Peter Burnell, "Building on the Past?: Party Politics in Zambia's Third Republic," Party Politics , 1 (July, 1995), 397-405.

First Paragraph:
At the outset of the 1990s a new wind of change seemed to be blowing across Africa, bringing political liberalization and democratization to many countries whose experience had been mainly rule by the military, personal dictatorships and one-party states. One such country was Zambia, where a constitutional amendment in December 1990 legalized political pluralism, thereby spelling an end to the one-party state which characterized the Second Republic.The Third Republic resumed the multi-party tradition that had characterized the country's First Republic (1964-72) and the years immediately prior to constitutional independence.

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Last Paragraph:
Zambia may not be about to witness a recurrence of its earlier inability to sustain multi-party politics. But there is a conventional view, as found in Lipset (1993: 14) and Kohli (1993: 676) for instance, that parties, and successful party-building, are central to the prospects of democratic consolidation (if not democratic transition as well), and on that score Zambia still has a long way to go. A durable solution for managing conflict among political actors has so far eluded Zambians in the nationalist period and in all three republics. The present flux and instability are due in part to the persistence of certain conditions that, in an earlier decade, conspired to put an end to multi-partyism. But that is only one aspect. The present uncertainties also derive from the legacy of the Second Republic, which bequeathed not only a reaction against personal rule(which should serve the cause of democracy well) but also some traits that are unhelpful to liberal democracy. In the meantime, the cause of effective government could suffer. Crisis management has come to be a preoccupation with regard to the internal affairs of cabinet and ruling party. There is bound to be a price, in terms of insufficient attention being given to effective management of public affairs, in a country that badly needs social and economic progress to go along with the existing achievements in political reform.