In September 2006, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and its presidential candidate, the late Levy Mwanawasa, were re-elected as the government of Zambia. The MMD's fourth successive election victory since Zambia's return to multiparty democracy in 1990-91 suggests that effective pluralism has yet to be entrenched in Zambian political life. Certainly, the optimism that surrounded that transition regarding the potential of democratisation to address the country's profound social, economic and political problems proved unfounded. By the late 1990s, amidst economic collapse and a renewed authoritarianism that echoed aspects of the Zambian one-party state of the 1970s and 1980s, it appeared that formal democratisation had made little impact either on political culture or the lives of ordinary Zambians (Bratton & Posner 1999). In this sense, Zambia bore a strong resemblance to many other sub-Saharan African countries that experienced similar transitions in the early 1990s, only to see the ‘capture’ of new democratic structures by what Bartlett calls ‘older political logics’ (Bartlett 2000: 445).

This chapter finds that, if the initial optimism surrounding the transition was overstated, then the subsequent pessimism was equally unwarranted. It will show how the pro-democracy movement that swept aside the apparently hegemonic one-party state was itself a complex alliance of popular and elite forces, in which supposedly popular civil society movements played a limited and problematic role. In an unconscious echo of Nkrumah's directive to nationalist movements to ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom’, the MMD, first as popular movement and subsequently as political party, achieved a relatively smooth transition to power only by postponing the underlying questions that it faced regarding the nature of post-colonial governance and Zambia's peripheral position in the global economy.