Zambia’s new president will have to balance austerity and the high expectations of the many unemployed young people and struggling people who voted for him.
Zambia has gone from a country where people engaged freely in open political debate to one where most people now look over their shoulders to see who’s listening.
Zambia’s president is securing powers to consolidate his political control while generating ‘plausible deniability’ to whether or not he has fatally undermined democracy.
The IMF’s decision to go ahead with a bailout package for Zambia, despite the government’s democratic failings, could embolden the president to pursue an authoritarian strategy.
The world’s media, which has in the past found Zambia uninteresting, are suddenly paying more attention to the impoverished nation, for all the wrong reasons.
Zambia’s Edgar Lungu shouldn’t consider his presidential victory to mean business as usual in the management of the economy; nor an opportunity to waste and plunder.
Danielle Resnick, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
As Zambia prepares to go to the polls again the entire party system is in flux, electoral violence has been worryingly frequent and the country’s democratic credentials are increasingly in doubt
Senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Administrative Studies at the University of Malawi and Research Associate, Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town