. CHILUBA

By ANTHONY MUSALUKE –
SO Zambia is poised to have the 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections under the newly-amended Constitution! Fantastic!
I am excited due to some progressive clauses in the amended Constitution and, of note, is the dual citizenship clause which our friends and relatives in the Diaspora will surely have something to giggle about.
They have been waiting for this one for ages. Now their children born elsewhere can at least claim Zambia as their home land.
What a breath of fresh air their parents must be breathing!
History was made on that 5th day of January, 2016, when President Edgar Lungu assented to the amended Constitution. Like it or not, it was history and history is told by the victors.
Time has come to move towards the implementation of some of the new items that have just become part of the supreme law of the land.
My own take from most of the contents, and one which caused a big discussion for many during the Constitution-making processes in the past, is the 50 per cent +1 threshold for the presidential candidate to emerge as winner in the presidential race.
Terminologies I looked up the 50 per cent +1 vote just to be sure what it means, and now I get it: A presidential candidate must get 50 per cent of the votes plus one more vote than the closest contender.
Essentially, one can have 10 and the other 11 and the 11 one wins.
Nice one!
But wait, wasn’t that what we had before?
What we have now elected to use in this country is called a two-round system which is a modification of the pluralist/majority system called First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) or winner-takes-all that we have been using in the past.
According to Wikipedia, a first-past-the-post election is one that is won by the candidate receiving more votes than any other.
It is a common but not universal feature of electoral systems with single-member legislative districts. Large countries using FPTP include India, United States (US), United Kingdom (UK) and Canada.
The two-round system (also known as the second ballot, run-off voting or ballotage) is a voting system used to elect a single winner where the voter casts a single vote for their chosen candidate.
However, if no candidate receives the required number of votes (usually an absolute majority or 40-45 per cent with a winning margin of 5–15 per cent), then those candidates having less than a certain proportion of the votes, or all but the two candidates receiving the most votes, are eliminated, and a second round of voting is held.
Will the 50 per cent +1 prove tricky for Zambia?
To do this write-up some justice and to make the reader follow my rumblings, I went into the archives of previous presidential elections in Zambia to see if I could use the information therein and apply the 50 per cent +1 method to them and see what the landscape would have looked like.
While searching, I noticed that apart from the 1991 and 1996 presidential elections, all the post multi-party democracy elections have never produced a winner in the first round of voting that would qualify for the absolute majority under a two-round system.
It also means, we have no way of knowing how differently people would have behaved given a second chance to pick from the top two candidates.
Would the late Anderson Mazoka with his United Party for National Development (UPND) have been the winner had we been given a round two in 2001?
Would the late President Michael Sata with his Patriotic Front (PF) have won earlier than 2011?
Would current UPND leader Hakainde Hichilema have benefitted from a second round last year or would it have awoken the absent voters and given President Edgar Lungu a bigger margin? Maybe yes, maybe not!
For instance, the Electoral Commission of Zambia, in 1996 speaks of the 1,325,053 votes cast when the winner needed 662,000 votes to get absolute majority.
Former President Frederick Chiluba, polled 913,000 votes and no round two would have been needed.
In the 2001 elections, both President Levy Mwanawasa and Mr Mazoka were miles away from the votes needed to reach the 50 per cent +1 absolute majority.
A re-run here would have been very interesting. Would FDDs 13 percent and UNIP’s ten per cent voters now in limbo have
decided to vote again or stay away?
If they did decide to vote in round two, who would they have voted for?
To answer this question, one would have to analyse the pattern of votes for both FDD and UNIP at that time.
Where did they come from? The youth, the white collar workers, the farmers, male or female voters, etc? Was there an issue of party strongholds or not?
Ten years after their defeat, what kept UNIP still looking like they could influence voters?
However, during the 2006 elections more people went to the polls compared to 2001; UNIP, FDD and UPND formed an alliance, the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) which was led by Mr Mazoka.
Upon Mr Mazoka’s passing in May 2006, Mr Hichilema became the leader of UDA and its presidential candidate during that year’s elections.
Careful examination indicates that give or take, about 100,000 votes, the total by UPND from the 2001 elections became the total for UDA in 2006.
It seems likely that the UPND did not need the UDA alliance at all at that time.
They had done well on their own in 2001.
The two allies added just about 100,000 votes or so which did not shift the political landscape in the face of the resurgent MMD who went from 28 per cent to 42 per cent compared to the previous election.
The alliance seemed to have worked though in so far as the ideology behind it was concerned: that even in Zambia, an alliance can go to the polls.
