By Dr. Field C. Ruwe
Deafening cheers and chants cascading from a massive crowd shook the foundations of Heroes Stadium as the presidential convoy passed through the gates. For five years, a nation of 22 million people had bled under a quiet tyranny–enduring the suffocating weight of skyrocketing food prices that emptied the bellies of the impoverished and the rhythmic misery of grueling rolling blackouts that destabilized their lives.
Piece by piece, the state machinery had systematically splintered the opposition and strangled free speech until dissent became a muted, dangerous whisper. In the corridors of power, the unchecked rot of graft and nepotism spread like a contagion, while the constitution itself lay fragmented–a casualty of absolute control, punctuated by the refusal of a sitting president to have his vast wealth known to the public. It was against this backdrop of quiet ruin that President Hakainde Hichilema’s convoy finally ground to a halt in the shadow of the towering pavilion.
The clear, blue sunny sky of June 28, 2026, hung heavy over the Lusaka landscape, casting long, golden shadows across the dust-whipped stadium grounds. On this day, Hichilema returned to the campaign trail, not merely as a candidate seeking votes, but as a president pursuing a profound renewal of his mandate from the Zambian people. The cheers and chants of the crowd rose like thunder, echoing against the African horizon, as Hichilema arrived at the podium to launch the campaign.
It had been a rough month for Hichilema. The heavy tide of June had brought with it cold, slow-bleeding uncertainty. His grip on the presidency was fast slipping. Throughout the long, suffocating nights of June, he was haunted by the persistent roar of waves of people with unified energy at the Tonse Alliance rallies. The huge crowds were a relentless reminder that his empire was built on sand. Looking in the mirror, he saw the terrifying truth that he was neither indispensable to his nation nor immortal in time. It was this that was causing him gnawing anxiety and insomnia.
The 2021 landslide had left Hichilema drunk on a dangerous illusion of eternal rule. He wore his victory like a prophet’s mantle, convinced that he alone was Zambia’s salvation. More than anything, he craved the narcotic thrill of the crowds of yesteryear. He fed on the thunder of packed stadiums. In those moments, surrounded by a sea of adulation, he felt truly invincible. It was a potent, intoxicating validation that transformed popular applause into a mandate of absolute, unquestionable power. The mere whisper that the Tonse Alliance might steal his presidency was a betrayal he could not fathom.
For several grueling days before the campaign launch, Hichilema’s campaign team lived in the crucible of his anxiety and nightmare. They, too, scrambled sleeplessly, driven by his urgent demands to conjure a rally with a human sea larger than the Tonse pride and nothing else. The ulterior motive was to build a firewall against the opposition. It involved stage-managing a display meant to slow down the Tonse momentum, establish false vitality, reclaim the mandate of strength, and forge an aura of unstoppable victory.
To this end, the campaign planners engineered the rally as a trap for the poor. They knew poverty breeds a desperate kind of loyalty, making these hollowed-out souls the perfect fuel for cheers and chants, and repeating commandeered slogans. By targeting the poor, the organizers planned to forge raw, bleeding fury into a feral, infectious frenzy—one that would choke out the Tonse Alliance rising tide.
With the poor in mind, campaign operatives cast their eyes toward the city’s frayed edges, treating the sprawling shanties, low-income settlements, and bustling marketplaces as a human quarry. To them, these desperate souls were the perfect people to fill the stadium. More than that, this sea of neglected humanity represented a sleeping political titan–a massive, voting bloc whose sheer numbers could conjure the illusion of an unstoppable grassroots revolution.
By midday, the stadium groaned under the weight of thousands of hollow-eyed multitudes. A dull, persistent ache gnawed at the empty bellies of the majority. For these forgotten souls, breakfast had long since vanished from daily life, fading into the memory of an unattainable luxury. Behind them, in the quiet shadows of their homes, they had left their emaciated children, their ribcages and cheeks sunken deep into the shadows.
Before jumping on the UPND transport to the rally, they had whispered frantic prayers, begging heaven that Hichilema would fulfill his 2021 promise this time around and somehow intervene before the quiet specter of starvation wiped out their families. Back in 2021, freshly sworn into power, Hichilema uttered a pledge that felt less like politics and more like a holy covenant: “No one will go to bed hungry as long as I’m president.” It was a promise that for five years, burned as brightly in their minds as the afternoon sun.
Every poor soul packed into the inauguration grounds that day caught the ring of Hichilema’s voice over the loudspeakers. He bound his first term to a fierce commitment that food security would be a major bedrock of his governance, and his administration would wage an aggressive war against the staggering hunger devouring the poor. His words crystallized in the air, hanging suspended over the crowd like a timeless promise, frozen forever in their hearts.
Sadly, Hichilema’s promise, held like a sacred vow, withered into a grotesque and hollow mockery of the Zambian poor. For five years, life for the impoverished was forged into an unyielding furnace of despair. It was the escalating cost of mealie-meal that first shattered the illusion.
As the price climbed into the realm of the impossible, the staple food vanished from the tables, inviting a quiet, desperate famine into homes. Severe starvation swept across the land, leaving an ache that settled deep into their daily lives. Families were hollowed out by grief, burying elders claimed by lack of food and children withered by malnutrition.
This devastating reality was no longer just a shared trauma; it was codified in black and white. The 2025 Global Hunger Index cast a grim light on the nation, ranking Zambia 110th out of 123 countries. With a hunger score of 29.6 out of 100, the hunger situation was officially branded with a chilling label: “catastrophic.”
