2021 — Zambia's Landslide

On August 12, 2021, a record 70 percent of Zambia's 7 million registered voters turned out for a presidential election. "HH," Hakainde Hichilema, the cattle herder turned businessman running for president a sixth time, toppled incumbent Edgar Lungu with 59 percent of the vote in a youth-led landslide.

Lungu had jailed him for 100 days in 2017 and presided over Africa's first pandemic-era sovereign debt default. The loser cried fraud, then conceded, and power changed hands peacefully. That concession mattered as much as the victory itself: Zambia became a proud beacon, proof that incumbents could fall at the ballot box.