Hakainde Hichilema has returned to Zambia’s State House for a second term, but the scale of his victory has done little to settle the debate over how he got there.

The Electoral Commission of Zambia declared the 64-year-old winner in the early hours of 18 August with 61.4 per cent of the vote, a comfortable first-round win in a field of fourteen candidates. Yet in the days since, the country has moved from celebration to a tense standoff involving a shuttered judiciary, a fatal security raid on the opposition, and a United Nations warning over arbitrary arrests.

The elections in the 22-million-people-rich country have brought to the fore striking questions on whether its institutions can indeed absorb a genuinely contested outcome without faltering. The country has long been one of the few in the region where power changes hands through the ballot box without crisis. Now, that reputation is being tested more openly than at any point since its return to multiparty politics.

According to the electoral commission, 8.8 million Zambians were registered to vote in this year’s election, held on 13 August. Incumbent Hakainde Hichilema polled 2,965,326 votes against Brian Mundubile’s 1,856,217. Undeniably, Mundubile was Hichilema’s fiercest rival and outright leader of the opposition.

From the electoral results announced by commission chairperson Mwangala Zaloumis in Lusaka, he was beaten by a margin of roughly 23 percentage points across 226 constituencies.

President Hichilema acknowledged the mixed feelings across the electorate and pledged to govern for all Zambians regardless of how they voted.

“We are truly humbled by the trust you have placed in our hands. To those citizens who preferred the ideas presented by our opponents, we hear you, and we will continue to work for you.”

Hichilema’s total cleared the constitutional threshold of more than 50 per cent required to avoid a runoff, sparing Zambia the kind of prolonged second round that has unsettled other African elections in recent years.

That margin, though, has not stopped Mundubile from contesting it. The former Patriotic Front figure, who ran under the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity banner, rejected the outcome within hours of polls closing and before the commission had finished its national count.

He has since accused the government of manipulating result forms as they moved from polling stations to constituency and national tallying centres, and said his campaign had documented irregularities, inconsistencies and suspicious conduct during and after the elections.

“Our campaign has documented serious irregularities, inconsistencies and circumstances surrounding ‌the conduct, counting, transmission and declaration of results,” Mundubile said in a statement shortly after.

Zambia’s Constitution gives a losing candidate seven days from the declaration of a winner to file a petition with the Constitutional Court, which must then rule within fourteen days.

Under Article 103 of the Constitution of Zambia (Amendment) Act No. 2 of 2016, the text explicitly anchors the timelines for any judicial interventions.

It frames the seven-day window by establishing that a person may challenge the election of a President-elect by filing a petition with the Constitutional Court “within seven days of the declaration of a President-elect”.

When setting the timeline for the court itself, the text specifies that “The Constitutional Court shall hear an election petition relating to the President-elect within fourteen days of the filing of the petition”.

It further mandates that where an election petition is filed, the Speaker of the National Assembly performs the executive functions of the President until the court determines the matter or a new President is sworn in.

The exact wording focuses strictly on the requirement to hear the petition rather than specifying the precise timeframe for rendering a final judgment, a phrasing that became the centre of a legal debate during the 2016 presidential election challenge that thrust Edgar Lungu to power.

The same scenario has now played out in the latest poll, becoming a critical focal point of the entire post-election crisis.

During the recently concluded elections, the Southern African Development Community’s observer mission reported a peaceful atmosphere at 99 per cent of the polling stations it visited. Transparency International Zambia’s parallel vote tabulation found a 98.9 per cent match with the commission’s own figures. This level of correspondence is the kind that analysts generally find reassuring.

But a joint analysis by academics Nic Cheeseman and Nicole Beardsworth, published in The Africa Report, identified an unusual pattern in at least 27 constituencies where the ruling United Party for National Development recorded supermajorities on turnout above 80 per cent, well ahead of the national figure of 57 per cent.

A rebuttal from another Africa Report contributor argued that even taking the disputed figures at face value, the anomaly was not large enough to change the outcome.  While the numbers appear to point to a decisive win, persistent concerns about the election environment mean the debate over fairness is far from settled.

Those qualitative concerns were echoed by the European Union’s observation mission, whose chief, Michael McNamara, said voting itself was largely peaceful, but the wider process unfolded in conditions that constrained fundamental freedoms.

“Late legal changes, legal uncertainty, and unequal campaign conditions distorted the playing field,” he said.

That assessment, delivered before the final result was even announced, has since been overtaken by events that go well beyond campaign conditions.

Perhaps the gravest of these came on election night, when Zambian security forces raided a property where Mundubile was present, resulting in an exchange of gunfire. The government, then, said that “high-grade military weapons” were recovered and that eleven people were arrested on suspicion of posing a threat to state security. These allegations, Mundubile denied, saying his supporters had been unarmed and fired upon.

In the fortnight since, the situation has deteriorated further. Mutotwe Kafwaya, a 49-year-old former cabinet minister and opposition MP, was shot dead during a subsequent security force raid connected to the same case. Mundubile reportedly hid in a secure location, amid what he described as threats to his safety.

It did not take long before the United Nations was drawn in. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said arrests and any resulting court proceedings needed to be fully consistent with international human rights standards.

“I call on the Zambian authorities to respect due process, ensure that all arrests comply with international human rights standards, and guarantee that detainees are brought before a court promptly,” Türk said.

This concern had already been flagged by numerous rights groups before polling day. In fact, Zambia’s own Human Rights Commission said it was monitoring arrests of candidates, supporters and journalists as early as 12 August, the day before voting began.

Amnesty International warned in the run-up to the election that persistent state action against free speech and peaceful assembly posed a serious risk, and separately called for the release of a journalist detained in July.

