The Politics of Constitution-Making in Zambia: 1964–2021

Scholarship on Zambia’s constitutions has been dominated by political scientists and jurists, and this contribution intends to give a more historical and analytical orientation to Zambia’s postindependence constitutional developments. This chapter sets out to examine the politics of constitution-making in Zambia as a recurrent process that was set in motion during British colonial rule and remained a dominant feature in the postcolony. The methodology is essentially qualitative, and this author depended heavily on primary written documents, personal involvement in constitution-making, interviews, and secondary sources. This study revealed that the inherited Westminster multiparty independence constitutional model from Britain was negotiated and fine-tuned with the political elite and built on the foundations of a unitary state. Zambia has distinguished itself as the country with one of the highest numbers of turnovers of constitutional reviews in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region since independence, with a strong quest for people-driven constitutions. These developments culminated in the transition from multipartyism to one-party governance and back to multipartyism with established presidential terms and presidential alternations.