Edgar Lungu One Foot In As Zambia’s New President

January 24, 2015 Editor Careers & Education, Leaders, Leadership

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VENTURES AFRICA – Zambia’s ruling Patriotic Front (PF) candidate, Edgar Lungu, currently leads with a slim margin in the country’s presidential by-elections as counting continues. The elections were held on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
Lungu who is also the country’s Justice Minister is leading his closest rival Hakainde Hichilema, a wealthy businessman, with 25,000 votes.
Results from 121 constituencies counted on Saturday by the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) have given Lungu 701,089 votes (48.72 percent) of the total votes counted. Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND) has 674,185 votes (46.85 percent).
The Zambian presidential bye-elections were held following death of
Michael Sata. Sata died October last year after ruling Africa’s second-largest copper producer for three years. He suffered from an unknown ailment and died while receiving medical care at London’s King Edward VII hospital.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says Zambia has averaged 6 to 7 percent economic growth when the mining sector boomed. But that slowed to 5.5 percent last year.
The southern Africa nation’s streamlined economy is heavily dependent on copper mining. Copper accounts for 85 percent of all the country’s exports. This has continued to raise worries that Zambia could crumble in the face of lower copper prices. And that is only if its poverty statistics don’t already tell such a tale. Unemployment and market-distorting agricultural policies are main contributors to Zambia’s high poverty rates.

By George Mpofu