“During the scoping visit in Zambia, stakeholders told Amnesty International that authorities were using the new cyber laws to arrest government critics, journalists, activists and opposition political party members, resulting in widespread self-censorship. Journalists reported harassment, threats, confiscation of equipment, and increased pressure when reporting on matters of public interest, contributing to a climate of fear and censorship,” the organisation noted in its detailed 18-page report titled ‘Authoritarian practices eating away at human rights in Zambia’.

Interestingly, the court challenge that was meant to resolve the election dispute instead became part of it. As the seven-day deadline to file a petition approached on 24 August, court premises in Lusaka and elsewhere were closed and cordoned off with police tape, with authorities citing security reasons.

Mundubile, who had planned to file his petition that day, was unable to access the Constitutional Court grounds. This unlawful activation of security forces to infringe upon constitutional freedoms is not unique to Zambia; other countries, such as Kenya and Tanzania, have grappled with it as well.

Chief Justice Mumba Malila said he had separately received a submission sent to his private email address by a member of the public, a step he called “highly irregular,” and referred it on for the court’s consideration.

When the Constitutional Court confirmed the following day that it had not received a formal petition through the proper channel, the path was cleared for Hichilema’s inauguration to proceed.

In the latest twist, Mundubile has since been questioned by police over allegations of treason, a charge that carries severe legal consequences under Section 43 of the Penal Code. Because it is classified as a non-bailable capital offence, an accused person is immediately remanded into custody and denied bail while awaiting trial. Following legal reforms under the Penal Code (Amendment) Act No. 23 of 2022, Zambia officially abolished the death penalty for treason, replacing it with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment upon conviction.

But beyond that, how this legal challenge is handled will directly, and perhaps greatly, impact faith in Zambia’s democracy. Since returning to multiparty politics in 1991, Zambia has seen peaceful transfers of power, including Hakainde Hichilema’s 2021 election victory over Edgar Lungu. The country now faces the question of whether a losing candidate can contest an election outcome through established legal channels without triggering public confrontation.

Analysts have noted that the scale of Hichilema’s declared margin has narrowed Mundubile’s legal options from the outset. Greg Musiker of the advisory firm Signal Risk observed that the size of the result significantly limited what the opposition could realistically achieve through the courts, even before the judiciary’s own closure became part of the story.

That narrowing of options matters less for what it says about the specific arithmetic of this election than for the precedent it sets. If a closed courthouse and a treason inquiry become the default response to a disputed result, future opposition candidates and their supporters may reasonably conclude that legal remedies exist on paper more than in practice, regardless of how strong or weak their underlying case might have been.

Hichilema’s second term will nonetheless be shaped as much by economics as by the fallout from the vote. He inherited, in 2021, an economy in crisis, a time when Zambia had defaulted on its sovereign debt the previous year. It was the first African country to do so during the pandemic, and was grappling with high inflation, a weak currency and collapsed investor confidence.

His government has since restructured more than 12 billion dollars of external debt, completed a 1.3 billion dollar IMF-supported programme, and rebuilt foreign exchange reserves to roughly 6.5 billion dollars, the strongest position the country has recorded.

Inflation, which had run into double digits for much of his first term, fell to 6.8 per cent in April this year, according to the Zambia Statistics Agency, while GDP growth has recovered into the five to six per cent range. The kwacha was already Africa’s best-performing currency this year, and it firmed further once the result was confirmed.

During the stabilisation period preceding the elections, the government also expanded social spending. Free secondary education, introduced despite expectations of austerity, has brought an estimated 2.3 million children into classrooms who might otherwise have been priced out, alongside expanded cash transfers and funding for community projects.

However, according to World Bank data, macroeconomic recovery has not been evenly felt. It is estimated that 70.7 per cent of Zambians were living on less than three dollars a day in 2022. This would explain why high food, fuel and electricity costs continued to dominate campaign-season conversations.

Joan Chirwa, a Zambian journalist and human rights defender who founded the Free Press Initiative, questioned whether reforms had translated into tangible improvements in household incomes and living conditions.

“The central question coming from voters is increasingly whether the economic reforms of Hichilema’s first term have translated into tangible improvements in household incomes and living conditions,” Chirwa told Al Jazeera.

Now, at the centre of Hichilema’s second term is Zambia’s greatest bargaining power: copper. The Southern African nation is the continent’s second-largest producer of the metal, behind the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to S&P Global, world copper demand is projected to jump 50 per cent by 2040, reaching 42 million metric tons. The surge is largely driven by renewable energy infrastructure and the build-out of AI data centres, which has since pushed prices higher and resulted in greater fortunes for producers worldwide.

Against this promising backdrop, Zambia’s government has set a target of lifting national output to three million metric tonnes per year by 2031, anchored by expansions at the Lumwana and Kansanshi mines, and has continued to court investment from both Western and Chinese sources. It aims to reduce reliance on a single partner.

Hichilema has said he wants to double the size of the economy and create more jobs in his second term, an ambition that will depend on translating mining-led growth into diversified employment.

“Our priority over the next five years is to ensure that the wealth buried under our soil transforms directly into jobs, better wages, and sustained opportunities for every Zambian citizen,” Hichilema emphasised during his victory address.

Reliable electricity supply, still constrained by drought affecting hydropower generation, and a stable mining tax regime will likely determine how much of that investment materialises.

Currently, mining accounts for roughly 70 per cent of Zambia’s total export earnings and contributes over 10 per cent to the national GDP. Despite reaching a post-independence high output of 890,346 tonnes of copper in 2025, the country requires at least 2,000 megawatts of additional electrical capacity to reach its 2031 targets, according to multiple analytical reports.

Now, Hichilema begins his second term with strong economic backing to address debt, create jobs, and boost copper production. However, his main test over the next five years will be navigating these economic priorities while restoring and managing public trust in the country’s governance institutions.