Zambia’s constitutional twilight
…A forensic projection of the country’s legal, judicial and electoral future
By Bishop Musonda Trevor Selwyn Mwamba
This is a tale of 118 days — between December 2025 and April 2026 — Zambia’s ruling United Party for National Development (UPND) passed three pieces of legislation that, examined in isolation, each appear as routine administrative reform. Examined together, they constitute the most significant restructuring of Zambian state power since the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in 1991.
The Constitution of Zambia (Amendment) Act No. 13 of 2025 popularly known as “Bill 7” was assented to on 18 December 2025. The Criminal Procedure Code Amendment Act No. 4 of 2026 was assented to on 31 March 2026 and entered into force on 8 April 2026. The Electoral Process Amendment Bill (N.A.B. 44 of 2026) is currently before Parliament. Three layers. One architecture.
Layer one in the map is the message
On 16 April 2026, the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) announced 70 new constituencies at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre in Lusaka. The announcement was framed as a democratic expansion, that is, more representation for more Zambians. Sounds good but the mathematics tell a different story.
Act No. 13 of 2025 raised the constitutional seat ceiling to expand Parliament. ECZ produced 226 constituencies. The constitutional ceiling stands at 211. The 15 seat overshoot carries no published legal justification and warrants urgent parliamentary scrutiny.
Ward-level analysis of the 2021 ECZ general election results — 1,841 wards, 4,775,025 votes across 156 constituencies reveals a constituency map that operates as a precision instrument rather than a neutral administrative exercise.
Nationally, UPND received 49.8% of the vote in 2021 and won 91 of 156 seats — a seat-vote gap of +8.5 percentage points. That alone falls within the internationally accepted ±7% efficiency gap threshold. The provincial breakdown does not.
In Eastern Province, UPND received 30.2% of the ward-level vote across the nine new constituencies. It is projected to win zero of those nine seats. The efficiency gap: +18.01%.
In Northern Province, a similar crack pattern produces an efficiency gap of +9.03% against UPND.
In Southern Province UPND’s stronghold votes are packed so densely that the efficiency gap registers at +15.89%, generating enormous wasted majorities.
The combined projection across all 70 new constituencies: UPND wins 130–140 of 226 seats on approximately 50% of the popular vote. A structural excess of 17 seats above strict proportionality purchased not through persuasion but through boundary geometry.
This is the Sishuwa thesis made cartographic: where the opposition is strong, pack it. Where it is weak, crack it. The map is the message.
Layer two is the bill that corrects nothing
N.A.B. 44 of 2026 the Electoral Process Amendment Bill presents itself as a corrective to First Past The Post distortions. It introduces 40 proportional representation seats: 20 reserved for women, 15 for youth, and 5 for persons with disabilities. The optics are unimpeachable.
The mechanics are a different matter entirely. Its smokes and mirrors. Section 36A allocates PR seats by presidential vote share. In 2026, UPND will contest on the back of President Hichilema’s 59.02% mandate from 2021 the ECZ certified final figure (2,852,348 votes).
A party that takes 59% of the presidential vote takes 59% of the 40 PR seats 23 or 24 additional MPs. A party with 5% takes two. The PR mechanism amplifies the FPTP distortion rather than correcting it.
Section 36A’s presidential candidacy gateway compounds the problem. Only parties that fielded a presidential candidate qualify for PR seat allocation. Small parties, civil society vehicles, regional movements, issue-based formations are structurally excluded from Parliament’s upper tier. The correction is available only to those who least need correcting.
Most alarming is Section 36H (2): a party may recall its PR MPs at will, without stated grounds, without due process, without appeal. The constitutional test under Article 72 which prescribes the conditions under which an MP vacates their seat is not engaged. These MPs serve at the pleasure of the party secretary-general. They are not representatives. They are delegates. The distinction is not semantic. It is constitutional.
Section 5 reduces the voter register inspection window from 90 days to 14 days. Zambia’s 2026 voter register stands at 8,861,918 registered voters. At 14 days, civil society organisations must process 632,994 records per day to conduct a full audit. The window is not a reform. It is a wall.
