Zambia Media Critique

By Bruce Chooma A recent report ranked Zambia the fifth hungriest nation on earth. This coincidentally comes at a time when the country is grappling with a severe drought which has devastated more than half of the country mainly in the Southern, Central and Western Provinces leaving many rural households surviving on wild fruits, roots and tubers. Despite enjoying a long period of peace and stability, climate variation has severely impacted the landlocked country of Zambia, where most farmers rely on rain to grow their crops. In the 2018 -2019 farming season, many areas in southern and western Zambia saw the lowest rainfall since at least 1981. 40% of Zambian children continue to be stunted, a figure that has remained consistent over the last few years, and the UN estimates that the current number of acutely food-insecure Zambians (1.7 million) will rise to 2.3 million by March 2020.   Many stakeholders have asked the Zambian government to declare the hunger situat...

THE political temperature is rising as Zambia nears the 2021 general elections. The ruling Patriotic Front (PF) and the main opposition party United Party for National Development (UPND) are not leaving anything to chance. Analysts have pointed out that the ruling party has never felt secure with its narrow victory over UPND in the 2016 elections hence its continued efforts to demonstrate who has more power and influence at every opportunity and particularly when there is a by-election. The fight for political dominance has often turned violent and for some time now political party supporters commonly referred to as party cadres in Zambia have used offensive weapons such as machetes commonly referred to as pangas to maim their opponents usually in the campaign battleground. A recently held by-election in Western Zambia in the District of Kaoma turned into yet another political battleground resulting in the death of a UPND supporter who was allegedly shot by an agent of their...

FREE and open access to public information by citizens is one of the hallmarks of a well-functioning democracy. Zambia like many other peer African countries continues to defer and to an extent frustrate citizens’ efforts to have easy access to information on the operations of government for them to hold their leaders to account. Nearly two decades ago Zambia began drafting what it called the Freedom of Information Bill which has now evolved into the Access To Information (ATI) Bill. However there has been consistent deferment of the date of introduction of the Bill to Parliament despite assurance that the Bill was approved by Cabinet.   Open access to information legislation are contentious on the African content and some commentators have argued that they have no meaningful impact on access to information by the media and little evidence exists that points to the extent to which they actually assist investigative journalism. An interesting argument for and against fre...