institutional architecture. And having now concluded that process, the UPND has laid the foundation for a party capable of governing and winning for a century.
A Three-Layer Filter: From the Ward to the Secretariat
What distinguished the UPND’s 2026 adoption process was its depth. Rather than relying on a single vote or a back-room decision, the party constructed a cascading system of evaluation that spanned three distinct levels.
At the ward and constituency level, primary elections were held across all wards in every constituency ahead of the August 2026 general elections. These were not mere formalities. The results were ward-by-ward, transparent, and critically, public. In Nangoma Constituency, incumbent MP Hon. Eng. Collins Nzovu polled 82.2% of the vote, finishing well ahead of three challengers — a commanding result that demonstrated the merit-based accountability built into the system. Candidates had to earn their adoption, not assume it.
At the secretariat level, all aspiring candidates for the positions of Member of Parliament, Council Chairperson, and Mayor were summoned to attend mandatory physical interviews at the party secretariat in Lusaka. Aspirants were required to present their membership cards, original voters’ cards, National Registration Cards, and original academic qualification documents. This was institutional vetting in its truest form — the kind that demanded paper-trail accountability, not merely popularity.
And at the public level, the UPND made history by allowing the general public to participate in the adoption process for the first time. Through a free mobile platform, citizens dialled *2026# from any phone network to cast opinion poll votes for their preferred aspiring candidates for MP, Mayor, or Council Chairperson. The data gathered informed final adoption decisions, giving ordinary Zambians a voice inside a process that had historically been closed to them.
Three layers. Three accountability tests. A ward primary, a secretariat interview, and a public opinion poll. Together, they formed the most comprehensive candidate vetting architecture in Zambia’s modern political history.
The *2026# Innovation: Democracy in Your Palm
The *2026# platform deserves special attention, not merely as a political novelty but as a structural statement about the kind of party the UPND intends to be.
The initiative arrived at a politically sensitive moment. Delimitation had created dozens of new constituencies, opening fresh political contests across the country and intensifying adoption battles that could easily have fractured the party from within. Rather than managing that pressure through imposition and hierarchy, the UPND chose transparency and participation.
Candidate selection in Zambia has historically been dominated by party hierarchies, repeatedly triggering accusations of favouritism, elite capture, and grassroots alienation. By introducing a public-facing opinion mechanism, the ruling party blended internal party structures with broader voter sentiment, particularly in highly competitive constituencies where popularity on the ground carried more political weight than seniority within party ranks.
This is smart institutional design. A party that listens to its people before finalising candidates is a party that stays connected to its base. And parties that stay connected to their base do not collapse. They evolve.
Discipline as the Backbone of Longevity
A rigorous adoption process means nothing without the discipline to enforce it. And the UPND demonstrated precisely that.
Through an internal memorandum signed by Chairman for Elections and Campaigns Hon. Likando Mufalali, the party made clear that primary results alone did not guarantee adoption. The National Management Committee had resolved that several other considerations and internal processes would be taken into account before final adoptions were made. Aspirants, party structures, and members were firmly advised against premature celebrations on social media and mainstream media, with the warning that such conduct risked creating divisions within the party.
This was not a party stumbling through its own process. It was a party managing its political temperature with precision, reminding aspirants that merit and institutional judgment, not noise, determine the outcome. Parties that cannot manage their own adoption process cannot manage a country. The UPND managed both.
The system also protected the party from opportunism. Late-defecting opposition figures who sought to ride the UPND ticket without contributing to its struggles found themselves exposed by the very structure they sought to exploit. The ward-level primaries, with their ward-by-ward vote counts and mandatory documentation requirements, served as a natural firewall against infiltration by political opportunists seeking to reap where they did not sow.
The 100-Year Argument
What does it take for a political party to survive a century? The historical record is instructive. Parties that collapse do so because they centralise power too tightly, fail to renew their candidate pool, disconnect from their grassroots base, or become vehicles for individual ambition rather than collective mission. The UPND’s 2026 adoption architecture directly addressed each of these failure modes.
The ward-level primaries ensured that candidate selection stayed close to the people. The public *2026# opinion poll ensured that even non-members could signal their preferences, expanding the party’s social contract beyond its formal membership. The secretariat interviews ensured that candidates met minimum standards of documentation, loyalty, and credibility. And the NMC’s oversight, its insistence that primary results were advisory rather than automatically binding, ensured that institutional judgment tempered pure popularity.
By integrating mobile technology into the adoption process at a moment when Zambia’s youth population is growing faster than any other demographic, the UPND positioned itself to speak directly to a generation that demands participation over imposition. That is not just good politics. It is generational strategy.
Systems Outlast Leaders
President Hakainde Hichilema will not lead the UPND forever. No leader does. What will determine whether this party governs Zambia for decades to come is not the longevity of any individual, but the strength of the institutions it builds while in power.
The 2026 adoption process was one of those institutions. It was transparent enough to earn public trust. It was rigorous enough to filter for competence. It was disciplined enough to resist capture by opportunists. And it was technologically forward-looking enough to speak to a generation that refuses to be spectators in its own democracy.
A party that selects its councillors, mayors, and Members of Parliament through genuine multi-layered scrutiny, ward by ward, ward to secretariat, secretariat to the public, is a party that knows who it is and what it stands for. That clarity of identity, replicated across five elections, ten elections, fifteen elections, is what builds the institutional memory and grassroots loyalty that keep a party alive long after its founding generation has passed.
The UPND did not merely build a candidate list for August 2026. It built a party for the next hundred years.