Speaking during a Special Interview in Lusaka with ZNBC, Hichilema said he was monitoring the situation and described himself as “Chief Shushushu,” a local term for chief spy.

Warning Over Alleged Military Training

“I’m the Chief, Shushushu. I know what is happening,” Hichilema said. “My friend, you cannot send people to a foreign country to receive military training and expect them to return and disrupt elections in this country without being arrested.”

“You will be arrested. If you commit a crime, you must be prepared to face the consequences,” he said. “Why would you send people to train somewhere so that they can return and plan to kill?”

The President also condemned remarks attributed to an opposition leader that he was prepared to kill or be killed. “An opposition leader has said that he is prepared to kill or be killed. Nobody wants to kill him,” Hichilema said. “If he says he is prepared to kill, then who is he prepared to kill? Fellow citizens. And for what? Political competition?”

Patriotic Front Record on the CDF and Free Education

Hichilema also turned his attention to the Patriotic Front, which governed Zambia for ten years, criticising the party for not introducing free education. He questioned why the PF did not increase the Constituency Development Fund from 1.6 million kwacha, an amount he said could only cover a 1×3 classroom block, to the 40 million kwacha now allocated under his administration.

“A few people were sleeping on cash, using it as mattresses and pillows,” Hichilema said. “Where was that money coming from? It was coming from loans, including Eurobonds, which they failed to repay. The result was a debt service burden of about 2.3 billion US dollars.”

He said much of that borrowing financed questionable contracts, including projects that were never completed. “That was money they accessed through questionable contracts, including contracts for projects that were never completed. Some contractors received 50 percent down payments and never built the roads. They used that money as if it were their personal wealth. Is that how you run a country? No.”

No Return to Load-Shedding, President Says

Hichilema dismissed claims that Zambia will return to load-shedding after the elections. He said government is expanding electricity generation capacity to meet growing demand, targeting 10,000 megawatts from solar and other non-hydro sources.

Why It Matters

The interview came two days before Zambians vote in Thursday’s general election, at a moment when security agencies and the Electoral Commission of Zambia have been finalising preparations at the National Results Centre in Lusaka. Public reassurance from the Head of State on security and continuity of power supply is aimed partly at markets and investors, who watch pre-election statements from incumbents closely for signs of instability that could affect the kwacha, portfolio flows and business confidence in election week.

On energy, the 10,000 megawatt target signals continuity in Zambia’s diversification away from hydropower dependence, a policy priority since the 2024/2025 drought exposed the vulnerability of Kariba-linked generation to climate shocks. Investors in the power sector will be watching whether this commitment translates into concrete project timelines after the vote.

By Zambian Economist Analyst

Related Reading

• Hichilema Condemns Political Violence, Warns of ‘Full Consequences’ for Offenders
• Hichilema Meets ICGLR Election Observers
• ECZ Launches National Election Results Centre at Mulungushi Ahead of Thursday’s Vote
• Civil Society Deploys Over 600 Election Monitors Nationwide Ahead of Thursday’s Polls

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A graphic claiming Brian Mundubile leads President Hakainde Hichilema 57% to 41% has spread widely this week. Its sample size and its own margin of error contradict each other. Here is how to see that in under a minute, and what Zambia’s actual economic data says five days before the vote.

By Zambian Economist Analyst

Five days before Zambians vote, the most widely shared “data” about this election is not data at all. It is a set of coloured rectangles. A graphic circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook this week reports that opposition candidate Brian Mundubile leads President Hakainde Hichilema by 57% to 41%, with 2% for everyone else, attributed to a firm calling itself American Independent Polls Consultants. It carries a date, a pie chart, and a confidence level. It has the visual grammar of evidence. It has none of the substance.

A Poll With No Survey Behind It

Fabricated polls are not new to Zambian elections. Researchers dissected a similarly dressed-up survey ahead of the 2021 vote, and the damage this genre does is well documented: it creates bandwagon effects, manufactures false expectations among rival supporters, and pushes a contested outcome to look normal before a vote is even cast. Five checks will expose almost any fake poll graphic. Apply them to the one in your own feed.

