Pro-Lungu Church Group Planning “Independent” Election Monitoring

A non-profit Christian political group, which has openly endorsed President Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front, is planning to deploy election monitors to observe Zambia’s upcoming general elections in August, despite the obvious conflict of interest which that presents.

The Christian Coalition of Zambia, which claims to “promote Christian participation in politics of the Nation”, last month put out a call for interested citizens to register with them to become election monitors, helping to ensure free and fair elections in August. 

However on April 28, the Coalition released a video in which their leader, Charles Mwape, openly endorsed President Lungu as a candidate in the upcoming elections.

He said, “The Church in this country must rise and support President Lungu”.

This support for the government would totally undermine any credibility for the Christian Coalition to fairly and impartially observe the upcoming general elections.

Open Zambia also understands that the Coalition intends to carry out its own parallel vote tabulation (PVT), which is a process used by election monitors to independently verify the results of an election. This would only serve to confuse the results and undermine the genuine PVTs being carried out by official election observers, including those from the European Union. 

The Christian Coalition has also been wholly supportive of the Electoral Commission of Zambia’s disastrous voter registration process, openly praising the ECZ’s online voter pre-registration platform. 

This is despite many international and civil society groups labelling Zambia’s voter registration exercise a ‘scam’, after the ECZ failed to register nearly 2 million eligible voters. 

In March, University of Zambia lecturer Sishuwa Sishuwa further warned that the voters’ roll was massively biased in favour of the PF, with the number of registered voters’ growing disproportionately in government safe seats, while actually falling in areas likely to vote for opposition parties. 

An advert by the Christian Coalition calling for volunteers to work as election monitors