Zambia’s election reveals a new democratic battleground: the smartphone. From fake results and premature victory claims to algorithm-driven misinformation and AI-generated deception, political power is increasingly mediated by technologies controlled beyond national borders—raising an urgent question for Africa: who governs democracy when democracy itself is being written in code? The post Democracy in code: How digital power is reshaping sovereignty in Africa appeared first on This is Africa .
During the past month in Zambia, in the run-up to the country’s 13 August general elections, I watched democracy unfold not only at rallies, campaign meetings and polling stations, but also on the screens of ordinary citizens.
A young voter in Lusaka could move from a WhatsApp conversation about the election to a Facebook campaign video, then to TikTok commentary, before checking a candidate’s position on an issue. A Yango driver could follow campaign developments between trips, while a small-business owner in Kitwe could receive political messages while processing mobile-money payments on Airtel. On election day, citizens followed results, rumours and competing claims through their phones long before the official count had concluded.
Zambia’s 2026 election, contested by fourteen presidential candidates alongside hundreds of parliamentary and local-government candidates, was fought not only through rallies, posters, television and radio, but across increasingly important digital spaces. This was not accidental. It reflected a broader transformation in democracy itself.
Elections, constitutions, parliaments, political parties and courts remain essential. But democratic life is now also mediated through smartphones, social platforms, algorithms, digital identities and artificial intelligence. The question is no longer simply whether technology can strengthen democracy. It is who controls and governs the technologies through which democratic participation increasingly takes place—a question at the heart of geosociotechnopolitics.
For much of Africa’s post-independence history, political communication was relatively centralised. Governments, newspapers, radio, and television were the principal gatekeepers of information. My time in Zambia made these fundamental changes visible. Campaign messages moved constantly between physical and digital spaces: a rally generated content for Facebook; a television interview became a TikTok clip; a speech circulated through WhatsApp groups within minutes. Citizens were not simply consuming political messages; they were recording, remixing, and redistributing them.
Traditional broadcast media played a vital role in bridging this physical-digital divide. Established houses—the public broadcaster ZNBC alongside private networks such as Diamond TV, Muvi TV, Prime TV, and QTV—extended their reach well beyond television sets by live-streaming debates, breaking news, and interview clips on YouTube, Facebook, and X. Citizens inside and outside Zambia followed events as they unfolded. In this sense, the gatekeepers of the broadcast era were not displaced by digital platforms so much as absorbed into them.
The 2026 electoral field—spanning from the governing UPND to the NRPUP, Socialist Party, Citizens First, and smaller parties—depended heavily on this expanded digital architecture. Political leaders actively shaped, and were sometimes trapped by, it. President Hakainde Hichilema’s camp and the UPND used digital platforms to communicate policy, project continuity, and mobilise younger voters while bypassing traditional media. Opposition figures such as Brian Mundubile of the NRPUP adopted similar strategies to communicate directly with voters.
Yet the same platforms that expanded political communication also amplified volatility. This was starkly demonstrated when Mundubile claimed victory through online channels before the Electoral Commission of Zambia completed its official tally, accelerating competing claims of legitimacy and placing immense pressure on electoral institutions.
This volatility was compounded by the rapid circulation of unverified claims and synthetic disinformation. Fake GEN-20 forms purporting to show official election results spread across social media and messaging groups, giving misleading narratives a veneer of institutional authority. In an environment where citizens anxiously awaited outcomes, fabricated documents often travelled faster than institutional corrections.
Similarly, a false communication circulated online alleging that State House had instructed the Zambia Information and Communications Technology Authority (ZICTA) to shut down internet access and target critics. Although State House and fact-checkers quickly exposed it as a fabrication, the rumour generated deep anxiety. It succeeded not because it was true, but because it threatened the very digital infrastructure through which citizens were experiencing the election. The episode revealed a new reality of democratic politics: political leaders and institutions are no longer required only to communicate policies or official decisions; they are increasingly forced to expend political capital responding to entirely fabricated mandates and false narratives attributed to them.
