LUSAKA, Zambia — Lusaka is in campaign season, but one of the most powerful figures hanging over Zambia’s presidential election will not appear on the ballot.
Edgar Lungu has been dead for more than a year.
Yet his political legacy remains deeply embedded in the campaign, while a bitter dispute over his final resting place has become an unlikely symbol of the divisions between his family and President Hakainde Hichilema.
Lungu died in South Africa on June 5, 2025, aged 68, while receiving medical treatment. More than a year later, the dispute over his burial remains unresolved.
In June, a South African appeals court ruled that Lungu’s family should determine where he is buried, overturning an earlier decision that would have allowed the Zambian government to repatriate his remains for a state funeral.
The dispute has become politically significant because Lungu remains a potent symbol for supporters of the former ruling Patriotic Front (PF), particularly in northern and central parts of the country.
For opposition presidential candidate Brian Mundubile and the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity (NRPUP), that loyalty represents an opportunity.
For Hichilema and his United Party for National Development (UPND), it is another challenge in an election that initially appeared easier to predict.
Zambia’s 8.79 million registered voters are due to elect a president, parliamentarians and local representatives on August 13. The Electoral Commission of Zambia says voting will take place from 6am to 6pm.
The central question is whether Hichilema can convert the economic gains of his first term into enough votes to overcome persistent dissatisfaction over household finances and a more consolidated opposition challenge.
The election Lungu never contested
Lungu’s political career was already over before his death.
Zambia’s courts had ruled that he could not seek another presidential term after serving from 2015 to 2021. His death therefore removed a former president who was already constitutionally barred from returning to office.
But politically, his influence did not disappear with him.
The PF fragmented after losing power to Hichilema in 2021, with rival factions competing for control of the party’s structures and legacy.
That fragmentation created space for new opposition alliances.
Mundubile, a former PF parliamentarian and government chief whip under Lungu, has emerged as the presidential candidate of the NRPUP. He is running alongside lawyer Makebi Zulu, who has been closely associated with the Lungu family. The NRPUP itself presents the ticket as a vehicle for jobs, lower living costs and political renewal.
The alliance has attempted to consolidate voters who remain attached to the PF era while reaching beyond its traditional base.
That is a difficult balance.
Mundubile must convince voters who want change that he represents something different from the political establishment that governed Zambia before 2021, while simultaneously benefiting from nostalgia for the Lungu years.
Lungu’s burial becomes a political symbol
Few issues demonstrate the depth of the political rupture between Lungu’s family and Hichilema more clearly than the dispute over the former president’s remains.
The Zambian government has argued that Lungu, as a former head of state, should receive a state funeral and be buried in Zambia alongside the country’s other presidents.
The family has opposed Hichilema’s involvement, citing the bitter political relationship between the two men.
That dispute eventually moved into the courts in South Africa.
The June 2026 appeal ruling, which gave the family authority over the burial decision, changed the legal position but did not erase the political symbolism surrounding the case.
Mundubile has sought to turn that symbolism into a campaign advantage, presenting his alliance as more sympathetic to the Lungu family’s position.
The burial controversy therefore represents more than a question of funeral arrangements.
It has become a proxy for a broader argument over whether Hichilema’s government respects political opponents and their supporters.
The economy remains the bigger test
For ordinary voters, however, the most immediate political issue is less likely to be the fate of Lungu’s remains than the price of food, electricity and other basic necessities.
Zambia has made significant progress in stabilising its economy since Hichilema took office.
The country completed a major restructuring of more than $13 billion in external debt, while copper production and investment have strengthened. The mining sector remains central to the economy, accounting for roughly 70 per cent of export earnings and more than 10 per cent of GDP.
The government also points to free education, increased recruitment of teachers and health workers and higher constituency development funding as evidence of progress.
Hichilema argues that his administration inherited an economy in serious distress and has spent its first term rebuilding the foundations for growth.
But macroeconomic recovery does not automatically translate into household prosperity.
The United Nations said Zambia’s economy was expected to grow strongly in 2025, yet poverty remained around 60 per cent, while commodity prices continued to rise.
That gap between national economic indicators and household experience could prove politically important.
A stronger currency, higher copper investment and improved debt management matter to the country’s long-term prospects.
But voters also judge governments by the cost of a meal, the availability of electricity and whether wages can cover household expenses.
The power crisis still matters
Zambia’s electricity crisis has also left a lasting political memory.
The devastating 2024 drought sharply reduced hydropower generation, exposing the country’s dependence on dams for electricity.
The resulting power shortages affected households and businesses, with some parts of the country experiencing extremely long daily outages.
