By Ambassadors Emmanuel Mwamba As Zambia counts down to the August 13 general election, a familiar contest is playing out, not over policies or crowds, but over what citizens are allowed to believe before they have seen the evidence for themselves. An investigative report by…

By Ambassadors Emmanuel Mwamba

As Zambia counts down to the August 13 general election, a familiar contest is playing out, not over policies or crowds, but over what citizens are allowed to believe before they have seen the evidence for themselves.

An investigative report by Global Witness, the London-based anti-corruption group, is expected to examine influence in Zambia’s mining sector. Yet before the public has been able to read a single page, a campaign to shape how that report is received is already under way.

The clearest example is a lengthy article that appeared in the state-owned Zambia Daily Mail. Running ahead of the report’s release, it did not engage the substance of the findings so much as pre-frame the organisation itself: foreign, agenda-driven, suspiciously timed. It leaned on an anonymous ruling-party official, on attacks on Global Witness’s funding and the timing of its work, and even on the identity of the report’s sources, noting, for instance, that some are former associates of the late former President Rupiah Banda, as if old political connections settled whether a claim is true. These are the classic moves of “prebunking,” in which a story is discredited in advance so that, whatever it says, readers have already been told to dismiss it.

That would be concerning enough on its own but it is not the only manipulation in circulation. A document has also been spreading on social media under the letterhead of a “Washington Center for African Strategy” – an organisation with no verifiable existence: no website, no staff, no public record, a contact number drawn from a range reserved for fiction, and a name that closely imitates a real U.S. institution.

That fabricated document attacks the ruling party, not the opposition, and its true origin is unknown. But notice the effect: a flimsy, easily-debunked anti-UPND document surfacing just before a genuine, critical report muddies the water, letting the real thing be lumped in with “more forged foreign documents.” That plausibly serves the ruling party, whoever produced it.

The lesson for Zambians is not to decide in advance who is right. It is to refuse to let anyone else decide for them. When the Global Witness report is published, read it. Weigh its evidence. Note where it rests on named sources and documents and where it rests on anonymous ones that is fair scrutiny, and a genuinely credible report can withstand it. Then ask the same hard questions of those rushing to rubbish it before it appears.

Be especially wary of two tactics. The first is the pre-emptive dismissal that tells you a report is worthless before you can read it. The second is the fake “bombshell” that tries to stampede you into outrage. Both depend on you not checking. Both are defeated by a single habit: asking where a claim comes from, and waiting for the original source rather than the loudest summary of it.

Global Witness has spent decades investigating corruption and resource governance around the world; its work deserves to be read and tested, not pre-judged. So does every claim made about this election, from every side. In a democracy, that judgement belongs to voters not to whoever shouts first, or shouts loudest through the State and private media they control.

source:https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/transition-minerals/how-a-canadian-mining-giant-infiltrated-zambias-democracy/