Zambia updates
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Zambia’s opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema has been elected president of Africa’s second-largest copper producer in a sweeping victory against incumbent Edgar Lungu.
Hichilema was declared the victor with more than 2.8m votes to Lungu’s 1.8m, Zambia’s electoral commission said on Monday, after an election last week that was fought amid the country’s worst economic crisis in decades, including default on billions of dollars of debts.
Hichilema, a businessman who won the presidency on his sixth attempt, will have to move quickly to finish talks for an IMF bailout and make deals with creditors to resolve more than $12bn of external debts that are throttling an economic recovery.
In a televised address on Monday Lungu said he would “comply with the constitutional provisions for a peaceful transfer of power”.
The Zambian kwacha surged against the US dollar on Monday, along with prices for the country’s defaulted US dollar bonds.
The 59 per cent majority for Hichilema’s United Party for National Development will mark Zambia’s third transfer of power through the ballot box in as many decades of multi-party democracy.
Earlier Lungu, who became president in 2015, attacked the election as “not free or fair”, setting up what many feared would be a challenge to the result.
Voting in three opposition stronghold regions had been “characterised by violence, rendering the whole exercise a nullity,” he said on Saturday.
His party could have approached the courts to challenge the result but analysts said the margin of its defeat made a legal bid unlikely to succeed.
Lungu said his party’s agents had been chased away from observing voting and attacked by the opposition. But election observers from Zambian churches said that these agents were present at almost all polling stations.
