Electoral Process Bill of 2026:The Bill That Turns the Key: How Hakainde Hichilema‘s Govt Is Writing Itself a Permanent Lock on the Ballot

Electoral Process Bill of 2026

ELECTIONS & RULE OF LAW

The Bill That Turns the Key: How Hakainde Hichilema‘s Government Is Writing Itself a Permanent Lock on the Ballot

A new electoral bill gives the Ministry of Home Affairs permanent statutory control over who can stand for election in Zambia. Legal analysts say it enshrines in law the same abuse of power used to block John Sangwa’s party from the August 2026 ballot.

By Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba   •   16 April 2026


There is a word for what Zambia’s government has done with the Electoral Process (Amendment) Bill, 2026.

That word is consolidation.

What began as a pattern of administrative abuse — documented, protested, and ruled against by the Constitutional Court — is now being quietly dressed up as electoral reform and written permanently into law.

The Bill was tabled by Attorney General Mulilo Kabesha, SC (former UPND candidate for Kabwe constituency and purported cousin of the First Family), and runs to twenty-six clauses covering everything from voter registration to proportional representation. Most of it is technical and unremarkable. But buried within it are provisions that, taken together, hand the Ministry of Home Affairs a structural chokehold over the electoral process that no independent candidate or opposition party should ever have to tolerate.

To understand why this matters, you need to know what happened to John Sangwa earlier this year.
Sangwa, one of Zambia’s most distinguished constitutional lawyers and the founding partner of Simeza Sangwa and Associates, launched the Movement for National Renewal in October 2025. By March 2026, the Movement had enrolled over one million supporters — a figure that speaks for itself. He applied to register it as a political party with the Registrar of Societies. What followed was one of the more brazen pieces of institutional manipulation in recent Zambian political history.

The Registrar, whose office sits within the Ministry of Home Affairs under Minister Jack Mwiimbu, refused to register the Movement unless Sangwa first obtained police clearance. The police, also answerable to Mwiimbu’s ministry, refused to issue clearance on the ground that the Movement was not yet a registered party. Around and around. The Constitutional Court had ruled just days earlier that the Societies Act must be applied in conformity with Article 60 of the Constitution, which protects the right to form and join political parties. The Registrar continued regardless.

Sangwa withdrew from the election in April, citing a participation process that had been made practically impossible.

“In effect, this created a circular barrier: the police declined to clear the programme because the Movement was not registered, while the Registrar insisted on police clearance as a precondition for registration.”
— John Sangwa, SC — Withdrawal Statement, April 2026

That is the context in which the Electoral Process (Amendment) Bill must be read. Because what the government is now proposing to do — through the Attorney General, the same man who argued in court that the Political Parties Act could not be enacted for financial reasons — is to take that circular trap and bake it into statute.

The central mechanism is what the Bill calls an “adoption certificate.” Under the proposed amendments to sections 30, 31, and 33 of the Electoral Process Act, every candidate sponsored by a political party — for President, Member of Parliament, Mayor, Council Chairperson, or Councillor — must file an adoption certificate signed by the secretary-general of a party “registered with the Registrar of Societies.” No registration, no certificate. No certificate, no nomination. No nomination, no ballot.

Read that again slowly. The right to stand for election — a right guaranteed under Article 45 of the Constitution — would be made contingent on a discretionary administrative act by a civil servant employed in a ministry headed by a political appointee of the sitting President. There is no independent tribunal to appeal to. There is no statutory timeline within which a registration decision must be made. There is no constitutional safeguard against the kind of deliberate delay that left Sangwa’s movement in limbo for months. There is only the Minister of Home Affairs and the official who reports to him.

The proportional representation provisions are equally concerning. The Bill introduces a new framework for allocating parliamentary and council seats to women, youth, and persons with disabilities through party lists.

These are welcome in principle. But the lists must be signed by the secretary-general of a registered party.

A party denied registration cannot submit a list. Its presidential candidate’s votes count for nothing in the proportional allocation. Under the Bill’s formula, that party is simply invisible. One registration refusal by a civil servant in Mwiimbu’s ministry erases a party from every layer of Parliament.

What was achieved against Sangwa through administrative obstruction would, under this Bill, become a permanent and legally unchallengeable feature of Zambia’s electoral law.
— Constitutional Law Analysis Unit — Policy Note, April 2026

There is another amendment in the Bill that has attracted less attention but deserves more. Section 110(2) of the Electoral Process Act currently empowers the Electoral Commission of Zambia to “disqualify” a political party or candidate. The Bill replaces that word with “suspend.”

The change sounds moderate, even liberal. It is neither. Disqualification is a definitive act. It can be challenged in court on clear grounds, and a court can reinstate.

Suspension is indefinite, revocable at the Commission’s discretion, and far more easily deployed as a tactical instrument — imposed weeks before an election deadline, lifted days after the relevant window has closed. The government is not reducing its powers over political actors. It is making them more flexible.

None of this, it must be stressed, occurs in a legal vacuum. The Constitutional Court ruled in April that Parliament’s failure to enact a Political Parties Act since 2016 is unconstitutional. The Act would establish an independent body to regulate political parties, insulated from ministerial direction. It is precisely what the current situation requires.

The Attorney General acknowledged in court that the Bill had stalled since 2017 due to “financial challenges.” The Electoral Process (Amendment) Bill suggests those challenges are selective.

The government found the resources to draft twenty-six clauses of electoral amendments. It simply has not found the will to enact the one piece of legislation the Constitution actually demands.

The Hichilema government came to power on a platform built, in substantial part, around the rule of law and democratic participation. Hichilema himself was arrested in 2017 under charges that drew condemnation from many quarters.

Mwiimbu spent years as a vocal critic of precisely the kind of executive overreach he is now presiding over.

The irony has not been lost on constitutional lawyers, civil society, or the more than one million Zambians who signed up to support Sangwa’s movement before it was administratively strangled.

What this Bill proposes is not the reform of a broken system.

It is the entrenchment of the broken system’s most useful feature: the ability of the executive, through the Ministry of Home Affairs and its subordinate Registrar of Societies, to determine which political parties are permitted to exist in any meaningful electoral sense.

The Sangwa experience demonstrated that this power exists and will be used. The Bill proposes to make it permanent, statutory, and unchallengeable.

Democratic elections require more than a polling day.

They require that the field of participation is genuinely open — that the decision of who gets to compete is made by law and constitution, not by a minister’s telephone call to a civil servant.

Zambia’s Constitution says as much. Our Constitutional Court has said as much.

The Electoral Process (Amendment) Bill, 2026 says something different entirely. Parliament would do well to read it carefully and reject if with the contempt it deserves.