By News Sniffers Reporter
By any serious measure, Dr. Sishuwa Sishuwa’s claim that President Hakainde Hichilema has ordered a nationwide internet shutdown to smuggle Bill 7 through Parliament collapses under the slightest intellectual pressure.
Let us reason, calmly and rigorously. 
First question:
Where is the evidence? Not suspicion. Not memory. Not political instinct. Evidence. There is none.
No directive.
No leaked instruction.
There is no signal from service providers.
No movement by regulators.
No abnormal activity in the digital space. Nothing. Just an assertion loudly projected and repeatedly amplified, as though repetition itself could substitute proof.
Second question:
What exactly would an internet blackout achieve in Parliament?
Members of Parliament do not vote online. Parliamentary proceedings are governed by standing orders, physical presence, recorded votes, and Hansard.
The internet is not a prerequisite for legislation to pass.
Bills are debated in the open, under cameras, journalists, clerks, and constitutional procedure.
So what darkness is required here?
What secrecy is being facilitated?
What operational logic connects an internet shutdown to a parliamentary vote?There is none.
Third question:
Has Zambia experienced an internet shutdown before? Yes. And we all know who ordered it.
It was not speculative.
It was not theoretical.
It happened visibly, forcefully, and unmistakably.
The country remembers the context, the motive, and the author.
That is precisely why Sishuwa’s argument is intellectually dishonest.
What he is attempting to do is not analysis.
It is memory laundering deliberately smuggling a past national trauma and attaching it to a different president without evidence, hoping emotional recall will do the work that facts cannot.
That’s not scholarship.
It is manipulation.
This is where the tactic becomes clear.
Sishuwa is not warning the public of an imminent danger.
He is manufacturing a pre-emptive narrative.
By announcing an “undesirable” outcome before it happens, he seeks to poison the environment in advance.
The aim is simple: if anything controversial occurs around Bill 7, the groundwork for outrage has already been laid.
This is a classic narrative weapon: Announce a catastrophe before it exists.
Create suspicion where there is none
Elevate tension artificially
Then, claim vindication if public anxiety rises
It is not prophecy. It is provocation and it takes a skilled narrative manipulator to deploy it convincingly.
Now, the most uncomfortable question:
If Sishuwa truly believed a shutdown was imminent, what would a responsible intellectual do?
He would present verifiable indicators.
He would cite institutional movements.
He would show cause, not conjecture.
Instead, we get theatre, and that exposes the intent.
The objective is not truth. It is agitation.
Not protection of democracy, but contamination of public trust.
The plain truth is this:
There is nothing absolutely nothing pointing to a nationwide internet shutdown in Zambia.
Parliament does not legislate in darkness. Democracy does not require digital silence.
President Hakainde Hichilema has shown no behavioural, institutional, or historical pattern that supports such an allegation.
What exists instead is an argument built on fear, memory abuse, and strategic insinuation.
Zambia deserves better than recycled trauma dressed up as analysis.
Reason must prevail over rumour.
Evidence over emotion and scholarship over political theatre.
Anything less is an insult to public intelligence.