The combination of premature victory declarations, fake GEN-20 forms, and false shutdown claims illustrates a fundamental tension of democracy in the digital age. Institutional procedures have deliberate timelines for establishing facts, but the digital public sphere refuses to wait for them. Political narratives can be declared, fabricated, shared, and believed long before the institutions responsible for establishing the truth have completed their work.
The events surrounding the counting process demonstrated one of the clearest lessons of the campaign: misinformation and premature political claims can shape public perceptions before verified facts catch up.
iVerify Zambia documented a number of false and misleading claims circulating during the election period, including manipulated political content, allegations concerning electoral officials and fabricated documents. False claims about the outcome circulated before the Electoral Commission had formally completed the declaration process. The United Nations was itself forced to clarify its position after misleading social-media posts claimed that UN observers had congratulated a candidate.
The problem was not confined to one political camp, and that is precisely the point. Misinformation does not need to convince everyone to become politically significant. If one voter believes the election has already been stolen, another believes a candidate has already won, a third fears that the internet is about to be shut down, and a fourth believes an international institution has endorsed a candidate, the common informational foundation on which democratic disagreement depends begins to disappear.
That may be digital misinformation’s most dangerous effect: not simply introducing false information, but weakening citizens’ ability to agree on what counts as evidence at all.
This is compounded by the emotional pull of political content. A claim that an election has been stolen or that the internet is about to be shut down generates far more urgency than a routine official announcement. Algorithms do not necessarily reward what is true; they often reward what captures attention. In an election, what captures attention can quickly become what is believed.
Zambia had anticipated some of these dangers. In February 2026, UNDP and the Panos Institute Southern Africa relaunched iVerify Zambia 2.0 as a strengthened national mechanism to combat misinformation, disinformation and hate speech ahead of the general elections. The initiative specifically recognised emerging threats associated with artificial intelligence, deepfakes, synthetic media, algorithmic amplification and coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
Connectivity alone cannot sustain a healthy democratic public sphere. Citizens need reliable information, not simply more information. Electoral commissions need credible and timely communication. Journalists and fact-checkers need the capacity to respond at the speed of social media. Political parties have a responsibility not to exploit uncertainty for partisan advantage, while technology companies must recognise that their platforms have become part of democracy’s infrastructure.
Citizens have a responsibility too. Forwarding a message is no longer an entirely private act. The first line of defence against digital manipulation is often not the state, but the citizen who pauses before pressing “forward.”
This raises a question that conventional democratic theory has not fully confronted: who governs the digital spaces in which citizens increasingly exercise political agency?
A Zambian voter may discuss politics on Facebook, communicate through WhatsApp, watch campaign material on TikTok or YouTube, and search Google for candidate information. Yet none of these platforms is a Zambian public institution. Their rules, algorithms and moderation systems are largely determined beyond Zambia’s borders.
This does not make these companies inherently anti-democratic. It illustrates something more fundamental: an increasing part of Africa’s democratic conversation now takes place within infrastructure whose governance extends beyond national borders.
This is the democratic dimension of digital sovereignty.
Digital sovereignty is often discussed in terms of data localisation, cybersecurity or national control over technology. But it also has a democratic meaning. If citizens’ political communication increasingly depends on privately controlled digital systems, then questions of accountability, transparency and rights within those systems become questions of democratic governance.
The issue is not whether governments should control the internet. It is whether citizens have meaningful rights, protections and agency within the systems through which public life increasingly operates.
The false GEN-20 forms and fabricated communication attributed to State House demonstrated how easily documents can be manipulated to acquire an appearance of institutional authority. Artificial intelligence threatens to take this problem much further.
What may today be a fabricated letter or manipulated document could tomorrow become a convincing video of a candidate saying something they never said, a synthetic audio recording of an election official, or a fabricated government communication almost indistinguishable from an authentic one.
