Edgar Lungu and Hakainde Hichilema
Zambia goes to the polls next week, and one of the biggest wildcards isn’t a policy debate or a scandal. It’s a dead man in a South African mortuary.
Former president Edgar Lungu died last year. More than 12 months on, his body still hasn’t been buried. The holdup is a tug of war between his family and the man who beat him at the ballot box in 2021, President Hakainde Hichilema.
Lungu’s relatives want a private funeral, with Hichilema firmly off the guest list. The government wants a state funeral, with the president presiding. Neither side is budging, and so Lungu remains in cold storage while Zambians argue over how to say goodbye to him.
It sounds like a footnote. It might not be. Zambians have long memories for how leaders are treated in death as much as in life, and the spectacle of a former head of state left unburied for over a year has a way of stirring sympathy — even for a man whose presidency was better known for mounting debt and corruption allegations than for good governance.
That sympathy could flow straight to Brian Mundubile, the main opposition candidate who has united much of Zambia’s fractured opposition behind him and who positions himself as the custodian of Lungu’s legacy.
It’s a strange thing to be running against, not really Mundubile’s platform, but a coffin.
Set the burial saga aside and the race looks more conventional. Hichilema was elected in 2021, winning with about 59% of the vote against Lungu. It was Hichilema’s sixth attempt at the presidency, and he now has a genuinely strong economic record. He inherited a debt crisis and has spent his term restructuring it, stabilising the currency, wooing back foreign investors and scrapping tuition fees at public secondary schools.
Analysts credit him with real macroeconomic discipline. Zambian historian and political analyst Euston Kasongo Chiputa says Hichilema pursued market-orientated reforms after inheriting an economy weighed down by high debt, weak public finances and low investor confidence. A milestone in his presidency has been Zambia’s successful engagement with the G20 framework to help low-income countries restructure unsustainable debt.
“He taught Zambians how to catch fish rather than simply giving them fish,” Chiputa tells the FM.
The catch is that macroeconomic discipline doesn’t always show up in a household’s grocery bill, and plenty of ordinary Zambians are still feeling squeezed by fuel and food prices.
Zambian geopolitical analyst Aaron Ng’ambi, based in the US, says Hichilema enters the election with a mixed record that combines economic reforms with growing public frustration over the cost of living.
“The election will likely be determined by whether voters prioritise economic stability or immediate household pressures,” he says.
Mundubile, a Copperbelt native and former Lungu-era minister, is running hard on that gap between the statistics and the lived experience.
There’s also a newer irritant: a cybersecurity act that Hichilema has signed into law, which critics say could be used to clamp down on online speech. In a country that prides itself on being one of Africa’s more durable democracies — even if it’s still technically graded a “hybrid regime” — that’s the kind of issue that can needle swing voters who might otherwise credit the president with steadying the economy.
Add it all up — a resurgent economy, a squeezed electorate, a free speech law raising eyebrows and an ex-president’s body caught in a very public standoff over his final rites — and Zambia’s election looks less like a coronation for Hichilema than it did at the start of the year.
The polls open on August 13 and Lungu, it seems, will have to wait a little longer to find out where he’s finally laid to rest — and possibly longer still to find out whether his afterlife controversy helped decide who runs the country next.