Zambia’s Copperbelt is covered with billboards, posters and lamppost flags as President Hakainde Hichilema uses the power of his incumbency to urge voters to apply “more salt”, that is, to make their food tastier by voting him in for a second term.

Yet on July 13 – when Hichilema (HH to his supporters) launched his month-long election campaign in earnest – power conspicuously transferred to voters. Pro-Hichilema campaigners and business supporters suddenly became aware that this election – one they thought a certain win – will be a close call. From the chaotic and divided former ruling populist Patriotic Front (PF) has emerged a Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket that is turning the election into a real contest. Lawyer and former PF Minister Brian Mundubile, newly of the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity (NRPUP), has as running mate the late President Edgar Lungu’s personal lawyer, Makebi Zulu.

BMA – as Zambians call Mundubile – is drawing large crowds across the electorally important Copperbelt and pro-PF Lusaka province. His question – How can Hichilema boast of external reserves of $6.6-billion when people are hungry? – has hit home. Zulu, meanwhile, channels opposition anger at Hichilema personally for a year-long dispute over Lungu’s burial following his death in hospital in South Africa, where the Supreme Court has rejected the Zambian government’s insistence that Lungu’s body be repatriated and buried in Lusaka alongside Zambia’s other Presidents after a State funeral over which Hichilema – as President – should preside.

An AI analysis of social media shows that Mundubile’s favourability outshines Hichilema’s, and the NRPUP outstrips the UPND by a significant margin. Hichilema lacks “the common touch”. An accountant rather than a politician, he speaks the language of the international investor, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and not that of the ordinary market trader or farmworker in whose hands his future lies.

Hichilema’s first term is an undoubted success, and this election is seminal to Zambia’s and the wider region’s stability and prosperity. One commentator noted “the economy was almost dead: a debt python had almost digested Zambia, leaving only its head”, following years of PF profligacy. The PF borrowed to subsidise everything from electricity to maize-meal, the staple food. In 2020, Zambia became Africa’s first country to default on its sovereign debt, forcing Hichilema’s team on assuming office into complex negotiations with bilateral creditors, bondholders and multilateral institutions to secure a debt deal. High investor confidence was evident in June’s successful Eurobond buyback, which garnered a 98% participation rate.

Hichilema restored the mining sector and drove energy infrastructure development. Disputatious PF grandees had locked horns with international mining companies, bringing copper production, investment and employment to a halt. One mining major was on the point of leaving until Hichilema intervened. Hichilema restored Zambia’s reputation as a stable mining destination and secured some $11-billion in new mining investment commitments. The worst affected mines – Konkola Copper Mines and Mopani – are now back in production and two new copper developments, Mingomba and Lubamba, have come on stream. His standalone achievement is new energy sources to diversify from Kariba Dam’s drought-prone hydroelectric power generation by adding 236 MW of solar power in Chisamba and Kitwe and unleashing a further 250 MW from Lusaka’s Leopard’s Hill solar-battery plant. Mining, energy and agriculture are central to his ambitious second-term plans: to up copper production to three-million tonnes, add 10 000 MW of electricity to the grid, produce ten-million metric tonnes of maize, up beef exports to $1-billion, draw five-million tourists annually – all to add $65-billion and two-million jobs over five years to the economy.

Hichilema’s team hopes the social changes they have brought will cut through when voters cast their ballots. Principal among those signed into the Constitution is that education should be free. Supporters highlight a well-funded constituency development fund that encourages local communities to build schools and clinics according to their needs, monthly pensions for the elderly, and grants for the disabled. They hope, too, that 60 000 new teachers and 40 000 new medical professionals will not risk a PF return in new clothing. Mostly, they hope voters will reward Hichilema for restoring the rule of law with an end to ‘cadreism’. PF-allied apparatchiks, ‘cadres’, became a law unto themselves.

Yet Copperbelt union officials, farmworker union representatives and the ubiquitously political taxi drivers in Lusaka, Ndola, Kitwe and Chingola tell a different story. They complain that a bag of maize-meal has more than doubled in price; that loadshedding has worsened under HH; that the State’s Food Reserve Agency has failed to pay many of the 800 000 smallholding farmers for maize they had delivered. Many see Hichilema as working for business, the IMF and the World Bank, and not for them.

A Mundubile election win risks a return to populist policies that would squander Hichilema’s first-term gains and jeopardise an IMF deal due before year-end. That said, Zambia’s reputation as a stable democracy where power reverts to the people every five years would be enhanced.