Layer three, the code that closes the door
The Criminal Procedure Code Amendment Act No. 4 of 2026 arrived with minimal public debate. It should not have.
Section 192A renders forensic evidence admissible “against the will of an accused.” The right against self-incrimination implicit in Article 18 of the Constitution and explicit in the proposed Bill of Rights at Article 42(2)(m) is by passed by executive-directed prosecution.
The state extracts evidence from your body. Your will is irrelevant.
Section 123 expands the schedule of non-bailable offences to include theft of copper or coltan, and damage to infrastructure: railways, roads, electricity grids, and aircraft.
Read alongside Zambia’s history of labour action on the Copperbelt and civil protest against power outages, the operational application is clear. Strike. Demonstrate. Destroy nothing. Be denied bail regardless.
Section 358B grants the Chief Justice authority to issue sentencing guidelines for all CPC offences. The Chief Justice is a presidential appointee. The Director of Public Prosecutions — who decides what charges are brought — is accountable to the President. The loop is closed: the executive decides what to charge, a presidential appointee determines how long you serve.
Section 192 establishes that an affidavit from a government officer constitutes prima facie proof of forensic chain of custody. The defence bears the burden of disproving state documentation. Innocence, in effect, requires rebuttal. The comparative lens.
Political scientists have mapped this terrain before. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism (2010) describes regimes in which democratic institutions formally persist , elections are held, courts sit, parliaments vote while incumbents systematically tilt the playing field to render genuine competition improbable.
Anna Grzymala-Busse’s work on state capture (Rebuilding Leviathan, 2007) documents how ruling parties colonise administrative structures to convert public institutions into partisan instruments. Milan Svolik (The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 2012) identifies the critical inflection point: when a governing coalition internalises the assumption that it will not lose power, institutional safeguards cease to constrain behaviour and begin to serve it.
Hungary under Viktor Orbán rewrote its electoral law in 2011, one year after winning a supermajority. The gerrymandered map delivered a second supermajority in 2014 on a minority of votes. Turkey’s consolidation accelerated after 2013, culminating in the 2017 constitutional referendum that fused executive and judicial appointment power.
Nicaragua’s Ortega dismantled judicial independence between 2014 and 2021 before eliminating opposition candidates entirely.
Zambia’s 118-day legislative sprint does not replicate these trajectories in form. It replicates them in function: electoral geometry restructured, representative accountability severed, prosecutorial discretion consolidated, judicial sentencing centralised. All within a single parliamentary term. All with formal democratic process observed.
The judicious projection
What can be concluded with analytical precision? The delimitation, as designed, generates a structural seat bonus for UPND of approximately 17 seats above proportional representation without a single fraudulent vote being cast. The PR mechanism in N.A.B. 44 adds a further 23–24 seats allocated by presidential vote share. The combined effect: on 50% of the popular vote, UPND is positioned to hold 155–165 of 226 seats a near two-thirds parliamentary majority. Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority.
The Criminal Procedure Code supplies the enforcement architecture. Non-bailable offences now cover the tactics of organised opposition: infrastructure disruption, resource sector action, mass protest. Forensic evidence collection by passes consent. Sentencing guidelines flow from a presidential appointee.
The voter register inspection window has been compressed to 14 days. The Code of Conduct sanction for electoral violations has been downgraded from disqualification to suspension.
Each of these measures, reviewed individually by any competent legal authority, presents a defensible rationale. Reviewed together, across 118 days, they describe a state in the process of removing the conditions under which it could lose power while retaining every formal attribute of a democracy.
We have here a forensic description of the legal, electoral, and judicial architecture now in place. What Zambians, opposition parties, civil society, and the international community choose to do with that description is the only variable that remains genuinely open.
The twilight is not coming. It is here. The question is whether the institutions meant to call it dawn still have the authority and the will to do so.
The author is the president of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), Zambia’s oldest political party.