What happens when an algorithm determines which political information becomes visible? When synthetic media becomes difficult to distinguish from reality? When citizens increasingly rely on AI systems whose training data, institutional assumptions and governance structures were developed elsewhere?
These are questions of cognitive and democratic sovereignty.
A democracy requires citizens who can access information, evaluate competing claims and make political choices. If technological systems increasingly mediate that process, then the capacity to understand, scrutinise and govern those systems becomes essential to democratic resilience.
Africa’s AI debate cannot therefore be reduced to innovation and economic competitiveness. It must also ask who controls the production, distribution and interpretation of political knowledge.
Zambia also demonstrates why connectivity alone cannot be equated with democratic deepening.
The country has a vibrant media environment and an increasingly connected population, but the AU-COMESA preliminary election observation statement noted stakeholders’ concerns about the application of cyber-related legislation. According to the mission, concerns were raised that the legislation constrained political communication, limited freedom of expression and contributed to self-censorship among journalists and citizens.
A citizen may have a smartphone but little control over the data it generates. A voter may encounter thousands of political messages without knowing why particular content was selected for them. A government may digitise public services while retaining weak systems of transparency and accountability.
Digital democracy therefore requires more than access. It requires rights, transparency, accountability and institutional capacity.
Governments must be able to protect freedom of expression while responding to genuine threats of disinformation. Regulators must have the capacity to engage powerful technology companies. Universities and researchers must be able to scrutinise algorithms and AI systems. Civil society must be able to monitor both governments and platforms.
Most importantly, citizens must not become passive users of systems they do not understand.
This is where technomultipolarity matters. Africa sits between competing technological ecosystems: Chinese telecommunications infrastructure, American platforms and AI systems, European regulatory models, Indian digital public infrastructure, and emerging technological ambitions from the Gulf and elsewhere.
Zambia’s experience makes this convergence tangible. A voter can carry a Chinese-made smartphone, communicate through an American-owned platform, consume content shaped by algorithms developed elsewhere, and participate in an election administered by a national institution.
The technology is global. The democratic consequences are local.
Africa does not need to choose a single technological camp. It needs the capacity to engage multiple technological powers strategically. That requires investment in universities, local technology companies, digital public infrastructure, cybersecurity and independent regulatory institutions.
Technological sovereignty and democratic sovereignty are increasingly inseparable questions. A country that cannot understand, scrutinise or influence the systems governing its data, information environment and AI capabilities will struggle to exercise meaningful democratic control over the societies those systems shape.
The struggle for democracy in Africa has long centred on who controls the state. Increasingly, it is also about who controls the technologies through which citizens interact with the state, access information and communicate with one another.
My month in Zambia reinforced this reality. The election was simultaneously physical and digital: rallies and WhatsApp groups, campaign posters and TikTok videos, television debates and Facebook livestreams, polling stations and smartphones.
The ballot box, constitutions, parliament, courts and civil society remain indispensable. But democracy is now also being written in code.
That is the central insight of geosociotechnopolitics: technology is not external to political power. It is becoming one of its principal infrastructures.
Africa’s challenge is not to reject digital technology, nor simply to choose between competing technological powers. It is to build the capacity to understand, govern and democratise the systems through which digital life is organised—and to ensure that technological transformation strengthens rather than weakens citizens’ political agency.
If previous editions of The Thursday Briefing examined sovereignty in relation to infrastructure, knowledge and technology, the next question follows naturally: what does sovereignty mean when democracy itself is increasingly mediated by code?
Africa’s democratic future may depend on how it answers that.
Dr. Blessing Va****va is a scholar, governance practitioner, and researcher whose doctoral work developed geosociotechnopolitics as a framework for understanding the intersection of technology, society, and political power in an emerging technomultipolar world. He spent a month conducting field research on elections and digital public spheres in Zambia.
You can follow his blog The Vuvuzela Times
**This article was first published by Dr Blessing Vava **and it is published here with permission of the writer.
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