The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Edgar Lungu

  • Zambia holds general election August 11

    Zambia will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on August 11 under a new constitution, a government spokesman said on Monday.

    The elections are expected to be tight contest between President Edgar Lungu’s ruling Patriotic Front (PF) party and Hakainde Hichilema’s opposition United Party for National Development (UPND), Reuters reported.

    Lungu is expected to assent to the constitutional amendments on Tuesday, ratifying the election date, his spokesman Amos Chanda said.

    Under the previous constitution, the president set the election date every five years.

    “The new constitution has a fixed election date and that will take effect as soon as the president signs,” Chanda told Reuters.

    Other amendments include a clause requiring a winning presidential candidate to get more than 50 percent of the valid votes cast, he said.

    Presidential candidates will run on a joint ticket with a vice-presidential candidate, unlike the present situation where the president appoints his deputy, Chanda said.

     

  • Zambian president reduces death sentences to life imprisonment

    Zambian president reduces death sentences to life imprisonment

    Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu on Thursday reduced the sentence of 332 prisoners awaiting death by hanging to life imprisonment to ease maximum security prison congestion.

    Crimes that could be punishable by death include murder, treason and robbery with a deadly weapon, although Zambia has not executed any prisoners since 1997, Reuters says.

    During a visit to Mukobeko Maximum Security prison, about 180 km north of Lusaka, Lungu said it was unacceptable for a prison with a capacity of 51 inmates to house hundreds.

    “It goes without saying that this is an affront to basic human dignity apart from the health and sanitation challenges that it has created,” Lungu said.

  • Zambia holds presidential election

    Voting began on Tuesday for the next president of Zambia, one of Africa’s most promising frontier markets, in what shaped up as a tight race between a populist lawyer and a wealthy economist.

    Edgar Lungu, leader of the ruling Patriotic Front (PF), is seen having a slight edge over main rival Hakainde Hichilema, a businessman whose United Party for National Development has won over the middle-class and investors, Reuters reports.

    With no reliable opinion polls, few experts are keen to call a clear winner in the contest to succeed President Michael Sata, who died in office in October aged 77.

    Lungu’s campaign has focused on tapping into the grassroots support base of Sata, a populist leader from the majority Bemba tribe who won over the working class by funding infrastructure projects in poor, rural areas.

    Hichilema, one of Zambia’s wealthiest businessmen known locally as “HH”, says his experience in the private sector will help him encourage foreign investment and diversify the southern African state’s copper-dependent economy.

    Zambia, the continent’s biggest copper producer after Democratic Republic of Congo, has been one of the world’s best performing economies in the last decade, averaging 6-7 percent growth as the mining sector boomed.

    But growth slowed to 5.5 percent last year, the International Monetary Fund says, and could ease further with the price of copper, which accounts for 70 percent of export earnings, falling to a six-year low this month.