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Imanga Wamunyima Jr Wins Nalolo Parliamentary Seat by Narrow Margin

The Zambian Economist — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:54:24 +0000

By The Zambian Economist Analyst

Key takeaways

UPND’s Imanga Wamunyima Jr has won the Nalolo parliamentary seat with 10,420 votes.
Independent candidate Mashekwa Namakando finished second with 10,067 votes, a margin of 353 votes.
The narrow result reflects Nalolo’s status as one of the election’s closely watched contests.
Wamunyima had campaigned in Nalolo alongside President Hakainde Hichilema in the final stretch of the race.

UPND candidate Imanga Wamunyima Jr has won the Nalolo parliamentary seat, defeating Independent candidate Mashekwa Namakando by a margin of 353 votes in one of the tighter constituency races of Zambia’s 2026 general election.

The result

Wamunyima polled 10,420 votes against Namakando’s 10,067, according to results declared for the Nalolo constituency. The narrow gap places Nalolo among the more closely contested seats of this election cycle, in a constituency where the ruling UPND had invested significant campaign attention in the closing days of the race.

A campaign built on youth and continuity

Wamunyima campaigned in Nalolo alongside President Hichilema, part of a broader UPND push framing him as one of the party’s emerging youth voices. His candidacy had already drawn attention ahead of polling day for what it represented about generational change within the party, and Wamunyima’s win keeps that promise before Nalolo’s electorate rather than leaving it untested.

The scale of his win, just over three hundred votes, suggests the seat remains genuinely competitive rather than settled, a pattern consistent with several rural constituencies in this election where local issues and candidate profile weighed as heavily as party affiliation.

Why it matters

Individual constituency results of this size rarely move national economic indicators on their own, but they matter for what they signal about the shape of the incoming National Assembly. A government with a comfortable majority built from margins like Nalolo’s has less room to assume automatic support on contested legislation, including budget and tax measures, than one built from wider wins. For Western Province specifically, a newly elected, youth profile MP with a direct relationship to the presidency carries practical weight for how constituency development priorities get raised and followed up in Lusaka.

What to watch next

Whether Namakando’s campaign raises any formal challenge to the result, given the narrow margin.
How Nalolo’s result fits into the broader constituency tally as the Electoral Commission of Zambia finalises the national count.
Wamunyima’s first public priorities as MP-elect for the constituency.

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Youths in Politics: Imanga Wamunyima Jr and Nalolo’s Test of a Generational Promise

The Zambian Economist — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:32:41 +0000

At 29, Imanga Wamunyima Jr became Zambia’s youngest sitting MP and the only voice from his party in Parliament. As Nalolo’s results from the 2026 election remain outstanding, his five years in office have become a test of what youth representation actually changes for one of Western Province’s most underdeveloped constituencies.

A photograph making the rounds this week shows Imanga Wamunyima Jr walking alongside President Hakainde Hichilema at a campaign event, the two men side by side in a scene that would have seemed unlikely a year ago. Wamunyima built his political career as the lone MP for the Party for National Unity and Progress (PNUP), an opposition voice representing Nalolo Constituency in Western Province. His party’s decision to back President Hichilema and join the UPND-led alliance ahead of the 2026 election reshaped that picture, and Wamunyima’s own seat is now among those awaiting official results from the Electoral Commission of Zambia.

From First-Time Candidate to Zambia’s Youngest MP

Wamunyima is a lawyer by training. He contested the Nalolo seat in 2021 under PNUP, a party headed by economist Highvie Hamududu, and won it at 29, becoming the youngest member of the National Assembly at the time. He has said he was driven to stand by the social inequalities and injustices he saw across the country, with Nalolo itself, a constituency split by the Zambezi River into an east and west bank connected only by a difficult and costly crossing, standing as a direct example of the development gap he wanted to close.

In Parliament, he became a member of the Public Accounts Committee and Vice-Chairperson of the Committee on Privileges and Absences. Being the only PNUP MP in the House meant building alliances issue by issue rather than relying on a parliamentary bloc, a position he has described as difficult but one that forced him to engage directly with the substance of each debate rather than vote along party lines.

“The Only Youth in Parliament”

Wamunyima has been one of the more vocal advocates for youth political participation in the current Parliament, describing himself publicly as the only youth sitting in the House. He has argued that youth movements sponsored by older political figures cease to be genuine movements and become projects instead, urging young people to organise independently and turn out in large numbers for elections rather than being used as instruments of others’ political ambitions.

