In 2026, Zambians will discover whether they still possess the power to change their government—or whether that power has already been quietly taken from them to protect the country’s president. President Hakainde Hichilema entered office pledging to defend the Constitution. His record since then suggests a leader steadily testing how far that Constitution can be bent to secure his own position.

When he was in opposition, Hichilema condemned constitutional manipulation as a direct threat to democracy. He urged Members of Parliament to reject earlier amendment efforts outright, insisting that those in power must never rewrite the rules to entrench themselves. The Constitution, he declared, belongs to the people, not to any president. Yet his conduct since his 2021 election flatly contradicts those earlier claims. That contradiction has now erupted into full public view with the maneuvers surrounding Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 7 of 2025—a package of changes whose dry, technocratic title sounds harmless but conceals a danger to Zambia’s democratic order.

Pushed forward through a rushed, top-down process that sidelined the public, the bill prompted the Constitutional Court in June 2025 to rule that the amendment process initiated by the Hichilema administration lacked legitimacy. It was a damning verdict on a project marketed as a routine clean-up but pursued without meaningful citizen participation. The government unilaterally selected which articles to amend while insisting it was addressing only “non-contentious” issues—a claim that collapses under even cursory scrutiny of the bill’s contents. There is little doubt that Bill 7 concentrates power in the hands of the incumbent and weakens democratic norms and practices. It erodes the principle of checks and balances and risks rendering the opposition politically obsolete.

Under the Hichilema government, the Constitution would be altered to expand Parliament through an opaque delimitation process, introduce party-list MPs more accountable to party leadership than to voters, weaken by-elections that allow citizens to remove disloyal or underperforming MPs, and remove or dilute term limits for local leaders, allowing them to remain in office indefinitely. None of these changes serve ordinary citizens. Every one of them shields incumbents, shifting power away from voters and consolidating it among those already in office. Once embedded in the constitutional order, such changes would be exceedingly difficult to reverse.

Zambia has traveled this road before. Michael Sata’s reform process was widely criticized for being driven by short-term political calculation rather than by a consistent defense of constitutional principle, with positions shifting as the balance of advantage changed. Under Edgar Lungu, the Constitution Amendment Bill No. 10 of 2019 went further still. Legal scholars, churches, and civil-society groups denounced it as an attempt to entrench presidential and ruling-party power, weaken parliamentary oversight, and reengineer electoral rules in ways that risked pushing Zambia toward a “constitutional dictatorship.” Each time, the pattern was familiar: those in power presented self-serving changes as technical fixes designed for the public good.

Several provisions in Bill 7 are plainly contentious, whatever label the government attaches to them. Taken together, these amendments amount not to a technical tune-up but to a political project—one designed to insulate leaders from electoral punishment by weakening the mechanisms through which voters can say “no” and make that rejection meaningful. Historically and today, the message is consistent: the perceived problem is not the abuse of power, but the public’s ability to hold abusers to account.

Zambians should also recall how far Lungu’s own ambitions tested the limits of the 2016 constitutional settlement. The Constitutional Court’s ruling that his first, abbreviated term did not count as a full term opened the door to another run and ignited a fierce “third-term” controversy. Critics argued that the decision stretched the spirit, if not the letter, of the two-term presidential limit. That episode illustrated how quickly incumbents are willing to push legal arguments to the breaking point when their tenure is at stake—and how fragile constitutional guarantees become when they are treated as obstacles to be navigated around rather than boundaries to be respected.

Looking ahead to 2026, this pattern points in one troubling direction: the presidential two-term limit is at risk. A president willing to manipulate rules governing representation, by-elections, and local term limits to reduce political risk is unlikely to rediscover constitutional restraint when his own tenure becomes inconvenient. If Hichilema continues down this path, he will be following a well-worn script of African leaders who twist constitutions to clear the way for extended rule, often with disastrous consequences. Once the Constitution becomes a toolkit for political survival rather than a restraint on ambition, the clause preventing a third term becomes just another barrier to be removed when circumstances permit.

Seen in this light, Bill 7 is not an aberration but a rehearsal—groundwork for hollowing out the safeguards that stand between this president and an open-ended stay in power. The Constitutional Court’s intervention has stalled this particular effort, but it has not addressed the underlying impulse to bend the basic law to suit the incumbent. Similar proposals can be repackaged and reintroduced before or after the 2026 elections. The deeper danger lies in a governing mindset that treats constitutional guarantees as disposable whenever they conflict with elite interests.

Zambian voters, therefore, cannot approach 2026 as a routine election conducted within a neutral, rules-based system if Bill 7—or its successors—prevails. They were promised a leader who would respect the 2016 settlement that brought Hakainde Hichilema to power. Instead, they face a president probing, step by step, how far the rules can be twisted to secure his own future, aided by a political class too willing to look the other way.

If citizens, through their MPs, civil society, churches, and other institutions, do not confront this now—and actively resist attempts to smuggle the same ideas back under a different guise—they risk awakening in a country where elections still occur, but the power to change course has already been taken out of their hands.