WHY TERM LIMITS MATTER: A RESPONSE TO A LAZY COMPARISON.
By Thompson K Luzendi
There’s an argument making the rounds defending the removal of presidential term limits: since councillors, council chairpersons, Members of Parliament, and mayors don’t have term limits, why should the President? On the surface it sounds like a fair point. In reality, it’s a lazy argument, one that reveals a lack of understanding of how our constitutional democracy is actually structured, and what makes the presidency fundamentally different from every other elected office in this country.
You simply cannot compare a mayor, a councillor, a council chairperson, or an MP to the President. The President is both Head of State and Head of Government. Practically every individual who works in government, from parastatal employees to public hospital staff, from public university lecturers to teachers, nurses, and doctors in the public service, is, in one form or another, employed under the authority of the Office of the President. Even the judiciary is not fully insulated from this power: the Chief Justice and judges at various levels are nominated for appointment by the President. Our entire democratic architecture, the very institutions meant to check and balance power, ultimately trace back to decisions made or influenced by the President.
An MP does not appoint judges. A mayor does not control the police service. A council chairperson does not sit atop the entire machinery of the civil service. These positions, however important locally, simply do not carry the kind of concentrated national power the presidency does. Comparing them is not a defense of the removal of term limits. It’s a distraction from the real question: what happens when one person controls this much power for an unlimited period of time?
Ten years is a long time for anyone running a country to entrench control, influence, and, if left unchecked, manipulation of the very systems meant to hold that power accountable. We do not have to speculate about this. In under five years, Zambians have already witnessed the extent to which power vested in the executive can be used to influence institutions and processes around an election including the closure of the courts. Extend that same trajectory across a full decade, or beyond, and ask honestly whether the guardrails would still hold.
There is also the question of political patronage. A president who remains in power for a prolonged, unlimited period creates fertile ground for a system where public employment, government contracts, and business opportunities increasingly flow toward those aligned with the ruling party, while everyone else is left on the outside. We have lived this before. Zambians from certain regions complained of marginalization under the PF era. Today, different voices raise the same complaint under the current government. Now imagine that dynamic compounding, not over five or ten years, but indefinitely, with no institutional mechanism forcing renewal. It will not shrink the divisions in this country. It will deepen them.
This is ultimately what term limits protect against: not a specific individual, but the near-certainty that unlimited power, held long enough, corrupts the systems meant to constrain it. Power that persists for ten years, or longer, does not remain confined to State House. It spreads, quietly and deliberately, into every institution meant to serve as a check: the electoral body, the police, the courts, the civil service, until an incumbent effectively becomes both player and referee in their own contest. At that point, no election held under that arrangement can genuinely be called free or fair, because the very institutions meant to guarantee that freedom would be staffed, top to bottom, by individuals loyal to the person they are meant to be checking.
“Ati let the people decide every 5 years, remove term limits.” It sounds democratic, but it’s actually the opposite. Elections without limits are not free because after 10 years in office, a Zambian President controls the entire system that runs the election. He appoints the ECZ, the police, the DCs. He is both player and referee.
If HH’s reforms are genuine, free education, debt restructuring, mining policy, then they should be strong enough to survive without him. That is the definition of good leadership: you build institutions, not dependency.
10 years is a long time. It’s 10 national budgets, two full development plans. If you cannot lay a foundation in 10 years, an extra 5 won’t save you. We should keep the limit. Not because we hate whoever is in State House, but because we love Zambia more than any one person. #No3RdTerm