1. Does the sample size match the margin of error?

This is the fastest kill. At 95% confidence, a sample of roughly 1,200 respondents produces a margin of about plus or minus 2.8%. A sample of 3.7 million would produce a margin some fifty times tighter, near plus or minus 0.05%. A graphic claiming both a 3.7 million sample and a 2.8% margin is stating two facts that cannot both be true about the same survey. Someone pasted the confidence figure from a standard national poll beside a fantasy sample size.

2. Is the sample physically plausible?

The Electoral Commission of Zambia has registered 8,786,300 voters for this election. A survey of 3.7 million people would be roughly 42% of the entire electorate, a scale no polling operation on the continent has ever reached. “Online sampling” makes it worse, not better: Zambian internet access skews young, urban and male, which is exactly why credible pollsters weight results by province, age, gender and rural or urban residence. A graphic with no weighting described has told you it is not measuring the country.

3. How many candidates are on the ballot, and how many are on the graphic?

The ECZ closed nominations in May with 14 candidates from 13 parties plus one independent. A graphic showing two names and folding twelve others, including Fred M’membe, Harry Kalaba and Kelvin Fube Bwalya, into a 2% residual is not measuring the election that is actually being held.

4. Where did the undecided voters go?

Genuine surveys carry undecided, refused and non-voting categories, often in the double digits in African elections, and this is usually the most interesting number in the release. A poll whose categories sum to exactly 100% with no undecideds has not measured opinion. It has allocated it.

5. Does the sponsoring firm exist?

A credible release names the principal investigator, the fieldwork dates, the questionnaire and the sampling frame without being asked. Search for “American Independent Polls Consultants” and the graphic itself is the only result. The firm is the graphic.

A sixth test is less technical but often decisive: does the graphic’s own arithmetic hold together? A separate projection dissected publicly by Rev. Dr. Elias Munshya this season carried a headline declaring one winner while its own province by province table elected the other. The fabricators could not keep their spreadsheet consistent with their own headline.

Genuine polling this cycle looks different. Afrobarometer publishes its full methodology and datasets. An opinion poll conducted by consultants led by a University of Zambia demographer showed Hichilema leading with about 60% against roughly 35% combined for the opposition, with head-to-head matchups placing him between 58% and 63%. Readers should interrogate that poll’s method too. The difference is that its method exists to interrogate.

What the Real Numbers Show

Strip away the graphics and the economic record is not ambiguous, though it is not simple either. Debt restructuring agreements now cover roughly 94% of the restructuring perimeter, and the African Development Bank records public debt falling to 87.6% of GDP in 2025 from 101% in 2024. Inflation has fallen sharply, from 12.3% in September 2025 to 6.8% in April 2026, back inside the Bank of Zambia’s 6 to 8% target band. The IMF nonetheless projects it rising to about 8.5% by the end of 2026 as fuel prices offset a stronger kwacha. Disinflation is not the same as falling prices; the cost of living is still above where it was, simply rising more slowly.

Growth tells a mixed story worth reporting honestly. The AfDB revised 2025 growth down to 3.8% from an initial 5.2% estimate. First quarter 2026 growth hit 7.7%, an over one year high, driven largely by agriculture after good rainfall, while copper production fell to an over one year low in the same quarter. The IMF has trimmed its full year 2026 projection to 4.3%. A recovery led by rainfall is a recovery hostage to weather.

Reserves have risen to about $6.4 billion, covering 4.4 months of imports, and the current account deficit narrowed to 1.0% of GDP in 2025 from 4.4% in 2024. The figure that should matter most to both campaigns is a fiscal one: the primary surplus reached 3.1% of GDP in 2025, and the IMF now projects it falling to just 1.1% in 2026, down from the 3.8% envisaged at the previous programme review. The consolidation that produced the stabilisation is loosening in an election year. That is the envelope every rally promise between now and Thursday has to fit inside.

