By Mukolo Lubinda My uncle does not trust the European Union, but he trusts his phone. So on Tuesday evening, when the President posted that he had hosted the European Union Election Observation Mission at State House, my uncle gathered the family at the kantemba to read the…

By Mukolo Lubinda

My uncle does not trust the European Union, but he trusts his phone. So on Tuesday evening, when the President posted that he had hosted the European Union Election Observation Mission at State House, my uncle gathered the family at the kantemba to read the comments together. The EU had written a report of 93 pages. Zambia answered it with about 400 comments in English, Bemba, Nyanja and emoji. Nobody at the kantemba had read the report, yet everybody knew exactly what it said.

The post was short and polite. The President thanked the mission for its observations and recommendations, said observers play a critical role in deepening democracy and noted the delegation’s warm wishes on winning this year’s elections. He closed by tying a flourishing democracy to the Grow Zambia Agenda. It ran to four paragraphs. The nation chose to chew on one word, like a stubborn piece of kapenta, and that word was “winning”.

“You said winning?” read my cousin from Kitwe, who owns two phones.

“Yes, because he won,” replied my uncle. “The people asking are the ones who did not.”

And so opened the first sitting of the Kantemba Constitutional Court, where every litigant is also the judge and the only exhibit is a screenshot. The first camp wanted to know what the EU had actually said, which was a fair question. One reader asked the President to summarise the key issues raised. Another demanded a video of the congratulations, as though warm wishes must now be certified like a title deed. My aunt agreed with all of them, because she believes most national problems could be solved in the comments if the right people read the replies.

The second camp needed no report, because the matter had been settled by the ballot, by God and by the chorus. One supporter wrote in Nyanja that Bally is our leader. Another wished him a reign “till 2090”, which I assume was a typing error, though in this country you never know which numbers are jokes. A third assured everyone that the courts had been closed only briefly and were open now for anyone who cared to visit.

The third camp worried me most, because it was the quietest. One reader wrote that commenting at all felt like doing so at your own risk. A gentleman on the Copperbelt said he wanted to say something, “nomba lawyer tapali”, but now there is no lawyer. When a citizen needs legal representation to type a sentence, the comment section has become a courtroom without a bench. The EU report says much the same about self-censorship, only in 93 pages and without the emojis.

Then came the fresh election. Somewhere between Tuesday afternoon and Tuesday night, a rumour was born that the EU had ordered Zambia to vote again, and both camps repeated it, one cheering and one jeering. The report says nothing of the sort. It recommends that future electoral laws be passed well before polls, that results be published polling station by polling station and that ZNBC be allowed to think for itself. That is not a referee calling for a replay, but a doctor telling the patient to cut the salt before the next check-up in 2031.

Not everyone cared about elections at all. My neighbour, a farmer, read the post twice and then asked about his Food Reserve Agency payment. Someone else raised fuel at K33, and a young man asked when the ten airports would land. These may have been the most honest comments of the night. To many Zambians, democracy is not a 93-page document but whether the money arrives in three days or three months.

A small, sensible party sat in the middle, and as usual nobody listened to it. One reader called the President’s gesture good, even if not everything in the report was acceptable. Another said that where correction is needed, correct it and move forward. A third reminded everyone that a good society treats its opponents with dignity, because yesterday’s ruler is tomorrow’s opponent. By ten o’clock the kantemba had run out of airtime, nobody had changed their mind and the EU was presumably packing its bags.

Which leaves me with a question I could not answer at the kantemba and cannot answer now. The observers came, observed and left a report we are free to accept or reject. But now that the visitors have flown home and the only observers left are us, will we read the whole report, or only the paragraph that agrees with us?