AI-illustration: Two ballots issued to the same hand at the same station.
A state with more holes in its story than a 1960s rock star’s jeans.
A dead former cabinet minister. A permanent secretary who dismissed reports of his shooting, advised Zambians to “be serious,” and was contradicted days later by his own police. An official presidential result that the country’s largest observer network says sits outside its estimated range, with votes added in 30 constituencies. A Constitutional Court expected to hear any petition after three judges were removed in 2024 and three new judges were appointed in May 2026. An armed insurrection involving five AK-47s, 60 rounds, and other weapons, for eleven people now held for treason-related offences. Five rounds per plotter, with five to spare. An Electoral Commission that declared the result at three in the morning on 18 August and, three days into the seven-day window the Constitution allows for challenges, has still not put the figures on the results website it launched the day before the vote.
All this in 2026.
I am not convinced any of it is real. It reads like the plot of a Bollywood action film, and if you have sat through one you know exactly what I mean.
But of course, raising concern is a foreign narrative, manufactured by coloniser minds determined to make Africa look bad.
I wrote The Silence Beneath the Canopy in May 2025. It is about what happens to a place when the questions stop. Go and read it.
Mutotwe Kafwaya is dead. He was 49, the former member of parliament for Lunte, and under President Lungu the Minister of Works and Supply and then of Transport. Whatever else is written this week, a man has died, and nothing below is meant to make that lighter than it is.
Reports said he had been shot during a security operation and taken to Maina Soko. On 16 August the government called the reports a total fabrication, and the Defence Permanent Secretary, Maambo Haamaundu, told Zambians that “we need to be serious as a people.” His wife asked the Lusaka High Court to hear urgently an application over what she called his continued detention. The Human Rights Commission said it could not establish whether he was in state custody. On 19 August the Inspector General of Police confirmed that Kafwaya was the previously unidentified man shot during the joint operation in Kabulonga on the evening of 14 August, taken to hospital, and pronounced dead. His family identified the body.
Governments hold back national security matters, sometimes rightly, and the courts will hear what happened in that house. None of that required a denial. Five days passed between the shooting and the confirmation, with his wife in the High Court asking where he was and the state telling the public to be serious.
Eleven people were arrested that night at a Kabulonga house used by the main opposition candidate. High-grade military weapons, said the Secretary to the Cabinet. The police say the individuals had been under watch since November 2023. Nearly three years of surveillance, and nobody noticed the coup was short of bullets.
When the announcements started, I posted that one of the first tests of an election is to set presidential votes beside parliamentary votes cast on the same day. I was not looking at anything in particular. What surprised me first was Lusaka and the Copperbelt, which looked more competitive than I had expected. Then someone pointed me to Solwezi Central and Mongu Central and asked whether I had seen the gaps between the two ballots. I assumed outliers and checked more.
The test: voters received both ballots together, at the same station, in the same visit. Within a constituency, the two totals must track. In 2021, on the ECZ’s own figures, they tracked nationally to within 0.31 percentage points. In 2016, to within 0.42. I compiled both races for 101 constituencies from ECZ read-outs as transcribed by several outlets, returning-officer declarations, and party and network collections, keeping every source and every conflict. Media transcriptions contain errors, and the ECZ has published nothing in writing, so only 40 of the 101 could be verified to the ballot, meaning candidates plus rejected equals the declared cast or the cast total is directly published. Everything below rests on those 40.
Nineteen reconcile within 10 per cent, seventeen of them within 5. In Southern: Monze East, Itezhi-Tezhi East, Namwala West. North-Western: Zambezi Central. Western: Mitete. Copperbelt: Kabushi, Bwana Mkubwa, Konkola, Kalulushi, Chingola Central, Roan. Lusaka: Chilanga South, Matero. Central: Kapiri Mposhi West. Luapula: Chifunabuli South, Nchelenge. Eastern: Chipata North. Northern: Mpulungu North. Muchinga: Nakonde. Seats the President carried and seats he lost. Twenty-one do not reconcile. Presidential ballots exceed parliamentary by 10 to 48 per cent, 186,247 ballots in total. North-Western: Solwezi Central, Solwezi North, Mufumbwe, Manyinga, Mwinilunga East, Mwinilunga West, Kabompo East, Kabompo West. Southern: Mapatizya, Mazabuka Central, Kalomo Central, Chikankata, Magoye East. Western: Mongu Central, Luena, Senanga South, Lukulu South. Copperbelt: Luanshya, Lufwanyama East, Lufwanyama West. Lusaka: Roma. Mongu Central: 50,618 presidential ballots, 30,531 parliamentary. Turnout 90 per cent on one ballot and 54 on the other.
