The petition is bigger than Mundubile and Makebi

Zambia’s present political crisis runs deeper than a dispute over who won the presidency. At its core lies a harder question: who controls the country’s institutions, and whether the major decisions shaping the nation’s future are still being made with the informed consent of its people.

A disputed election, a proposed United States–Zambia health financing agreement, unresolved IMF negotiations, quiet talk of scrapping presidential term limits, and sudden pressure on Brian Mundubile and Makebi Zulu to abandon their election petition are not unconnected stories. They are threads of the same anxiety: whether Zambia’s institutions still serve the public, or have been quietly reorganised to protect presidential power instead.

At the centre of it sits a proposed US health financing deal worth roughly US$1.5 billion over five years, covering HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and maternal health. Zambia’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly objected in May to terms it considered inconsistent with citizens’ privacy rights, and to American demands for preferential access to Zambia’s critical minerals. Reports that the agreement was signed before polling day but kept from public view would, if true, mark a serious accountability failure, irrespective of whether the deal itself proves beneficial. Voters were entitled to know what their government had committed on their behalf before they cast a ballot, not after.

A parallel concern hangs over Zambia’s next IMF programme, under negotiation since the last Extended Credit Facility concluded in January. The previous programme delivered improving headline numbers alongside fuel, electricity and transport costs that many households felt acutely. Whether an elected government should sign fresh IMF commitments on tax, subsidies and public spending without first showing Parliament and voters the likely impact is not an academic question. It is one that will define kitchen-table budgets for years.

A third, quieter warning concerns the constitutional two-term presidential limit. A December 2025 amendment scrapped term limits for mayors and council chairpersons, leaving the presidential limit untouched, but setting a precedent through which the public could gradually be conditioned to accept the same argument at the top. Zambia has faced this fight before and won it, when churches, civil society, opposition parties and ordinary citizens turned back Frederick Chiluba’s third-term bid. Term limits are not a punishment reserved for unpopular leaders; they are a safeguard against the concentration of power in the hands of popular ones too.