Two Answers, One Shrinking Envelope

The two campaigns are not disputing these figures so much as disputing what they mean. Our full head-to-head comparison covers the candidates in depth. In short: Hichilema is asking to be judged on the turnaround itself, with a second term proposing to spend the resulting fiscal space on delivery. Mundubile, whose BBC interview put his economic vision on the international stage, is arguing the turnaround has not reached ordinary households, and has campaigned on fertiliser allocations, road rehabilitation, restored student meal allowances and youth wealth creation pledges, delivered largely through rallies rather than a single costed document.

That absence of costing is the fair criticism of the challenger, and it is analytically serious given where the primary surplus is headed. It is equally fair to press the incumbent on what carries growth once the rains are no longer doing the work copper used to do. Our piece on whether Zambia can afford its competing manifestos sets out that arithmetic in full. Neither campaign has fully answered its own hardest question. That, and not a fabricated pie chart, is the real story of this election.

A Standard for the Final Week

More graphics will circulate before Thursday, favouring one side or the other. Treat them identically. Before sharing any poll, look for the sampling frame, the fieldwork dates, the number of respondents, the margin of error, the undecided share and the name of the person who ran it. If any one is missing, do not share it. If the margin of error and the sample size contradict each other, the document is fabricated, and the only responsible response is to say so. This publication will report polling when polling exists, with its methodology attached, and will not publish a number it cannot source. In the final week of a national election, a projection dressed as a survey is not analysis. It is interference wearing analysis as a costume.

Sources: Electoral Commission of Zambia; International Monetary Fund staff assessments, 2026; African Development Bank, African Economic Outlook 2026; Bank of Zambia Monetary Policy Committee statements; International Foundation for Electoral Systems. Figures cited are as reported by the named institutions at the dates indicated and are subject to revision.

With seven days left before Zambia votes on 13 August, the presidential contest has narrowed to two men making opposite arguments about the same economy: President Hakainde Hichilema, asking to be judged on falling inflation and rebuilt reserves, and Tonse Alliance leader Brian Mundubile, asking to be judged on what those numbers have not yet fixed.

By Zambian Economist Analyst

Fourteen names appear on the presidential ballot on 13 August, but the contest has effectively been between two men for months. President Hakainde Hichilema, 64, is seeking a second term on the strength of a macroeconomic turnaround. Brian Mundubile, 55, a lawyer and sitting MP before the election was called, has united a fractured opposition under the Tonse Alliance banner and is asking voters to judge that turnaround by what has reached their kitchens, not what has reached the reserve figures.

Neither man is new to Zambian politics, but neither has faced the other at the ballot box before. This is the test.

The Incumbent’s Case

Hichilema took office on 24 August 2021 after unseating the late Edgar Lungu, inheriting an economy that had defaulted on its sovereign debt the previous year. Five years on, his campaign rests on a specific set of figures. Annual inflation, which stood near 24% when he took office, had fallen to 6.5% by June 2026, the lowest reading in more than eight years. Foreign exchange reserves have climbed to roughly $6.5 billion, and the government points to about $12 billion in new mining investment as evidence that debt restructuring and policy reform have restored investor confidence in Africa’s second-largest copper producer.

Loadshedding, a recurring grievance through much of his first term, eased in the months before the election, though the improvement is recent enough that the opposition has made a point of asking whether it will hold. Hichilema has kept Mutale Nalumango as his running mate and became the first candidate this cycle to campaign in person in all ten provinces, a tour his campaign has since narrowed into a more targeted push through specific swing constituencies as the vote nears.

His own political history includes a stretch in detention: arrested and charged with treason in April 2017 under the Lungu government, a case widely seen at the time as politically motivated, before his release and the charge’s withdrawal four months later. That episode still surfaces in how his supporters frame his position today, as a leader who survived the system he now runs.

The Challenger’s Case

Mundubile’s route to the ballot has been shorter and less conventional. The Tonse Alliance formed in November 2024 with the explicit goal of removing the UPND from office, and it originally rallied around Lungu himself as chairperson and presidential candidate. Following Lungu’s death in South Africa in June 2025 and the bitter dispute that followed over his burial, an internal convention on 28 January 2026 chose Mundubile, until then a Patriotic Front-aligned parliamentarian, as the alliance’s standard-bearer instead. He had never previously run for president.

