INSIGHT | Mundubile’s Defeat Began Before the Counting
Brian Mundubile says he will challenge Zambia’s presidential election result. He argues the Electoral Commission of Zambia announced figures which were “flawed, misrepresented in many instances” and says his NRPUP has documented irregularities involving ballot security, transportation and differences between polling-station records and the final tally. Those allegations now belong in the legal process. If his lawyers possess evidence, a court is the proper place to test it.
But a legal challenge should not prevent a political examination of how Mundubile lost. The final numbers expose a weakness which existed long before ECZ completed its count: NRPUP entered the election with a severely uneven national coalition. Mundubile built formidable support across the old PF belt, but Hichilema constructed much larger vote reservoirs elsewhere.
Consider the three provinces NRPUP struggled to penetrate. Hichilema received 718,569 votes in Southern, 436,624 in Western and 387,751 in North-Western. Combined, those provinces delivered 1,542,944 votes to the incumbent. Mundubile received only 26,260 in Southern, 11,972 in Western and 14,598 in North-Western, for a combined 52,830.
The difference from those three provinces alone was therefore 1,490,114 votes in Hichilema’s favour. Hichilema’s eventual national advantage was 1,111,109 votes. Put differently, Mundubile spent the rest of Zambia recovering hundreds of thousands of votes from a deficit created overwhelmingly across three provinces. He recovered a substantial portion. He did not recover enough.
Now compare Mundubile’s strongest regional bloc. Eastern gave him 350,468, Luapula 235,439, Northern 229,744 and Muchinga 143,409. Combined, Mundubile collected 959,060 votes from those four provinces. Hichilema collected 477,222 there. Mundubile’s net advantage was therefore 481,838 votes.
This is the central arithmetic of the election. Hichilema’s advantage from Southern, Western and North-Western was more than three times Mundubile’s advantage from Eastern, Luapula, Northern and Muchinga. Mundubile could win more territory across his northern and eastern belt and still lose nationally because his victories were not producing anything close to the margins Hichilema accumulated elsewhere.
Copperbelt and Lusaka could not rescue him. Mundubile won Lusaka 334,772 to 316,004, an advantage of only 18,768. Copperbelt was effectively a draw, with Hichilema actually finishing slightly ahead, 371,724 to 370,085, a difference of just 1,639 votes. The opposition performed competitively in Zambia’s two major urban centres. But competitive urban voting cannot neutralise a 1.49-million-vote deficit accumulated elsewhere.
This is why the campaign itself deserves scrutiny. NRPUP treated Southern Province as politically inaccessible and did not seriously campaign there. Party figures later explained their absence partly through concerns about the environment they expected to encounter. Whatever the reason, withdrawing politically from an entire province carrying 29 constituencies was a strategic gamble. Elections do not award points for provinces considered unwinnable. A candidate does not have to win hostile territory. He has to lose it intelligently.
Mundubile needed precisely this strategy. Suppose he could not defeat Hichilema in Southern, Western or North-Western. That was hardly surprising. His task was to move from catastrophic losses towards manageable ones. Every additional 50,000 or 100,000 votes secured across those provinces would have reduced the burden placed on Eastern, Luapula, Northern, Muchinga, Lusaka and Copperbelt. Instead, he obtained only 52,830 votes across all three provinces combined, against Hichilema’s 1.54 million.
Hichilema understood the opposite side of this equation. He lost Eastern 350,468 to 187,654, Luapula 235,439 to 99,569, Muchinga 143,409 to 63,463 and Northern 229,744 to 126,536. Those were clear Mundubile victories. But Hichilema still extracted 477,222 votes from those four hostile provinces. He did not need to conquer them. He needed to survive them.
The contrast becomes even more striking when individual constituency results are considered. Mundubile could win Malole 20,431 to 3,994, Bangweulu 26,493 to 9,023 or Chipangali East 14,173 to 6,327. These were strong victories. Hichilema, however, could answer with results such as Mapatizya 38,365 to 144, while constituencies across Western and North-Western repeatedly reduced Mundubile to hundreds or low thousands. Several opposition victories were required simply to cancel one overwhelming Hichilema margin.
This context also makes Mundubile’s early victory claim politically important. “We won this election right from the start,” he now says. But after claiming victory from the party’s Parallel Vote Tabulation, he subsequently instructed provincial coordinators and candidates to collect GEN 20 forms, saying: “By the end of today, I expect us to have wrapped up this exercise and established a clear picture of our results.”
There is an obvious inconsistency. If NRPUP still needed GEN 20 forms to establish a clear picture, on what complete numerical picture had the earlier victory claim rested? This does not determine whether irregularities occurred. Nor does it invalidate evidence NRPUP may eventually place before a court. It does, however, raise questions about the completeness of the PVT used to pronounce victory before the party had finished assembling its own primary election records.
The polling-agent question is equally important, although it requires care. NRPUP alleges manipulation in areas where Mundubile performed extremely poorly. A serious election petition can test those claims against GEN 20 forms, party-agent copies, polling-station records and constituency aggregates. The editorial question is different: how extensive was NRPUP’s agent coverage in Southern, Western and North-Western, and how complete was its reporting chain on election night? If agents were deployed comprehensively, their records should provide the foundation for reconciliation. If coverage contained major gaps, the confidence of the early PVT becomes harder to explain.
None of this means every concern raised by Mundubile should be dismissed. He says his party has “enough evidence and records to submit to appropriate institutions within the stipulated period.” He should be allowed to do precisely this. Election disputes are settled through evidence and law, not political intuition. A court can examine material unavailable to journalists or the public.
But there are two separate questions, and Zambia should resist mixing them. Was every aspect of the election properly administered? Mundubile is entitled to challenge this. Does the political geography of the declared result make sense? On the figures available, it does.
Mundubile appears to have inherited and consolidated a substantial part of the former PF electoral coalition. His 1.856 million votes demonstrate a serious opposition base. But consolidation is not expansion. The old PF geography could make him competitive across Eastern, Luapula, Muchinga, Northern and urban parts of Lusaka and Copperbelt. It could not, by itself, carry him to State House while Southern, Western and North-Western were delivering an almost 1.5-million net advantage to his opponent.
This may therefore be the harder lesson from Mundubile’s first presidential campaign. His biggest problem was not simply where he lost. It was how badly he lost where he was weak. Hichilema survived hostile provinces. Mundubile was overwhelmed in his.
The courts can determine whether the election was legally compromised. But no court petition should spare NRPUP from conducting its own political audit. Before asking how ECZ produced a Mundubile defeat, the party must also ask how its campaign produced only 52,830 votes across Southern, Western and North-Western combined.
Those are two different inquiries. Both matter.
– The People’s Brief | Editors