Edgar Lungu declared winner of Zambia's Presidential election

The ruling Patriotic Front’s candidate, Edgar Lungu, a lawyer was last night 24 January declared winner of the Zambian presidential by-election of 20 January 2015.

Edgar Lungu won by a narrow majority of 1.66% (27,757 votes) against the opposition's UPND candidate, Hakainde Hichilema, an economist.  The by-election was necessitated by the death of President Michael Sata. Sata passed away in October of 2014. The new President will serve the remainder of Sata's five-year term until the next general elections scheduled for 2016.

Lungu’s supporters burst into country-wide celebrations as soon as the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) chairperson Irene Mambilima officially prounced the PF candidate as the winner. The Acting Chief Justice,  Lombe Chibesakunda declared Lungu to have been duly elected at Mulungushi International Conference in the Zambian capital of Lusaka. Lungu becomes the country’s sixth Republican President.

Earlier, UPND opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema described the elections as “A stolen election (that) does not reflect the will of the people.”  Hichilema stated, “This has not been a level playing field from the start. We have experienced widespread violence against our supporters and party members throughout the campaign as well as deep irregularities in the counting process. We know that democracy lies not only in the voting, but in the counting.”

The Christian Churches Monitoring Group (CCMG) which monitored the election and carried out its own Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) validated the results as given by the country’s ECZ in a statement. “Based on the findings of the CCMG’s PVT, Zambians should have considerable confidence that the official results as announced by the ECZ reflect the ballots cast at polling stations,” said a statement made available to Vatican Radio.

CCMG comprises umbrella Church bodies namely, Council of Churches in Zambia (CCZ), the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ), the Zambia Episcopal Conference (ZEC) together with ZEC affiliates -Caritas Zambia and the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR).

CCMG and several organisations nevertheless decried the extremely low voter participation. CCMG said it was “very concerned about the low turnout for these elections as low participation undermines the credibility of our democratic institutions and elected leaders,” said the statement.

The new President was set to be sworn Sunday 25 January 2015.

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