The Elections

This week saw the presidential elections, the previous president Levy Mawanwasa had died in Paris in Aug. Whilst Zambia’s a peaceful country with a stable democracy it’s a little tense and VSO have told us not to go to work the day after the elections just in case of riots, there had been some isolated incidents in some of the rougher compounds e.g. Garden, after the previous election. This in addition to the official day off we get for the election means a short week. The main candidates are Rupiah Banda acting president and Sato Pabwate leader of the opposition. There’s also a guy nick named HH who’s popular in certain areas but has no hope of winning. He’s a bit of a Tony Blair/David Cameron character, young, thrusting and image led. However, in attempting to sound like them he’s alienated a lot of the normal Zambians who just don’t get it when he says things like “I’m going to increase your capacity for wealth generation by 7.2%” or, of the army “I want to turn it into a multi-dimensional rapid reaction force” even the army are a bit confused. Sato just says “If you have K1,000 in your pocket I’ll make it K2,000” . So, HH is out, never really a convincing candidate, it’s between Sato & Rupiah. I’ve been told that in Africa the residing GVT only ever lose an election when they want to and there’s a little bit of unrest with claim & counter claim about planned election rigging. To be fair after the event they were praised by international election monitoring body of some sort for the way the election was run. It also looks like it’s going to be a close run thing with Sato heading out in front & Rupiah chasing. This is because Sato is popular in urban areas where votes get counted quicker and rupiah the other way round. Sato’s call to action seems to reference a combination of everyone getting on Noah’s ark to be safe and everyone pulling together to row in the same direction as a result you see loads of peopled driving around Lusaka with passengers leaning out of the windows “air rowing” a pretty surreal sight. Anyway the night of the elections comes and we all go out to celebrate an ex VSOs birthday despite concerns about election night tension, as it turns out it was absolutely fine and a very Lusakian night was had by all. A couple of days later and all the predictions come true, Sato rushed out into a lead by was caught and guess what the ruling party won.