His argument to voters is not that the government’s numbers are false, but that they are beside the point. At the Tonse Alliance manifesto launch in April, he told supporters the country needed an economy built on jobs and dignity rather than statistics and graphs, and has since accused the government of speaking in what he calls “big English” while households go hungry. His running mate is Makebi Zulu.

The Tonse manifesto is the most interventionist economic document any opposition alliance has put forward this cycle. Its central pledges include mobilising $12 billion for solar, wind and biomass generation to close the electricity deficit; creating more than 300,000 jobs within three years through twelve government-backed farming blocks aimed at value-added agriculture; and equipping marketeers nationally with an excavator and a vehicle each to expand their trading capacity. Mundubile has also pledged to repeal the 2025 cybercrime law and has promised a government with representation drawn equally from all ten provinces.

Where the Arguments Actually Clash

The Vulnerabilities Voters Are Weighing

Hichilema’s weak point is the gap between the dashboard and the doorstep. Inflation at 6.5% and $6.5 billion in reserves are real numbers, but Zambian households have told pollsters and reporters that the relief has been slow to show up in prices at the market. The government has also had to answer accusations, which it denies, that a 2025 cybercrime law and December 2025 constitutional amendments enlarging Parliament have made it harder for the opposition to organise and campaign freely.

Mundubile’s weak point is arithmetic. Independent commentary on the Tonse manifesto, including from analysts who broadly welcomed its ambition, has questioned whether a $12 billion energy programme and job creation on the scale promised can be financed and delivered inside the timelines given, since job creation at that volume typically requires sustained above-trend growth and large-scale private investment rather than public spending alone. He also carries the weight of a coalition assembled quickly around a leader other than the one it was originally built for, and enters the race with a fraction of incumbency’s institutional and financial reach; he has appealed publicly for voluntary contributions to fund the final stretch of campaigning.

What Investors and Businesses Are Watching

For business and investors, the immediate question is less about the winner than about continuity. A Hichilema win would be read as a vote for policy continuity: the existing debt restructuring framework, the mining tax and investment regime that has drawn in roughly $12 billion in new commitments, and the exchange rate stability the kwacha has enjoyed through the recovery. A Mundubile win would raise the more open question of how quickly, and how, an interventionist manifesto built around large state-backed programmes would be reconciled with a debt position still being rebuilt from a 2020 default.

Neither outcome is being priced with certainty. Pre-candidacy polling from late 2025, before Mundubile had even entered the race, put Hichilema’s support at 55%, but that data predates the very consolidation of the opposition that has made this a genuine two-horse contest, and both camps are treating the final week as live.

The Numbers That Could Decide It

Key Takeaways

• The election has become a referendum on whether Zambia’s macroeconomic recovery, falling inflation, rebuilt reserves and returning mining investment, has been felt by ordinary households.
• Hichilema is running on continuity and a five-year record; Mundubile is running on the argument that the record has not reached the people who need it most.
• The Tonse Alliance’s manifesto is the most interventionist opposition economic programme this cycle, and its financing has drawn scrutiny alongside its ambition.
• Businesses and investors are watching for policy continuity risk more than for the outcome itself, given Zambia’s still-recovering debt position.
• Both campaigns enter the final week claiming momentum; only the 13 August count will settle it.

Related Reading

• Ballot Papers Arrive in Livingstone Ahead of August Polls
• Hichilema Condemns Political Violence, Warns of “Full Consequences” for Offenders
• Judicial Independence Key to Fair Election Outcomes, Says Chief Justice Malila
• Hichilema Warns Mopani Copper Mines Over Unpaid Pensioner Benefits
• ZAF Prays for Peaceful Elections Ahead of Zambia’s 2026 Vote
• Chitambo’s 13 August Vote: Chembe Kunda Runs Independent
• Zambia’s Inflation Is Back in Target. Why Relief May Still Feel Slow

Read also: UPND’s Elvis Nkandu says the opposition has no alternative policies.

Related: The Viral 57% Poll Is Fake: What Zambia’s Real Economic Numbers Say

Read more: Former MMD Chairman Stan Kristafor Endorses Hichilema Ahead of 2026 Polls.

