The Editor Zambia
There is something deeply revealing about the know-it-all- ‘critic’ Sishuwa Sishuwa’s latest assault on President Hakainde Hichilema: it is written less like an analysis of an election and more like a prosecution in which the verdict was decided before the evidence was heard.
Sishuwa has declared that President Hichilema “stole” the 2026 election. But the extraordinary accusation rests heavily on anonymous sources, speculation, assumptions, and unverified allegations presented as established fact. 
Speaking from a self-imposed exile in South Africa, Sishuwa should know that in a democratic society, serious allegations require serious evidence and that suspicion is not evidence. Neither is prediction is, evidence. An anonymous source is certainly not a substitute for independently verifiable electoral documentation.
The central weakness of Sishuwa’s argument is that he appears to have confused his personal expectations with objective reality.
Before the election, he predicted that President Hichilema would lose unless he rigged the election “on an industrial scale.”
Now that President Hichilema is on course to win, Sishuwa presents the result as proof that his prediction was correct. That is circular reasoning of the most elementary kind: I predicted that he would rig; therefore, because he won, he must have rigged.
No serious political analysis can operate on that basis.
Sishuwa’s article contains an extraordinary number of allegations that demand documentary proof. For example, he claims that three supposedly independent Parallel Vote Tabulations showed Brian Mundubile winning by 567,911 votes.
Where are the complete datasets? Where are the polling-station forms? Where is the methodology? Where is the independent audit? Where are the names and institutional identities of those who conducted these exercises?
Instead, readers are asked to accept the assertion because the author says it is credible.
That is not how electoral disputes are settled.
The same problem infects the allegations concerning the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ), again our good ‘intellectual’ stumbles badly when he interprets changes in the commission’s composition as evidence of political capture and then leaps from that suspicion to the conclusion that the election was stolen.
But appointing commissioners with whom one disagrees politically is not itself proof that those commissioners manipulated votes.
However, the most sensational allegation concerns by the serial critic of President Hichilema are the supposed destruction and fabrication of Gen 20 forms, military intervention, arrests, and the alteration of results across provinces.
These are potentially grave crimes and yet rather than producing the forms allegedly destroyed, copies of replacement forms, arrest records, photographs, videos, sworn affidavits or other independently verifiable evidence, Sishuwa relies on the testimony of an unnamed Local Government Service Commission “commissioner.”
That is an allegation—not a conviction.
If such industrial-scale electoral fraud actually occurred, there should be an enormous evidentiary trail because every polling station has party agents.
Every polling station produces documentation. Political parties have copies. Election observers have records. Journalists have access to results. The courts exist precisely to test competing claims.
Sishuwa should, therefore, welcome the legal process rather than attempting to conduct a parallel trial in the court of public opinion.
His attack on the military is equally loaded with assumptions. He interprets President Hichilema’s comments about soldiers being capable of becoming “lethal” when duty requires it as evidence of a plan to politicise the army. That interpretation may be debated, but interpretation is not proof of an electoral conspiracy.
Likewise, the appointment of a military commander whom Sishuwa believes is politically compromised does not automatically establish that the commander participated in rigging an election.
Most troubling is the manner in which Sishuwa attributes virtually every disputed event to President Hichilema personally.
If a government official allegedly altered a form, it becomes President Hichilema’s operation. If soldiers allegedly moved somewhere, President Hichilema ordered it. If an opposition figure claims to have been abducted, President Hichilema becomes responsible. If the ECZ makes a controversial decision, President Hichilema supposedly designed it.
This is not investigation. It is attribution by assumption.
President Hichilema, like every politician, is entitled to criticism. His government must be scrutinised relentlessly. The ECZ must be questioned. Election results must be independently verified. Any genuine evidence of electoral malpractice must be investigated and, where proven, punished.
But democracy cannot be defended by replacing evidence with certainty.
Sishuwa presents himself as a guardian of Zambia’s democratic tradition. He should, therefore, respect the very institutions whose credibility he claims to defend.
If Mundubile believes he won, let his party produce the polling-station evidence and challenge the declared results through the courts. If there was manipulation, the evidence should survive forensic examination.
Until then, proclaiming President Hichilema as an electoral thief is not journalism, and it is not scholarship.
It is political advocacy wearing an academic gown.
Zambia deserves better than prophets who announce the verdict before counting the evidence. It deserves scrutiny, yes—but scrutiny grounded in facts, not a narrative constructed first and evidence sought afterwards.
The burden of proof remains where it has always been: on the person making the extraordinary accusation.
And no amount of eloquence, academic credentials, or rhetorical indignation can remove that burden.
