Editorial: The Choice the President Has Set Out

In The Choice We Face, President Hakainde Hichilema has done something Zambian incumbents have rarely done with such directness: framed his re-election bid as a referendum on the direction of the country. The choice, he writes, is between "two Zambias. The one we are building, and the one we left behind."

It is a confident framing, and one that rests on real ground. The Zambia of 2021 was, by any measure, in crisis, defaulted on its sovereign debt, its currency in collapse, classroom doors closed to children whose families could not afford the fees. The Zambia of 2026 is not yet the finished product. But it is no longer that Zambia. Inflation has fallen from above twenty-two per cent to single digits. The kwacha has steadied. Children are back in school, and the law now guarantees it. These are not abstract statistics, they are visible in the country every day.

The President draws particularly on the expansion of the Constituency Development Fund, which has risen from K1.6 million per constituency in 2021 to K40 million today. That figure has done meaningful work. Across the 156 constituencies, classrooms have been built, health posts opened, water projects completed in villages that had long gone without. CDF utilisation has risen from twenty per cent in 2022 to eighty-six per cent in 2025, proof, the President argues, that decentralised money is reaching the communities it was meant for rather than sitting in accounts.

Beyond the figures, the letter reinforces what Zambians have themselves seen. Peace returned to markets and bus stations, an end to the cadre violence and extortion that disfigured the previous administration, and a public space in which the press is free to criticise the government and does so daily. At a moment when several of Zambia's neighbours are losing democratic ground, the President's call for "a healthy exchange of ideas and discussion on policy and vision" and "zero tolerance for violence" during the electoral process is not just talk. It is the standard against which his own government, and the opposition contesting it, will be measured between now and 13 August.

The President acknowledges in other recent remarks that the work is not finished, but the letter itself dwells more comfortably on what has been done than on what has not. An incumbent confident in his record can afford to be more honest about where that record falls short.

Still, the choice the President sets out is not a manufactured one. Going back is a real option on the ballot, and so is going forward. Zambians will weigh both. That they will do so in a country where the question can be debated openly, in a free press and at peaceful rallies, is itself part of what is now at stake.

On 13 August, the choice will be made. The argument has been put.