Election day

The following was written on Thursday 30th October.

The rest of the world often seems a long way away from Zambia. Without a television or reliable internet access, world news is usually a world away. Even the BBC World Service is brief in its account of international affairs, offering no analysis of the happenings of states and their withering economies or of the people that must endure the ebbing tide and the politicians trying to make money flow once more.

In search of news coverage with the scrutiny of Newsnight, I have started reading The Economist, something I have not done with regularity since I was at university. Then, as now, the world was preparing for Americans to elect their next president and I, at the time taking the module Government and Politics of the USA, had a greater interest in the outcome than many (I even stayed up to watch as the results were announced state by state and felt very smug that I knew what the electoral college was). Now, I am more concerned by the outcome of a different presidential election.

Today, Zambians will vote for who will lead their country for the next three years (the remaining years of former President Levy Mwanawasa’s term). There are three candidates in the running, but only two have a chance of winning the race: Rupiah Banda, the vice-president who has looked after things since Mr Mwanawasa’s death in August and Michael Sata, a rather intimidating old man who, as some White Africans (many of whom have come from Zimbabwe) remark, has something of Mugabe about him.

The third horse, who perhaps had no expectation of winning but rather intended to build a platform from which to launch his campaign in 2011, is known as ‘H.H.’. He is a businessman and so, according to many Zambians, is unqualified for the job. The school driver put it to me thus: he, as a driver, can find his way around the busy streets of Lusaka without a problem, but he would never apply for a teaching job, it is not his profession. The point is simple enough, but perhaps politics would benefit from a few less career politicians. H.H. then is too inexperienced to win, but many Zambians make vague references to his future potential and it seems likely his name, perhaps even in full, will come up again in three years time.

There is no way of knowing who will triumph out of Banda and Sata, or what difference, if any, it will make who wins. There is not the relentless polling in Zambia that there is in the United States, and even if there was - and there are indeed some polls - I am not sure how valid their findings would be. To talk to people in Lusaka and to see the open-backed trucks cruising up and down full of young men vocally showing their support for Sata (enticed by promises of more jobs and lower taxes, though how these lofty ideals are to be achieved is unclear), one might be forgiven for thinking that Banda had lost already. But Banda, or so I am told (all of what is written here is based only on what I have been able to gather from talking to various people), has greater support in rural areas. Banda also has another advantage: completely free and fair elections are a rare thing in Africa and if one were hoping to influence the outcome it would certainly be easier to do so from the position of acting President (it should be noted that foreign funds, from the United States in particular, have been pumped into these elections to make proceedings as transparent as one would expect them to be in a democracy; but money is hardly a guarantor fair play).

If Banda does prevail, and that is the result most White Africans and foreign nationals are hoping for (many justify their preference with a catalogue of clichés: better the devil you know, the lesser of two evils), then with Sata’s overwhelming support in Lusaka there is likely to be trouble in the capital. If Sata is victorious then, in short-term at least, problems are less likely. But in coming years White Africans and foreign nationals might find Zambia an increasingly difficult place to live and work.

The result of the election has now been announced with Rupiah Banda the victor. From within the confines of the school compound all seems quiet, for the time being.