The Election Zambians Don’t Recognise

PART I

As Zambia prepares to vote, political claims are racing through phones faster than many voters can verify them. MakanDay examined allegations of foreign interference and found something more complicated: real events, unsupported claims and sophisticated political messaging increasingly occupying the same digital space.

By Charles Mafa

When Nathan Banda* voted in Zambia’s historic 1991 election, he knew where most political messages came from.

Candidates stood before crowds. Political arguments played out on radio. Newspapers carried identifiable headlines and bylines. Rumours travelled through markets, workplaces and neighbourhoods — often taking days to move from Lusaka to places such as Mansa, Chipata or Solwezi.

Thirty-five years later, the 56-year-old is preparing to vote again.

But this is an election he barely recognises.

Political claims now arrive on his phone throughout the day. They appear in WhatsApp groups, Facebook posts and videos, sometimes stripped of their original source and forwarded repeatedly before anyone establishes whether they are true.

“Sometimes you don’t know what to believe anymore,” Banda says. “Everyone claims they have the truth.”

For 22-year-old University of Zambia student Mary Mwala*, there is no earlier election to compare it with. She is voting for the first time, and the digital contest is simply part of politics as she knows it.

Political videos and messages regularly reach her through WhatsApp and TikTok, she says, often forwarded by friends and relatives with little indication of who created them.

“Someone sends you a video and says, ‘This is what happened,’ but you don’t know who made it or whether it’s true,” Mwala says. “Sometimes people forward things so quickly that by the time someone corrects it, everyone has already believed it.”

The two voters, separated by a generation, are confronting the same problem as Zambia prepares to vote on 13 August: How does a voter know what — and whom — to believe?

Professor Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham, says the way elections are contested has “fundamentally changed” since 1991, with social media allowing political messages to travel faster and reach voters without rallies or direct contact with candidates.

“What we then see is a kind of cycle or web of information in which digital technology plays a critical part,” Cheeseman told MakanDay.

Professor Stephen Chan has another vantage point.

The Professor of International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, lived and worked in Zambia in the 1980s and later became an Honorary Professor at the University of Zambia. In 2010, Chan was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) “for services to Africa and higher education,” and also the title of Eminent Scholar in Global Development by the International Studies Association. Chan was also awarded Zambia’s Presidential Insignia for Meritorious Achievement in 2022.

Now back in the country to observe the 2026 election, he has been watching the wider environment in which the campaign is taking place.

One thing struck him while travelling around Lusaka.

“Basically, what I have learnt just driving around Lusaka is that the only billboards you see are for the President and his party,” Chan said. “You have to look really hard to see even small posters for opposition parties, and even then, they tend to be from minority parties.”

Some of those parties, he said, were unfamiliar to him.

“Some of them I have not heard of before. I don’t know what their agendas are or what their manifestos say.”

President Hakainde Hichilema has campaigned on economic recovery, while opposition parties and voters have questioned who has benefited from it.

Ordinarily, such competing claims would form the substance of an election campaign: a government defending its record, opponents challenging it and voters deciding between them.

But beneath the rallies, manifesto launches and campaign promises, another contest is unfolding.

It is taking place on smartphones, in WhatsApp groups, Facebook feeds and TikTok videos, where genuine political debate competes with rumours, anonymous allegations, misleading information and increasingly sophisticated campaign messaging.

And the source of a message is not always obvious.

Neither is who paid for it, who helped create it or whose interests it ultimately serves.

What MakanDay found

For the past three months, MakanDay has been examining this less visible side of Zambia’s election — tracking political content, testing claims and investigating what can be established about some of the organisations and interests seeking to shape political narratives ahead of polling day.

What emerges instead was more complicated.

Genuine facts are being mixed with unsupported allegations. Foreign political consultants are operating alongside domestic campaigns. Claims of corporate political influence are being fiercely contested. And institutions responsible for safeguarding electoral integrity have spent much of the campaign disputing online rumours while providing limited public information about how they are responding to emerging threats.

For voters such as Banda and Mwala, the effect is the same: distinguishing legitimate political persuasion from manipulation — and established fact from speculation — has become increasingly difficult.

One Facebook post examined by MakanDay illustrates the problem.

Israel, Pegasus and an allegation without evidence

Published by The Candidate, a Facebook page created in May 2021 with more than 78,000 followers and which regularly publishes content supportive of the opposition Patriotic Front (PF), the post alleged that Israeli operatives were working with the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) to manipulate the election.

It also alleged that the government had acquired Pegasus spyware for US$5 million to rig the vote and suppress dissent.

MakanDay found no credible evidence supporting either allegation.

Some elements woven into the post’s wider narrative were based on real events.

Israel reopened its embassy in Lusaka in 2025. Zambia has previously featured in international research concerning the use of Pegasus surveillance technology during the administration of the late President Edgar Lungu. The country’s cybersecurity laws have also prompted concerns about surveillance and privacy.

But those facts do not establish that Israeli operatives are involved in the 2026 election, that anyone has gained access to ECZ systems or that the government made the alleged US$5 million Pegasus purchase.

ECZ did not respond to MakanDay’s request for comment but has publicly rejected allegations that its systems are being manipulated.

Zambia Police has also warned about false and misleading information published by The Candidate.

The episode demonstrates one of the defining characteristics of the election’s information environment. A persuasive story can be constructed from genuine facts without the central allegation itself being true.

Misinformation is not necessarily foreign interference. Nor is every piece of election misinformation evidence of foreign interference.

Cheeseman says Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference — FIMI — requires something more specific: evidence that an operation has been purposefully orchestrated from outside a country to influence political outcomes or undermine confidence in democratic processes.

“The critical point is that it’s being purposefully designed from outside of the country,” he says.

Establishing that requires investigators to go beyond examining what a suspicious post says.

They need to determine where it originated, which accounts first circulated it and how it entered the country’s information ecosystem, Cheeseman says.

That distinction is particularly important in Zambia.

Despite the country’s growing strategic importance because of copper and other natural resources, Cheeseman says his research has not identified Zambia among the African countries experiencing the highest levels of FIMI.

“Zambia’s natural resources do mean that it has a degree of geostrategic importance, but it hasn’t so far in my research been often identified as one of those countries that sees the highest levels of FIMI,” he says.

But foreign interference is only part of the picture.

Because while MakanDay could find no credible evidence supporting some of the most dramatic claims circulating online, it found evidence of something much easier to establish: Foreign political consultants have played a role in Zambian election campaigns.

And that raises a different question.

Not whether foreigners are secretly controlling Zambia’s election — but who is helping shape the messages Zambians receive, who is paying for that work and how much voters are entitled to know about it.

Part Two: The Foreign Consultants Behind Zambia’s Political Campaigns.

Names changed to protect the identities of the voters interviewed.