Zambians voted in national elections on Thursday, following a heated campaign dominated by economic concerns and the impact of the coronavirus outbreak.
There are sixteen presidential contenders running, but President Edgar Lungu, 64, and his long-time adversary and business mogul Hakainde Hichilema, 59, are the frontrunners in the polls for the third time.
Hichilema is sponsored by a coalition of ten political parties in his bid for re-election for the sixth time. Hundreds of people queued up in the dark to vote at a secondary school in Lusaka’s Matero district.
President Lungu was one of the first people in Lusaka to vote in the election.
“Zambians are ready to vote, and they’ve come out in force,” Lungu said after casting his ballot at a school in Chawama, a poor Lusaka neighbourhood.
Rising living costs, according to polls, have eroded the incumbent’s support base, and the contest could be even closer than the 2016 election, when Hichilema was beaten by approximately 100,000 votes.
Lungu, a lawyer by training, is accused of taking on unsustainable debt, primarily from Chinese creditors, in order to fund a rash of infrastructure projects.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began under his leadership, Zambia has become the first African country to default on its sovereign debt, while inflation hit 24.6 percent in June, the highest level in more than a decade.
After failing to make another loan payment this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s second-largest copper producer and the world’s ninth-largest copper producer.
“I’m going to cast my vote for change. We can’t continue down this path “Andrew Daka, a 20-year-old who was voting for the first time, voiced his feelings.
Despite his critics who point to high living costs, poverty, and unemployment, Lungu argues that “things are flowing smoothly in the country” and that he is confident of winning.
The vote will be influenced by “poor governance and a struggling economy,” according to O’Brien Kaaba, a political scientist at the University of Zambia.
