On August 5-6, 2026, the #KeepItOn coalition — more than 370 organizations including Access Now, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders — sent an open letter to Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, one week before the country's August 13 general election. Its core ask is narrow and specific: don't repeat 2021. It invokes a legal instrument most election-shutdown coverage skips past — a March 2022 High Court consent judgment that already obliges Zambia's telecom regulator to behave differently this time.
What Happened Last Time, and What Fixed It
On August 12, 2021 — election day — Zambian authorities blocked WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as then-President Edgar Lungu trailed challenger Hichilema in the count. The Chapter One Foundation filed for judicial review the next day and won restoration of access. Rather than litigate the underlying legality to a final verdict, Chapter One and the Zambia Information and Communications Technology Authority (ZICTA) entered a consent judgment on March 21, 2022: ZICTA committed to not acting outside its legal authority to interrupt internet access, and to publicly disclosing the reason for any future interruption within 36 hours (Diggers News). Chapter One's executive director, Linda Kasonde, called it the first ruling of its kind in Zambia — a mechanism for accountability rather than a ban.
That is the legal hook for this month's letter. The #KeepItOn coalition isn't asking Hichilema — now the incumbent facing Tonse Alliance challenger Brian Mundubile in what most Zambian outlets are calling a two-horse race — to invent a new commitment. It's asking him to make sure an existing one is honored across every agency that could pull a trigger: ZICTA, the Ministry of Technology and Science, and private ISPs.
The Ask Is Modest Because the Ground Is Already Half-Won
Zambia's Ministry of Technology and Science publicly assured citizens in June 2026 that the government would not deliberately shut down the internet during the election. The coalition's letter welcomes that but presses further: it wants a formal presidential directive that binds ZICTA and ISPs too, not just a ministry statement, plus explicit safeguards against using cybersecurity law to chill speech around the vote. That distinction matters. A ministerial assurance is revocable by the same ministry that issued it; a presidential directive tied to a standing court judgment is a different order of commitment, and it's the one the coalition is angling for before polls open.
Steelmanning the Case for Caution
Election officials who reach for network restrictions aren't usually acting from nowhere. Zambia's 2021 vote occurred amid real street tension and fears that viral misinformation could trigger unrest in a tightly contested race; regulators in fragile electoral environments genuinely worry that unmoderated platforms can accelerate violence faster than fact-checkers can catch up, and shutting off the amplification layer looks, to a nervous official, like the fastest lever available. That instinct isn't irrational — it's just empirically wrong about the tradeoff, and the evidence on that has only gotten stronger since 2021.
Why the Tradeoff Fails
The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights adopted Resolution 580 on March 8, 2024, calling on states to guarantee open internet access before, during, and after elections and explicitly directing telecom regulators to keep networks live rather than order disruptions (ACHPR). It addressed 21 African nations holding elections that year alone — Zambia's 2026 vote is exactly the kind of event the resolution anticipated. UNESCO, meanwhile, told the UN in January 2026 that at least 300 state-ordered shutdown incidents had hit more than 54 countries over the preceding two years, and that 2024 was the worst year on record since 2016 (UN News). Ethiopia — this outlet's usual case study for shutdown-as-default governance — has logged at least 30 shutdowns since 2016, the worst record of any African country, without measurably reducing the unrest its shutdowns were meant to contain (Access Now). Shutdowns don't suppress disinformation so much as they suppress verification: election observers, fact-checkers, and results-tabulation transparency all depend on the same connectivity that a blackout removes, while rumor still travels by SMS and word of mouth. The 2025 election season alone produced at least 12 documented election-related shutdowns worldwide, matching 2024's pace — Zambia is trying not to become the 13th.
The Proportionate Model Worth Copying
What makes Zambia's situation genuinely instructive isn't the threat of a shutdown — every contested African election carries that risk — it's the accountability architecture already sitting on the books. The 2022 consent judgment doesn't ban emergency network measures outright; it forces disclosure and time-bounds the silence. That's the proportionate-regulation model this publication generally argues for: courts imposing procedural discipline on a regulator's discretion, rather than either a blanket prohibition or an unchecked kill switch. If ZICTA holds the line through August 13 and beyond, Zambia will have done something rarer than avoiding a shutdown — it will have shown that a shutdown judgment won under litigation actually binds behavior two election cycles later. If it doesn't hold, the letter's signatories will have a very short list of what to point to in the next judicial review.