Hakainde Hichilema
Hakainde Hichilema has been president of Zambia since August 2021, the cattle rancher and accountant who lost five presidential elections between 2006 and 2016, spent four months in prison in 2017 on a treason charge for failing to give way to the president's motorcade. He won the sixth in August 2021 by a million votes against the incumbent Edgar Lungu, whose government had defaulted on the country's debt in November 2020, the first African default of the pandemic, and whose party had run the election with the internet cut and the army in the streets. The young voters who queued through the night gave him fifty-nine per cent, and Lungu conceded. The presidency has been the debt. Seventeen billion dollars owed to China, the Eurobond holders and the rest were restructured under the G20's common framework in a process that took two and a half years, with China and the bondholders each waiting for the other. It closed in 2024 with the country's growth back at five per cent and the kwacha the world's best-performing currency for a year. There were the copper mines taken back from the Indian owners of Konkola and the Vedanta dispute settled, the target of three million tonnes a year, and the free secondary education from 2022. There was the drought of 2024, the worst in forty years, that cut the maize harvest by half and the Kariba dam's power to a fraction, so that the country lived on three hours of electricity a day. There was the death of Lungu in South Africa in June 2025, whose family refused a state funeral and whose body the two governments fought over in the Pretoria courts. He was born in Monze in the Southern Province in 1962, the son of subsistence farmers, studied economics at the University of Zambia and took an MBA at Birmingham, ran the Zambian arm of Coopers and Lybrand and then Grant Thornton. He built the largest cattle herd in the country. He took the United Party for National Development in 2006 on its founder's death and kept it through the defeats. The record on the freedoms he promised is mixed. There are the cyber-security laws of 2025 that the opposition calls Lungu's in new clothes, the public order act still in force, and a constitutional amendment bill of 2025 to enlarge the parliament that the churches opposed. The election of August 2026 will be against an opposition that has lost its leader and found no other.
- Lived: 1962 CE – ?
- Nationality: Zambian
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