That framing puts him in an unusual position. He has spent his term arguing that young Zambians need to build political power on their own terms, while himself depending on an older generation of PNUP leadership, and now an alliance with the governing UPND, to remain viable in a system still organised around established parties and patronage networks.

Nalolo’s Development Ledger

Wamunyima has focused his constituency work on four areas he has identified as most critical for Nalolo: healthcare, education, agriculture, and water and sanitation. He has pushed for the completion of Nalolo District Hospital and additional health posts, along with new and upgraded secondary schools for a constituency he says has been one of Zambia’s most underdeveloped.

Recent constituency activity reflects that focus. In April 2026, he handed over a newly built classroom block at Muoyo Secondary School, part of a wider push to expand school infrastructure on both banks of the Zambezi. Work has also continued on a mother’s shelter in Makoka Ward, aimed at improving maternal health outcomes in a constituency where distance to health facilities remains a significant barrier.

A New Alliance, A New Test

PNUP’s move to endorse President Hichilema for the 2026 election was not one Wamunyima was involved in deciding. He has said publicly that he was not part of the meeting where Hamududu made the call to join the UPND alliance, and that he wanted the party to weigh the alliance’s track record carefully before committing to it. That tension between a leader’s snap decision and a lone backbencher’s caution captures the position PNUP occupies in Zambian politics: a small party whose influence rests almost entirely on the judgement of its few elected representatives.

Whatever his reservations about how the alliance came together, Wamunyima has since campaigned alongside the president, and Nalolo’s 2026 result will show whether that alignment, and five years of infrastructure delivery, translated into a renewed mandate. Official results for the constituency had not yet been declared as this article was published.

Why It Matters

Zambia’s youth make up the majority of its population, yet Wamunyima’s description of himself as the only youth in Parliament points to a persistent gap between that demographic weight and actual representation. His term offers a concrete test case: whether a young, independently-minded MP from a small party can deliver visible infrastructure gains in a genuinely underdeveloped constituency, and whether voters reward that record when the same MP aligns with a larger coalition rather than standing apart from it. The answer from Nalolo, once it comes, will matter well beyond Western Province.

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Nalolo, This Is Your Suit for Tomorrow: What One of Zambia’s Youth MPs Tells Us About Youth in Politics

The Zambian Economist — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:32:24 +0000

At 29, Imanga Wamunyima Jr became one of the youth MPs in Zambia’s National Assembly, the sole voice of the Party for National Unity and Progress in Parliament, and the face of Nalolo, one of Western Province’s most underserved constituencies. Ahead of the 2026 general elections, his time in the House is a useful test case for what youth representation actually delivers, and what it still has to prove.

Introduction

Zambia’s Parliament has never had many young faces in it. When Imanga Wamunyima Jr won Nalolo Constituency in the 2021 general election at 29, he became one of the National Assembly’s youth MPs and, for a period, the only MP from his party, the Party for National Unity and Progress (PNUP), led by economist Highvie Hamududu. Nalolo, a rural constituency in the Western Province floodplains, is routinely ranked among the country’s most underdeveloped seats, short on secondary schools, health posts and reliable water access.

Five years on, with the 2026 elections approaching, Wamunyima’s record offers a concrete answer to a question that comes up every election cycle: does putting young people in Parliament change what Parliament does for constituencies like Nalolo, or does it change only who sits in the chamber?

A Lawyer in the House

Wamunyima is a lawyer by training, and it shows in his committee assignments. He sits on the Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinises how ministries and public bodies spend money against the Auditor General’s findings, and served as Vice-Chairperson of the Committee on Privileges, Absences and Support Services. By late 2025 he was chairing a Select Committee gathering public submissions on a proposed constitutional amendment, Bill No. 7.

That chairmanship also produced the sharpest criticism of his tenure so far. Commentary published in December 2025 accused him of stepping outside the impartiality expected of a Select Committee chair after he publicly challenged the Law Association of Zambia’s president during committee proceedings and followed up with a social media post on the exchange. The episode is a reminder that youth in a leadership role does not exempt an MP from the same scrutiny any chairperson would face, and Wamunyima’s critics have held him to that standard directly.

What Nalolo Has Received

Away from Lusaka, Wamunyima’s public record centres on the basics his constituency has long lacked. He has pushed for completion of Nalolo District Hospital, additional health posts, ambulances, new secondary schools and boreholes across the constituency, framing healthcare, education, agriculture and market access, and water and sanitation as his four priorities. Constituency Development Fund records show tangible, if modest, delivery against that list: in April 2026, Nalolo Town Council confirmed the handover of a newly built classroom block at Muoyo Secondary School, alongside continuing works on a mother’s shelter in Makoka Ward.

