By Brian Matambo | 4 February, 2026

Dear Reader,

Someone needs to remind our friends at the Electoral Commission of Zambia that the work entrusted to them is sacrosanct. It is not a routine clerical chore. It is not mere public relations. It is the serious and disciplined stewardship of the people’s sovereignty. When an institution charged with guarding the vote appears casual with facts, sluggish with clarity, or dismissive of legitimate public concern, it does not merely inconvenience critics. It weakens confidence in the Republic itself.

Early last month, we raised a straightforward concern. Why does the voter register displayed on the ECZ website, marked 2025, show just over seven million registered voters, while the Commission publicly announced a figure exceeding 8.8 million? A discrepancy of more than 1.7 million voters is not a rounding error. It is not a footnote. It is the population of entire provinces. It goes to the heart of electoral planning, delimitation, resource allocation, and ultimately the credibility of the 2026 General Election. ECZ responded at the time with a press statement signed by Brown Kasaro.

The explanation offered was that the difference lay between a previously certified register and a provisional register arising from a mass voter registration exercise. We were told that the higher figure was provisional, subject to cleaning, verification, inspection, and statutory processes. Fine. Taken on its own, that explanation is not unreasonable. Electoral processes do involve stages.

What is unreasonable is what followed next.

Nearly a month later, Beverly Moore, known as Chair The Voice of Zambia, through her Facebook page, returned to the issue, asking a question that any serious democracy should expect to be asked. How does a commission embark on the delimitation of constituencies without first telling the nation the exact number of voters, broken down properly, transparently, and credibly? Instead of engaging afresh, instead of providing updated figures, timelines, or granular data, ECZ simply reposted the same January 11 press statement. No new numbers. No progress report. No acknowledgement that time has passed and the country has moved closer to an election.

Ba ECZ, look here. Elections are not managed in the abstract. Political parties do not campaign in national aggregates. They organise by wards, by polling districts, by polling stations. Candidates need to know who they are speaking to. Observers need to know what to verify. Citizens need to know that the register reflects living, breathing voters in their communities today, not historical snapshots from 2021.

If I ask how many registered male voters are in Lyansa Polling District, specifically at Lyansa Community School polling station under Keembe Constituency in Chibombo, that should not be an exotic or hostile question. It should be a routine query, answerable from a modern electoral database in seconds. More importantly, it should reflect who will be eligible to vote in August 2026, not who voted five years ago.

Instead, ECZ appears comfortable hiding behind process language and provisional labels, as if the mere existence of statutory procedures absolves it from the responsibility of timely competence. Six months before a general election is not early. It is late. At this stage, the nation, political parties, civil society, observers, and even the next government should already be working from a common, reliable dataset. Planning cannot happen in fog.

The danger here is not just administrative. It is political. When you, ba ECZ, begin to play the dismissive card, you sow seeds of suspicion. Do not blame the nation when anger festers because of that. You should never allow yourselves to feign incapacity. You should not appear more irritated by public scrutiny than committed to public trust. And you should never give citizens reason to believe that you are quietly smoothing the path for any political party, ruling or otherwise.

Zambia deserves better than recycled explanations. It deserves an ECZ that is alert, technologically capable, and deeply aware of the gravity of its role. If the register is being cleaned, tell us how far along it is. If figures have changed, publish them. If verification is ongoing, provide timelines and interim datasets. Transparency is not a favour. It is the job.

This election will not be judged only by how votes are cast on polling day. It will be judged by how seriously institutions treated the public in the months leading up to it. ECZ still has time to correct course. But time, like trust, is a finite resource, and it is being spent very quickly.