On August 13, 2021, Zambians went to the polls to find Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram unreachable, a blackout that began on election day and ran into the next. Five years later, on August 13, 2026, Hakainde Hichilema's government stood for re-election under the same scrutiny, and this time the networks stayed up. Zambia's Ministry of Technology and Science had pledged in June 2026 that it would not "deliberately shutdown internet connectivity at any time," and when rumors of a shutdown circulated on polling day, MISA's regional observer mission reported them debunked by fact-checkers, not confirmed.
That is a genuinely rare outcome. Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition counted 313 documented shutdowns worldwide in 2025 alone, across 52 countries, up from 78 in 2016. Against that trend, one African election passing without a deliberate blackout is worth examining for what actually changed.
The judgment that did the work
The proximate cause predates the 2026 pledge by four years. When ZICTA cut social media access on August 12, 2021, Chapter One Foundation filed for judicial review the next day and won an order restoring access within days. The case settled in March 2022, when the High Court for Zambia at Lusaka entered a consent judgment binding ZICTA not to "inhibit or interrupt the flow of and uninhibited access to information on all available telecommunication platforms" beyond its lawful regulatory authority, and requiring it to publicly explain any future disruption within 36 hours.
That is an unusually concrete remedy for a shutdown case. Most #KeepItOn campaigns win statements of concern; Zambian civil society won an enforceable court order with a specific disclosure deadline attached. Ahead of the 2026 vote, that judgment gave the #KeepItOn coalition — more than 370 organizations from 106 countries — a legal hook rather than just a moral one when it wrote to President Hichilema on August 5, 2026, alongside the Committee to Protect Journalists, invoking the 2021 shutdown and calling on ZICTA and ISPs to honor the 2022 commitment.
Steelmanning the case for restriction
It would be unfair to treat every government instinct toward network controls during an election as bad faith. Officials in Zambia and elsewhere point to a real problem: unmoderated virality of unverified claims — fake vote counts, doctored results, incitement — can spread faster than fact-checkers can respond, especially in a tight or contested race. Zambia's own 2026 cycle produced exactly that risk. MISA's regional observers noted that platforms like iVerify and the National Action Coalition on Information Integrity had to actively debunk false claims about both ballot delays and shutdowns themselves. A government facing a viral rumor of stolen votes is not choosing between calm and internet access; it is choosing between two different failure modes, and a total blackout can look, in the moment, like the more controllable one.
But a full network shutdown is a blunt instrument for that problem, and Zambia's 2021 experience illustrates why. The disruption did not stop misinformation from spreading through other channels, it denied legitimate news outlets and election observers the same access it denied bad actors, and — as the Ministry admitted to the #KeepItOn coalition in 2026 — Zambia was never able to conclusively establish who ordered the 2021 blackout or why. A remedy that cannot identify its own author is not a targeted response to disinformation; it is an unaccountable one. The 36-hour disclosure rule in the consent judgment exists precisely to close that accountability gap, not to bar every conceivable network intervention outright.
The unfinished business
Keeping the network up for one election day is not the same as resolving the underlying tension. Zambia's Parliament passed the Cyber Security Act, 2025 and the Cyber Crimes Act, 2025 in April 2025, and CIPESA's analysis ahead of the 2026 vote warned that both laws' broad definitions and real-time interception powers could substitute surveillance and selective prosecution for a blunt shutdown, achieving similar chilling effects through subtler means. Chapter One Foundation, the same plaintiff that won the 2022 ZICTA judgment, has separately joined the Law Association of Zambia's petition to strike down parts of both Acts.
That is the more durable test of Zambia's 2026 commitment: not whether the network stayed on for one election, but whether ZICTA's court-bound restraint extends to the platform-level and content-level powers the 2025 cybersecurity laws hand the executive. A shutdown is a visible, internationally embarrassing act that draws immediate #KeepItOn-style pressure within hours. Quiet interception, or a well-timed cybercrime charge against an opposition-aligned account, draws far less scrutiny for doing comparable damage to the same freedoms.
What travels
For other election-cycle governments watching Zambia, the lesson is not that pressure campaigns alone changed behavior — Nigeria, India, and Pakistan have all faced #KeepItOn letters in past elections and restricted networks anyway. What was different in Zambia was that civil society converted one shutdown into a binding legal precedent with a specific, checkable term, then kept the pressure on to enforce it years later. Proportionate regulation of genuine election-security risk is legitimate; an unreviewable kill switch is not. A court order that names the remedy and sets a clock beats a coalition letter that only names the harm — a template worth exporting well beyond Southern Africa, and worth watching closely as Zambia's own cybercrime laws face their legal test.