Africa-Press – Zambia. As part of our long-term monitoring of the electoral process, including the campaign activities of political parties, TI-Z has been using proxy indicators to estimate the level of campaign spending towards the 2021 general elections by political parties.
This monitoring of the cost of campaign activities is meant to give Zambians a rough estimate of how much political parties are spending on trying to convince the electorate to vote for them, and will ultimately inform our ongoing advocacy on the pertinent issue of political party financing in Zambia.
To kick off this aspect of our 2021 elections project, we focused on four political parties namely the PF, the UPND, the Socialist Party and the Democratic Party, and how much these spent on billboard advertisements.
To get the estimates, we collected information about the cost of advertising on billboards from different advertising agencies, and then went round to identify as many as we could of the four parties’ billboards in Lusaka.
It is now our pleasure to present our preliminary estimations of what these parties spent towards billboard advertisement within the city of Lusaka only.
Our data collection revealed that for the month of May 2021 only, the PF had at least 208 billboards, the Socialist party had at least 70, the UPND at least 24 and the Democratic Party at least 4 billboards across the city of Lusaka. Based on this quantity survey and pricing information obtained from advertising agencies for various sizes of billboards, it has been estimated that the PF spent about K2.9 million on billboard advertisement for the month of May only, followed by the Socialist party which spent about K864,000.
The UPND spent around K648,000 while the Democratic Party spent about K108,000. Again, we reiterate that this is only for the month of May, and focusing only on Lusaka.
We will continue to do this analysis for other major towns in Zambia, as well as for other campaign activities that the different political parties are involved in. In addition to it informing our advocacy interventions on the issue of political party financing, we are convinced that information about how much money political parties are spending on their campaigns is something that will be appreciated by citizens of Zambia.
We will be releasing this information based on our analysis in our subsequent weekly updates.
