5 - Winning the Prize

Summary

HALFWAY INTO the official count of the 2006 election results, with most votes from Lusaka, Copperbelt, and the Bemba-speaking Luapula and Northern provinces already tallied, Sata declared himself winner of the presidential election. Notwithstanding that results from the remaining five provinces were yet to be counted, the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) leader went on to announce that ‘I have won the presidential race by 55 per cent followed by President [Levy] Mwanawasa at 25 per cent’. So confident of victory was Sata that he moved to instruct the Cabinet Office to shift his inauguration from the Supreme Court grounds, the traditional venue, to the 30,000-seater Independence Stadium in order to allow the maximum number of his supporters to attend the ceremony. He then went on to direct that Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe should be invited to the inauguration ceremony as the guest of honour.

Sata's actions elicited strong criticism from the ruling party, whose campaign chief, Vernon Mwaanga, described them as ‘premature’. Mwaanga argued that Sata's strongholds ‘do not represent the total results of the elections for the whole country’. As shown in the previous chapter, the results from the Electoral Commission of Zambia, which saw Mwanawasa of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) the declared winner, demonstrated how hasty Sata's declaration was. Mwaanga's rebuke of Sata also highlighted the PF leader's limited understanding of the Zambian political landscape. In effect, the MMD campaign chairperson was making the point that, to secure the national presidency, a candidate needed to win their main electoral constituencies comfortably and perform well in the strongholds of their opponents. This was a consideration that Sata's campaign strategy had overlooked until then.

This chapter, building on the preceding one, explores the strategies of electoral mobilisation that Sata employed between 2006 and 2011 to establish a national constituency as a response to his electoral defeat. It demonstrates that during this period, Sata managed to achieve his objective by targeting and appealing to non-Bemba ethnic groups through specific policy messages, such as decentralisation, which found an echo in several constituencies of the Lozi-speaking Western Province.