Related: Mundubile Says National Reconciliation Will Be NRPUP’s First 100-Day Priority

By Zambian Economist Analyst

Zambia recorded 2.3 million international tourist arrivals in 2025, up from 2.2 million in 2024. The Ministry of Tourism wants 2.5 to 3 million this year, and has set its sights on a billion-dollar tourism industry by 2031. Vice President Mutale Nalumango, speaking for President Hakainde Hichilema at the June launch of the Zambia Travel and Tourism Expo, used the same figure for a nearer target: over 1 billion US dollars in tourism revenue by the end of this year.

Those are two different numbers wearing the same label, five years apart, from two different officials. That gap matters more than either number on its own, because it is the clearest sign of how far tourism policy still is from a single, costed plan, at exactly the moment government is asking Zambians to treat the sector as a genuine alternative to copper.

The timing has a second complication. Zambia votes on 13 August, which falls squarely inside the June to October dry season, the same months that bring the highest water flow at Victoria Falls, the best game viewing in South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi, and the bulk of the country’s international arrivals. An industry built on getting foreign visitors to move confidently around the country is being asked to do that in the same weeks as a national election.

The numbers in one place

Domestic tourism grew alongside the international numbers. Visits to national parks, museums and heritage sites passed 562,000 in 2025. Direct employment in hotels, travel agencies, airlines, restaurants and leisure activities rose from 159,028 jobs in 2023 to 164,800 by the end of 2025, a gain of under 6,000 jobs across two years against a headline unemployment rate still running above 10 percent nationally.

Two officials, two “billion-dollar” targets

Read the two statements side by side. In January, the Zambia Daily Mail reported the Ministry of Tourism’s budget had grown from K303.7 million in 2021 to K1.3 billion in 2025, with K1.53 billion approved for 2026, alongside a narrative of tourism as the sector that can spread growth beyond the mining belt. In June, at ZATEX, the Vice President put a headline figure on it: over 1 billion US dollars in tourism revenue by the end of 2026. Weeks earlier, at Africa’s Travel Indaba, tourism officials had described the same billion-dollar figure as a 2031 target for the size of the industry, not a single year’s revenue.

A revenue figure and an industry-size figure are not interchangeable, and reaching either from a base that generated K319.5 million in non-tax revenue for the ministry in 2024 is a very different claim depending on which one is meant. Neither statement came with a bridge showing how arrivals, average spend per visitor and length of stay combine to reach a billion dollars in either timeframe. Zambia’s international tourism receipts were last reported by the World Bank at 820 million US dollars in 2019, before the pandemic reset the base entirely. Getting a clear, single, sourced number from government on which billion-dollar target is actually being tracked would do more for investor confidence than either announcement did on its own.

Why tourism is the chosen diversification vehicle

The logic behind the push is sound, even where the numbers need tightening. Copper accounts for over 70 percent of Zambia’s export earnings and is the country’s main channel for foreign exchange, which means a single commodity price move still sets the direction of the kwacha. Agriculture depends on a rainy season that failed badly as recently as 2023/24. Tourism offers something neither of those does at scale: labour-intensive jobs distributed well outside Lusaka and the Copperbelt, in Livingstone, Mfuwe, Kafue and the Lower Zambezi, and revenue in hard currency that does not require a single mine to open or a single harvest to succeed.

Government has backed that logic with money. The World Bank-supported Green, Resilient and Sustainable Tourism Development Project is financing infrastructure and destination management. Disbursements to community resource boards and traditional leaders, the local structures that share in wildlife-based tourism revenue, rose 132.2 percent and 163.6 percent respectively year on year, according to ministry figures reported in January. ZATEX 2026 drew 150 exhibitors, including 24 small and medium enterprises, and 40 international buyers, up from 103 exhibitors and 28 buyers the year before, a genuine sign of a maturing domestic supply side.

The bottlenecks the target doesn’t mention

Three structural constraints sit underneath the arrival numbers, and none of them move on a one-year budget cycle.