All 21 were carried by the President. No verified constituency carried by the opposition shows any excess. The largest divergences cluster in North-Western, Southern and Western, which is where everyone expected the President’s heaviest support. But the cluster is not clean. Inside it, seats of the same character close and do not close. Monze East, Itezhi-Tezhi East and Namwala West in Southern, Zambezi Central in North-Western and Mitete in Western reconcile. Mapatizya, same province as Monze East, same candidate at 100 per cent of the two-candidate vote, is missing a quarter of its parliamentary ballots. Outside it, the Copperbelt holds six seats that close and three that do not, and Roma in Lusaka does not. So “strongholds behave differently” explains the provinces. It does not explain Monze East against Mapatizya, Zambezi Central against Solwezi Central, or Kabushi against Luanshya.
An election is a closed accounting loop. Every polling station records ballots received, issued, in the box, rejected, and unused and returned. A voter who takes the presidential ballot and declines the parliamentary one leaves a parliamentary ballot in the unused pile, or a blank one in the box, or a rejected one in the count. A vote for an independent is a parliamentary ballot cast and is already inside these totals. Mapatizya’s parliamentary declaration reconciles to the ballot exactly, 29,142 plus 528 rejected, and it is still 10,154 short of its presidential count. So “they chose not to vote for MPs” is a line item, and it is checkable. Abstention, differential rejection, a ballot shortage, transcription error, additions at the tally centre: each leaves a different mark in the accounts. Anyone naming the cause before the accounts are published is guessing.
CCMG got there by a better road. Its observers sat in 1,491 sampled polling stations from opening until the official station result was posted, and recorded that result. Its PRVT estimated turnout at 53.5 per cent plus or minus 0.6, the incumbent at 56.0 plus or minus 1.7, Mundubile at 42.3 plus or minus 1.7. The official figures for all three fell outside those ranges, because in 30 constituencies official turnout sat more than 10 points above the plausible upper limit, driven by increased UPND votes. In four constituencies where CCMG obtained tallying records, it compared 24 sampled stations. At ten, UPND votes were higher at the tally centre than at the polling station, by an average of 178. CCMG also says the incumbent probably crossed 50.
Nic Cheeseman and Nicole Beardsworth found 27 constituencies with presidential turnout above 80 per cent: nine in North-Western, eight in Western, six in Southern, three in rural Copperbelt, one in Central, none in the four provinces where the opposition did well. Solwezi North: a gap of more than 46 points between the two ballots.
One explanation offered is a flawed adoption process: voters so unhappy with the parliamentary field that they refused the second ballot, but not so unhappy that they stayed home. Adoption disputes usually produce independents, and angry voters vote for them. If the unused and rejected parliamentary counts for Mongu Central and Solwezi North account for the gap, adoption becomes one explanation worth testing among others. Nobody can get to that question until the counts are published. The question on the table is the one before it.
Every serious way of checking an election ends at the official figures. Forecasts, sample-based estimates and interviews with people who were in the room are inputs waiting for the thing they are measured against. A forecast that lands on the announced number has matched the announcement. Whether it has matched the election is the question.
The EU Election Observation Mission has observed every general election since 2001 at the government’s request. At ten of the 38 polling stations where its observers watched the count, the ballots in the box did not match the ballots issued. On 14 August the ECZ suspended counting and announcements for six hours. The mission’s update of 19 August says that after the suspension, observers recorded extended breaks in almost half their observations, with returning officers appearing to wait for instructions from ECZ headquarters before announcing results. A heavy military presence thinned out party agents and citizen observers. An armed group attacked the Makeni totalling centre on 15 August and took almost all the polling-station result forms. Witnesses told observers that alleged UPND cadres raided two of the three totalling centres in Kabwe on 16 August.
The ECZ said it would not publish polling-station results. Nobody here is asking for polling stations yet. The request for now is that the ECZ put on its own website the constituency results, presidential and parliamentary, that its officials read out on air. The Constitution allows seven days from the declaration for any challenge. The declaration was 18 August. Those seven days are the period in which the announced figures carry legal weight, and they are passing without the figures being published anywhere. If the official result is defensible, the announced numbers are its defence.
There is now a small industry of long words explaining why this request is unsophisticated. Give the ECZ time. Respect the process. Trust the institutions. Someone has proposed a longitudinal study. Of what, when the first data point is not published? And studied why: because the question is open, or because the answer is uncomfortable? I do not know, and I would rather not guess at anyone’s reasons. The request does not depend on them.
I have mates reminding me of 2021. I remember walking around the bank quietly encouraging people to vote for the man, even while my professional responsibility as an economist required neutrality in what I published. I believed Zambia needed change, and I believed he was the right change for the economy. He was.
You cannot be held responsible for everything a government later does because you supported it at an election. You are responsible for what you do once the evidence in front of you starts contradicting what you believed. You confront it, or you start finding reasons to excuse what you would have condemned from the other side. Across this continent we are better at protecting the image of our countries than at asking whether what is happening inside them is fair. We worry about what the world will think.
Sishuwa Sishuwa said many things I dismissed. At times I thought he was being alarmist. Today I find myself going back through what he said. Imagine that.
May this week never happen again. Unfortunately, we may need to pay more attention to the pattern that has presented itself. It is still 0 of 226.
Let that sink in.