The World Bank only deepened the state of hunger, painting a stark picture of a nation fracturing along poverty lines. The data revealed a steady climb in national poverty, rising from 54.4% in 2015 during Lungu’s presidency to 60% by 2026. Today, nearly two-thirds of the population, some 64.3% of Zambians, are forced to survive on less than $2.15 a day.
This desperate struggle for survival has pushed Zambia into the ignominious rank of the sixth-poorest nation on earth. It is a crisis compounded by a yawning chasm of income inequality, that tears the fabric of society apart as the wealthy and the poor drift into entirely different worlds.
The UPND rally laid bare the inequality and the bitter fracture in the social fabric. A silent theatre of wealth and poverty played out in the red and yellow colors of the UPND. Under the sequestered shade of the VIP pavilion, the party’s elite sat gathered like a pristine exhibit of the fortunate. They were draped in bespoke fabrics and tailored jackets of sharp, unblemished crimson garments that clung flawlessly to bodies unfamiliar with toil. In the poised stillness and easy elegance of their postures, they bore the unmistakable, radiant glaze of a well- nourished aristocracy.
Contrarily, in the rising dust kicked up by dirty feet, a different world existed. Thousands of hollow-eyed attendants stood huddled together behind barriers that kept them at a distance from the elite. They wore their poverty like patchwork armor; their garments were a faded mosaic, plucked from the stalls of the Salaula (secondhand) markets. For many, hunger had stripped away everything but the barest mechanics of life, leaving them drifting through the haze like zombies. Faded red berets sat askew on their heads, and T-shirts, salvaged from the previous elections, clung to their skeletal frames like burial shrouds.
The rally showed that the UPND regalia no longer signified a shared purpose; instead, it served as a grim testament to an unbridgeable chasm that drew a sharp and bitter inequality between the few rich who feasted on power and the thousands of the poor who died of hunger. Moreover, in shanty compounds where the true weight of voting rested, the faded berets were not an issue, but the empty plate; it stood as a stark testament to the difference between the rich and the poor.
The poor were at the rally to seek economic justice, a reckoning for the grand pledge Hichilema had woven into the fabric of their shared hope five years ago, which remains unfulfilled to this day. For weeks, a feverish whisper had crawled through the labyrinth of the shanties that Zambia was no longer destitute; it was wealthy. The word was that Hichilema was sitting upon a fortress of money in the dazzling amount of $6.5 billion. While to the rich it was a data point on a ledger, for the poor it was salvation.
Now, as they waited for Hichilema to speak, the poor, a sea of upturned faces bound by a single, desperate hope, held their collective breath, praying they would not go back home empty-handed; that he would dedicate a portion of the reserve to them to ease their daily plight. It was this fragile possibility of relief that had dragged them from the shelter of their homes and bound them to the scorching earth.
At the podium, Hichilema looked out over the sea of faces and spoke. The narcissistic architect of political pandering he was, he dropped the childish phrase “salt sana,” instantly setting the crowd ablaze. It was a trending youth slang that carried a dozen different meanings in a single breath. He adopted it to flavor his political narrative, transforming it into a symbol of his so-called achievements: free education, healthcare overhauls, and mining output.
Now, as his voice echoed across the stadium, he leaned into the microphone and finally addressed the issue on the top agenda for the majority-poor: the 6.5 billion in reserve. He blatantly intimated to the crowd that the reserved money was not intended for welfare.
“Ija reserve ni insurance,” he said in Nyanja, directing the dialect at the poor.
He continued. “Ija reserve ni policy insurance, ni confidence, ngati kuli drought, tisebezensa reserve, tagula vakudia tapasa bantu kuti badye. The central bank will use some to buffer the Kwacha against global economic shocks. I’ve locked $6.5 billion in national reserves in a safe. You won’t see it.”
The die was cast. Maize, the lifeblood of the nation, would remain a luxury. By turning a blind eye to the impoverished, Hichilema had transformed his bread-and-butter promises into a harvest of dust. His indifference to the 64.3% starving Zambians fractured the very foundation of his solemn vow to never see a Zambian go to bed hungry.
For those poor people in the stadium and beyond, who understood what had just happened, their optimism evaporated like a desert mirage. The grand promises of the New Dawn again failed to put food on the table, leaving the poor to swallow the bitter truth that their millionaire president cared less about them. Sitting atop a sprawling fortune of more than 340 million, his true ledger of success tallied the creditors, ignoring the hollow ache of the bellies.
For five years, Hichilema’s cold indifference carved itself into the bedrock of the nation. He stood unyielding, refusing to respond to the statistics that showed how hunger was claiming lives. He flatly refused to unlock even a fraction of the state’s reserve coffers to establish food banks meant to feed starving people as promised. In the alleyways of shanties and low-cost settlements, hunger will continue for as long as Hichilema is president. For him, the impoverished are nothing more than political props used every five years to secure his victory and dumped the minute the votes are counted.
For any president, the battle against poverty is the ultimate yardstick of presidential success. It is a raw, material reality for the destitute masses who hold the true power of the ballot, commanding the majority voice when election season sweeps across the landscape. Any poor person can confidently deduce that Hichilema has abandoned them at the vital altar. The choice is yours. You continue to starve, or you do something about it on August 13, 2026.
Author is a Doctor of Education, scholar, and a researcher affiliated with Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In 2023, I authored my inaugural academic article entitled “Phenomenon of Social Media in Sub-Saharan Africa: Leapfrogging from Traditional Communication to Digital Dialogic Communication” published in the Pacific Journal.
