Candidate Profiles: Hakainde Hichilema

When Hakainde Hichilema took the oath of office as Zambia's seventh President on 24 August 2021, it brought to a close one of the longest opposition careers in modern African politics. Over fifteen years he had contested five presidential elections. On the sixth attempt, against the incumbent Edgar Lungu, he won 59.02 per cent of the vote and a margin of close to a million ballots, one of the most decisive electoral verdicts the country has delivered.

 He was born on 4 June 1962 in a village in Monze District, in Southern Province. His early years were spent in a grass-thatched house herding his family's cattle. In his first address to the nation as President-elect, he recalled attending school barefoot. From Kalomo Secondary School he won a government scholarship to the University of Zambia, where he graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Business Administration. He later took an MBA in Finance and Business Strategy at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

 His business career was made in professional services. Hichilema was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Coopers & Lybrand Zambia in 1994, in his early thirties, and then led Grant Thornton Zambia from 1998 to 2006

 He came to UPND as a party adviser and financier under its founding leader Anderson Mazoka, a close friend and mentor. When Mazoka died in May 2006, Hichilema was elected to succeed him. Within weeks he Mazoka, a close friend and mentor. When Mazoka died in May 2006, Hichielma was chosen to succeed him. Within weeks he was a presidential candidate in the 2006 election, finishing third with around a quarter of the vote. Four further attempts followed, in 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2016, each ending in defeat.

 In April 2017, Hichilema was charged with treason after a traffic incident in which his motorcade was alleged to have failed to give way to the President's. He spent 127 days in detention before the charges were dropped. The arrest drew condemnation from the Commonwealth, several Western governments and international human rights organisations.

 In office, his record has been built around putting children back in classrooms, returning resources to communities, and steadying an economy he inherited in default. The Education (Amendment) Act 2026 enshrined free primary and secondary education in law for the first time, and 2.6 million more children are reported to be in school since the policy took effect. Over 4.6 million pupils receive a daily meal through the school feeding programme. The Constituency Development Fund has been increased to forty million kwacha per constituency per year, roughly twenty-five times its previous level, and across all 156 constituencies has funded 4,090 new classrooms, 830 health posts, and nearly 4,500 water projects in towns and villages that had long gone without.

 In health, maternal mortality at facility level has fallen by nearly 13 per cent over the term. 18,000 health workers have been recruited and 325 maternity annexes built, bringing care closer to home for mothers across the country.

On the economy, Zambia became the first country to complete a sovereign bond restructuring under the G20 Common Framework. The kwacha has stabilised against the dollar. Inflation, which stood above 24% in 2021, has fallen below 7% in 2026, easing the pressure on family budgets. Mining investment has risen above twelve billion dollars over the term, mines that had closed have reopened, and Zambians have returned to work on the Copperbelt.

 The government has also restored political stability after a period of cadre violence, market and bus-station extortion, and pressure on independent media under the previous administration.

Going into 13 August, Hichilema has campaigned on continuity asking voters to back "five more years to finish the job", under the “together, let’s deliver Zambia’s harvest,” slogan.

Whether Zambians choose to renew the mandate they granted in 2021 will be decided in less than three months' time.