The Two ECZ Commissioners Both Lungu and Hichilema Trusted

Zambia's Electoral Commission has just overseen the declaration of Hakainde Hichilema's second term as president, but two of the people who helped get that result across the finish line owe their positions on the Commission not to Hichilema at all, but to the man he defeated twice: former President Edgar Lungu.

Vice Chairperson Major General Vincent Mukanda (Rtd) and Commissioner Ambassador Ndiyoi Mutiti are the only two members of the current five-person Commission who were not appointed by Hichilema. Both were named Commissioners by Lungu in 2020, part of an original five-member panel that also included Ali Simwinga, Esau Chulu and Emily Sikazwe, an appointment Parliament ratified unanimously that September, a year before Lungu himself would be voted out of office.

What happened next is the more unusual part of their story. Chulu, the Commission's Chairperson at the time, was the Returning Officer who personally declared Hichilema the winner of the 2021 election, a declaration that ended Lungu's presidency and, indirectly, Chulu's own tenure: his contract as ECZ Chairperson was not renewed by the incoming administration and lapsed the following year. Sikazwe and Simwinga were similarly not retained over the years that followed, each eventually replaced by Hichilema's own appointees, Mwangala Zaloumis as Chairperson and, this year, Zevyanji Sinkala as a new Commissioner.

Mukanda and Mutiti were the exceptions. Both were kept on through the change of government and remain on the Commission today, nearly six years after their original appointment, longer than any of their current colleagues. Mukanda, a retired Deputy Army Commander and Chief of Staff who later studied peace and conflict resolution at Copperbelt University's Dag Hammarskjold Institute, was elevated from Commissioner to Vice Chairperson by Hichilema in April 2026, just months before this year's election. Mutiti, a career diplomat who served as Zambia's Ambassador to Zimbabwe and later Japan, where she received Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, has remained a Commissioner throughout.

Their survival across a change of government has not gone unremarked. Commentator and academic Sishuwa Sishuwa, writing after Simwinga's departure, argued that the Commission's current composition draws too narrowly from the same part of the country, a concern MUVI has reported on separately, though he did not suggest Mukanda or Mutiti's individual retention itself was improper. Read differently, their continued presence, across both an incumbent's electoral defeat and his successor's own re-election five years later, is also one of the few threads of institutional continuity running through what has otherwise been one of the most turbulent stretches in the Commission's history: a nationwide suspension of results counting in the current election, a disputed security operation, and now a declared outcome that the losing side has publicly contested.

Whether being trusted by two rival presidents in succession reflects genuine, demonstrated neutrality, or simply the advantage of being useful enough not to remove, is a judgment MUVI leaves to its readers. What is on the record is this: of the five people who administered the election that just handed Hichilema a second term, only two were ever chosen by him.