The government responded by importing electricity and accelerating investment in solar generation.
The situation has improved, but the crisis demonstrated how vulnerable the economy remains to climate shocks and inadequate generation capacity. The United Nations has described the drought-driven power crisis as one of the country’s defining economic challenges of recent years.
For Hichilema, the challenge is to persuade voters that the crisis was an inherited and largely climate-driven problem being addressed through long-term investment.
For the opposition, it is evidence that economic reforms have yet to translate into reliable services for every household.
Copper offers Hichilema an economic argument
The mining sector gives the incumbent another potentially powerful campaign advantage.
Zambia is seeking to triple annual copper production to three million tonnes, while global demand for copper has surged because of its importance to electric vehicles, electricity infrastructure and other technologies.
Mining companies have called for more exploration, local processing, improved infrastructure and additional electricity generation.
The government can therefore point to a potentially transformative investment cycle.
But the political question is whether that investment creates enough jobs, wages and opportunities to be felt outside the mining industry.
That is where the election becomes less about economic statistics and more about distribution.
A new electoral system
The 2026 election is also the first to be held under major constitutional changes enacted in 2025.
The reforms expanded the National Assembly to 226 constituency-based seats and introduced 40 proportional-representation seats reserved for women, youth and persons with disabilities: 20 for women, 15 for youth and five for people with disabilities.
The changes are intended to widen political representation.
They also create a substantially different parliamentary landscape, with more constituencies and a formal mechanism for increasing the presence of groups historically under-represented in Parliament.
President Hichilema has defended the reforms as an expansion of democratic representation.
Critics, however, have questioned the timing and scale of the changes, particularly the expansion of Parliament only months before the election. Reuters reported that civil society and opposition critics argued that the reforms were rushed and could strengthen the ruling party’s position.
The new system will therefore be tested not only by who wins the presidency, but also by whether it produces a more representative Parliament.
The opposition’s opportunity — and its weakness
Mundubile’s rise has made the presidential contest more competitive than it appeared earlier in the election cycle.
His campaign has attempted to unite elements of the fragmented opposition and tap into dissatisfaction over living costs.
His alliance with Makebi Zulu also gives the campaign a direct connection to the Lungu political legacy.
But the opposition faces a familiar problem: fragmentation.
Even with the Tonse and Pamodzi forces joining under the NRPUP banner, opposition politics remain crowded.
Other candidates and parties are competing for the same anti-incumbent vote.
That creates a strategic dilemma.
The opposition needs enough unity to challenge Hichilema, but individual parties also have incentives to preserve their own political identities and support bases.
Previous disagreements within opposition alliances have already exposed the difficulty of maintaining a common campaign structure.
Hichilema benefits from the fragmentation because an opposition divided among several candidates can make it harder for any one challenger to consolidate the anti-government vote.
Zambia’s democratic reputation is also at stake
The election comes with another concern: trust in the electoral and political environment.
Zambia has historically been regarded as one of the continent’s more stable electoral democracies, with peaceful transfers of power between political parties.
That reputation matters to both voters and investors.
Civil society organisations have nevertheless raised concerns about political violence, inflammatory rhetoric and the treatment of opposition figures during the campaign.
The Christian Churches Monitoring Group, for example, has documented incidents involving inflammatory language, threats and disruptions during the nomination period.
The Catholic bishops have meanwhile urged political parties and their supporters to preserve Zambia’s record of peaceful elections.
The stakes are therefore larger than the identity of the next president.
The election will test whether Zambia can combine political competition with institutional credibility at a time of economic transition.
What voters are really deciding
The 2026 election has increasingly become a referendum on two competing narratives.
Hichilema’s is a story of economic repair.
He inherited a country in debt distress, undertook a difficult debt restructuring programme, expanded free education and health-sector employment, attracted new mining investment and began rebuilding the country’s energy system.
The opposition’s argument is that those gains have not sufficiently improved everyday life.
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For many households, economic recovery remains something visible in government statistics rather than in their wallets.
And hovering over both arguments is Lungu’s unfinished political legacy.
His death removed the former president from the political arena but did not remove the loyalties, grievances and divisions associated with his years in power.
The burial dispute has given those emotions a physical symbol: a former president who has yet to be laid to rest.
On August 13, Zambia’s voters will decide whether Hichilema deserves another five years to complete his economic programme, or whether the opposition has succeeded in convincing them that the country needs a different direction.
The result will be determined not simply by memories of Lungu or promises of economic recovery, but by the more immediate question confronting millions of voters:
Has life become better enough to justify keeping the government in power?
