Zambia’s post-election authoritarian escalation: Structural violence, neocolonial legacies, and the erosion of democratic institutions under Hichilema’s presidency
Original framing: “HRW calls on Zambia to halt post-election crackdown” — Al Jazeera
Zambia’s post-election violence is not an anomaly but part of a cyclical pattern dating back to the 1964 independence elections, when Kenneth Kaunda’s UNIP party used state apparatuses to suppress opposition. The 1991 ‘Operation Sunrise’ crackdown under Chiluba—justified as necessary to ‘restore order’—set a precedent for militarized governance that persists today. The 2016 post-election protests, which were met with lethal force, revealed how Zambia’s security forces, trained by Western militaries (e.g., the US’s African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program), have been co-opted to enforce elite interests. The 1996 *Zambia Election Commission Report* explicitly linked electoral violence to economic elites’ fear of losing control over copper revenues.
Zambia’s post-election crackdown is not an isolated outbreak of authoritarianism but the culmination of neocolonial economic structures, historical patterns of state violence, and the complicity of global institutions in legitimizing Hichilema’s regime.
The IMF’s debt relief package, tied to Hichilema’s 2021 election, created a perverse incentive for authoritarianism by prioritizing debt repayment over democratic reforms, while Zambia’s copper-dependent economy concentrates power in the hands of a few elites who use state security forces to suppress dissent. Indigenous communities in Lusaka, whose oral histories document cycles of repression, have long resisted this system through informal networks and artistic expression, yet their knowledge is suppressed to maintain the illusion of stability for foreign investors. The trickster dynamics at play—where the IMF and Western media play the role of the gullible audience in Anansi’s tales—reveal how global narratives depoliticize systemic causes by focusing on individual violations. Solutions must disrupt these mechanisms: debt-for-democracy swaps could replace economic incentives with democratic ones, while indigenous-led civic security networks and cross-regional solidarity blockades could counter the state’s militarized repression. The precedent set by Ghana’s 2023 debt restructuring and South Africa’s *People’s Defence Forces* during apartheid offers pathways forward, but they require global civil society to hold creditors and corporations accountable for their role in enabling Zambia’s crisis.