Concentration is the first. Zambia’s tourism product is still overwhelmingly Victoria Falls and a handful of national parks. Harry Mwanga Nkumbula International Airport in Livingstone has good regional connections to Lusaka, Johannesburg and Nairobi, but Zambia still competes for the same falls-based visitor as Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls Airport on the opposite bank, and most of that competition is decided by which side has the easier flight connection and the smoother visa experience that week.

Visa cost is the second, and it cuts both ways. The KAZA Univisa, the joint Zambia-Zimbabwe visa that lets a traveller cross for Victoria Falls on both sides and day-trip into Botswana, has held its price at 50 US dollars for 30 days, still one of the better-value regional travel products. But Zambia raised its standalone visa fees for 2026, and tour operators in Lusaka and Livingstone have had to update pricing packs mid-season to absorb the change. Neither move is disqualifying on its own. Together they show a visa regime still being adjusted in real time rather than locked in as a stable input investors can plan a five-year hotel development around.

Seasonality is the third, and the least discussed. A dry-season, falls-and-safari product concentrates most of the year’s revenue and most of the year’s casual and SME employment into roughly five months. The jobs growth reported by the ministry, from 159,028 to 164,800, is a national annual figure; it says nothing about how thin that employment gets between November and May, when the same lodges, guides and craft traders that carried the sector through the dry season have far less to sell.

An election falls in the middle of peak season

None of the government’s tourism messaging this year has addressed the fact that the country’s highest-traffic travel months now contain a general election. That is not a reason for alarm; Zambia has held competitive elections without disrupting international travel before. But it is an operational fact that lodges, tour operators and airlines serving the Livingstone and Lower Zambezi circuits have to price into August bookings regardless of whether government mentions it.

International travel advisories around election periods tend to be cautious rather than restrictive, and Zambia’s recent election cycles have not produced the kind of unrest that triggers travel warnings from major source markets. The more practical risk sits closer to home: fuel and transport logistics during a national vote, temporary staff being pulled from tourism jobs into election-related work, and a domestic travel and conferencing market, already a meaningful share of Livingstone’s hotel occupancy, that typically goes quiet around a poll. Operators who built August itineraries without a contingency plan for election week are managing that now, not planning for it.

Business, investor and policy implications

For tourism operators, the immediate task is separating the two billion-dollar targets in their own planning and asking government, directly, which one applies to which year, since financing decisions, staffing plans and marketing budgets should not be built on a number nobody has actually defined.

For investors evaluating hospitality or aviation projects, the more useful entry point than the headline arrival figures is the ZATEX exhibitor data: a rising count of Zambian SME tourism suppliers, twenty-four of them at the 2026 expo, is a better proxy for whether the domestic supply chain can actually absorb three million visitors than any single ministerial announcement.

For policymakers, the case for tourism as a genuine third leg alongside copper and agriculture is real, and the World Bank financing and community revenue-sharing growth are evidence the sector is being built rather than just marketed. What is missing is the same discipline the government has applied elsewhere in its economic messaging this year: one reconciled target, one baseline, and a public account of how the country gets from 2.3 million arrivals and 820 million US dollars in pre-pandemic receipts to whichever billion-dollar figure is the real one.

Key takeaways

• International arrivals reached 2.3 million in 2025; government targets 2.5 to 3 million in 2026 and a billion-dollar industry by 2031.
• The Vice President separately cited a billion dollars in tourism revenue by the end of 2026, a different claim on a much shorter timeline that has not been reconciled with the 2031 figure.
• Direct tourism employment grew by under 6,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025, concentrated in a roughly five-month dry season.
• The 13 August election falls inside Zambia’s peak tourism season, an operational reality tour operators are pricing into August bookings without clear government guidance.
• ZATEX exhibitor growth, not the arrival headline, is the better signal of whether Zambia’s domestic tourism supply chain can support the government’s targets.

This article is part of our Zambia Economy 2026 series, which unpacks the numbers behind the headlines on growth, trade and diversification. See also our analysis of how economic diplomacy can drive diversification beyond copper, and our guide to how Zambian businesses should plan for the election period.

Primary sources: Ministry of Tourism figures as reported by the Zambia Daily Mail, Africa-Press and ATTA (2026); World Bank international tourism receipts data; Zambia Department of Immigration KAZA Univisa guidance.