LUSAKA (CU)_Hakainde Hichilema, the leader of Zambia’s main opposition party, secured a stunning landslide victory in Zambia’s presidential election which was held last week, by defeating outgoing President Edgar Lungu by more than a million votes. According to the final results issued by the electoral commission on Monday (16 August), Hichilema secured 2,810,777 votes to Lungu’s 1,814,201 from seven million votes that were registered this year. “I therefore declare that the said Hichilema to be president of Zambia,” the chairman on the commission, Esau Chulu, announced at the results centre in the capital city of Lusaka.
The 2021 election was the sixth attempt at winning the presidency, since he has contested and lost at every election in the Zambia since 2006. Following the announcement of the results, supporters of the President-Elect were seen celebrating on the streets, as Hichilema’s victory was seen as a resounding rebuke of Lungu’s six-year rule, which was criticised for alleged corruption, human rights abuses, along with a failing economy and massive unemployment.
The South African nation, whose economy is heavily reliant on the production of copper, has been marred by stifling debt, huge inflation and rising food prices over the recent years. In November, the country became the first pandemic-era sovereign default in the African continent after failing to keep up with its international debt payments. Apart from Zambia’s mounting economic challenges, activists claim that the increasingly repressive tactics followed by Lungu’s government also caused an erosion of the country’s democracy.
“In the 2021 elections, the people voted to save democracy,” the President-Elect said in a written statement accessed by The New York Times. “We know that a healthy and functioning democracy is one in which the voices of citizens can be heard freely,” he added. “We will listen to those voices rather than seeking to silence critics.”
Hichilema was born in June, 1962, into humble beginnings in a small town in the Southern Province of Zambia. He managed to get a scholarship to the University of Zambia, and graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business Administration. Subsequently, he pursued an MBA degree in Finance and Business Strategy from the University of Birmingham in the UK as well. He served as the chief executive of two major accounting firms Coopers and Lybrand Zambia and Grant Thornton Zambia before entering politics. In 2006, Hichilema was appointed as the leader of the opposition United Party for National Development, following the death of Anderson Mazoka.