However, there seemed to have been one other problem for the alliance. Mr Sata’s PF was gaining momentum at this stage.
PF had not been a factor in the elections of five years earlier in 2001.
Now, the scene had changed. What would have happened in round two of votes in 2006 considering the UDA, an alliance of three political parties, would have had 25 per cent of its voters stranded?
Would have PF taken those votes, or would it have been the MMD to take the votes?
Note, the MMD had made a great improvement as well from the 2001 elections, growing by about 12 per cent.
Would strongholds and regional influence have played a part in how the UDA supporters were going to vote if asked to choose over MMD and PF in round two, or would they have simply stayed away and let the MMD win anyway to punish PF for ruining their alliance chances?
Note here that the in areas where PF was considered strong, so was MMD, but not vice versa.
The 2008 elections saw the UDA disappear.
PF seemed to have gained another eight per cent, MMD shed three per cent whereas UPND dropped five per cent (in comparison with their individual performance of the 2001 elections).
The other two UDA members did not make the cut for the top four slots even.
All the top three party numbers dropped compared to 2006.
Both MMD and UPND seemed to have donated their loss to PF by the exact amounts gained by PF in percentage terms.
And in 2011, things got even more interesting.
In terms of number of votes cast, 2011 was almost a mirror of 2006.
The PF became the MMD in percentage poll results. The MMD dropped five per cent votes from the previous election, whereas the UPND seemed to have maintained their numbers and PF gained another four per cent.
Despite all these movements, there still was no absolute majority winner in this election either. So a round-two would have been used.
Once again, it would have been the MMD and the PF. Once again, the 18 per cent UPND voters would have had to choose between these two party’s candidates.
Before I look at the 2015 presidential by-elections, I would like to mention that both of the two presidential by-elections we have had, the voter turnout has not been the same as for the regularly scheduled elections once every five years with last year’s being the worst attended at 32 per cent voter turnout.
Ok, so that aside, the 2015 elections seemed to have had its own character.
The UPND, for the very first time since 2001, came within a couple percentage points with the ruling party in the elections.
Not only that, they made gains of just under 39 per cent points over their previous performance. No other party has had such a huge percentage gain since MMD defeated UNIP in 1991.
The PF still gained six per cent on their previous performance in percentage point terms but that is a far cry from the gains by the UPND.
Still, there was no absolute majority winner even after these results.
Hence a round-two of voting would have been needed.
This time, it would have been UPND and PF as the contenders.
Time for the MMD voters to have some painkiller medication for a change. Except them and FDD’s voters had only two per cent  influence in this election. However, with a round two voting system, winning is still based on the FPTP rule.
Even a single vote difference at this stage makes you win.
Would the 30,000 FDD and MMD supporters have picked sides equally or leaned more to either the PF or the UPND?
Some of the few headaches the 50 per cent +1 presents are that, there are always stranded voters who could be substantial if there are more than two relatively strong parties.
The supporters of a party that comes third can decide to stay away, split the votes or lean to one of the top two.
The other often cited issue is that of voter fatigue. Elections are not particularly interesting activities that people do.
They are considered by many as a waste of time and just a way of replacing one set of politicians with another while ordinary people remain in the same state as citizens.
Sending the ordinary people back again to stand in line is not something they like doing.
As such, the round two turn-out could be low.
Nevertheless, what will be the landscape for 2016 August 11 elections, given the analysis above?
What do you think will be the factors leading to the UPND or the PF winning the elections?
I have mentioned UPND and PF deliberately so that you are aware that it is definitely the two that will be going for a round two.
Do bear in mind that there has been an additional 1,246,626 new voters registered as of November, 2015.
This figure means we now have at least 6,412,714 voters eligible to cast their votes this year.
The top five, in no particular order, with high numbers of new voters are Southern, Eastern, Lusaka, Central and Copperbelt provinces.
What will become of FDD and MMD?
Will they contribute more than 30,000 votes between them?
Will they go it alone or opt to support either of the top two parties?
Can the country avoid the second round of voting by having alliances formed ahead of time?
If not, which party will be third and help decide the winning party?
There are many more other factors that come to play during round-two voting. I have not discussed all of them so we can make this long article shorter.
I have also assumed that the voters of round one who get their candidate to round two will not change their minds at all during round two. That is not entirely true but it helps make the analysis easier and is usually common sense. Let us discuss.
The 50+1 we wanted is here. Or did we even understand it in Zambia’s context?
We will find out soon enough, in seven months.