These are small-scale, CDF-funded projects rather than transformative infrastructure, and that scale is itself the point. For a constituency with limited services, incremental delivery on health posts, classrooms and boreholes is the currency most voters will actually judge an MP by, not national headlines.

The Youth Argument, Made From Inside Parliament

Wamunyima has been vocal about what youth political participation should look like, and has been sharply critical of movements that aren’t youth-led in substance. In a widely shared message ahead of the 2026 elections, he argued that a youth movement funded and directed by older political figures stops being a movement and becomes something closer to a project controlled by others, and called on young Zambians to use their numbers rather than be used by them. He paired that with a direct appeal for higher youth turnout and participation in the 2026 polls.

It’s a pointed argument from someone positioned to make it: as the only PNUP MP for most of his term, Wamunyima has had to build a political profile without the machinery of a larger party behind him, which is closer to the position most young aspiring politicians are actually in than the well-resourced youth wings he has criticised.

A Second Term, and What It Would Say About Confidence in Youth

Wamunyima stood again for Nalolo in the 13 August 2026 general election, this time on the UPND ticket after PNUP’s alliance with the ruling party, rather than PNUP. As of this writing, the Electoral Commission of Zambia has not yet formally declared the Nalolo result, so his second term is not yet confirmed. But the fact that Nalolo’s voters had the chance to renew his mandate at all, five years after first trusting a 29-year-old first-time candidate, is itself notable. A constituency choosing to send the same young MP back to Parliament, rather than reverting to an older or more established figure, would be a direct measure of how much confidence the people of Nalolo place in young leadership, not just as an experiment in 2021, but as a considered choice repeated in 2026. Once the ECZ declaration is in, that verdict, one way or the other, deserves its own follow-up piece.

Business, Investor and Policy Implications

For Nalolo and similarly underserved constituencies: CDF-funded classroom blocks, health posts and boreholes are unglamorous, but they are the delivery mechanism that actually reaches rural Western Province. Tracking CDF disbursement against completed projects, constituency by constituency, remains one of the more useful public accountability exercises available to voters and civil society ahead of 2026.

For parties recruiting for 2026: Wamunyima’s PNUP ticket showed a young, independently profiled candidate can win a seat without a dominant party machine behind him. Parties courting the youth vote face a credibility test: financed and directed youth wings will draw exactly the “project, not movement” criticism Wamunyima has already put on the record.

For governance watchers: a young MP chairing a constitutionally significant Select Committee, and then facing public criticism over impartiality, is a normal part of parliamentary accountability. It is worth watching how the committee’s eventual report and recommendations on Bill No. 7 are received, rather than treating the criticism as the final word.

Conclusion

Imanga Wamunyima Jr’s five years in Parliament do not settle the debate about youth representation in Zambian politics, but they sharpen it. Age brought him the seat and the attention. What has followed, committee work, incremental CDF delivery in Nalolo, public criticism over impartiality, and a public argument about what youth political participation should mean, is the same mix of scrutiny and modest progress any MP faces. As Zambia heads into the 2026 elections with youth turnout again a live question, Nalolo’s experience suggests the suit fits. His bid for a second term, on a new party ticket, is the most direct test yet of whether that confidence holds: not just whether young people can win a first seat, but whether a constituency chooses to keep one in place.

Key Takeaways

Imanga Wamunyima Jr became one of Zambia’s youth MPs at 29, representing Nalolo Constituency for the Party for National Unity and Progress.
His committee work spans the Public Accounts Committee, the Privileges, Absences and Support Services Committee, and, more recently, chairing a Select Committee on Bill No. 7, which drew public criticism over impartiality in December 2025.
Constituency delivery has focused on health posts, a district hospital, secondary schools, boreholes and CDF-funded projects such as the April 2026 classroom handover at Muoyo Secondary School.
He has publicly argued that party-funded youth wings undermine genuine youth political participation, and has called for high youth turnout in the 2026 general elections.
He contested Nalolo again in the 13 August 2026 general election under the UPND banner; the ECZ had not yet formally declared the result at the time of writing, but the constituency’s willingness to consider renewing his mandate is itself a marker of confidence in youth leadership.

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The Zambian Economist Analyst