Zambia’s 13 August general election was already fraught before anyone tried to challenge its result, according to an account human rights lawyer Linda Kasonde has since published on her Substack. The army had been deployed to polling stations, she writes, a role outside its constitutional mandate. The Electoral Commission suspended vote tallying for six hours over reports of attacks on polling agents, during which only police and soldiers had access to the ballots. Opposition candidate Brian Mundubile’s home was raided and eleven of his associates were abducted. Former Cabinet Minister Mutotwe Kafwaya was fatally shot in the same raid. Authorities denied the killing for five days, until a habeas corpus application forced them to confirm it. Hakainde Hichilema was declared the winner on 18 August with around 61 percent against Mundubile’s 38 percent, though the Christian Churches Monitoring Group’s own assessment of its parallel vote tabulation had projected a closer 56 percent.

It is against that backdrop that Linda Kasonde decided to petition the result. Kasonde is a human rights lawyer and former president of the Law Association of Zambia. She petitioned under Article 103(1)(b) of the Constitution, which allows any citizen to challenge an election on the ground that it was not free and fair. She had seven days from the declaration to file, under Article 101(4). She did not get seven days. On 24 August, a day before her deadline, the government shut down the courts. The closures covered the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the High Court in Lusaka, and premises in Ndola, Chipata and Livingstone. The stated reason was unspecified security concerns. Police later described the closuresas nationwide security risk assessments at government premises, without saying what threat had prompted them. The closure lasted until 27 August. In an essay she has since published on her Substack, Kasonde describes what she did next.

In her account, she writes that she had tried to file electronically before, under new e-filing rules introduced in May 2026, and had been told the rules were not yet operational. With the courthouses sealed, she tried again anyway, emailing her petition to the Chief Registrar’s official address. The judiciary’s website, she says she was told, had been disabled. So she sent the documents to Chief Justice Mumba Malila’s personal email instead, explaining that the shutdown had left her no other option. A day later, Kasonde recounts, the judiciary’s public relations office confirmed receipt, and the Chief Justice himself said that while the method was “highly irregular,” he would forward the documents to the Constitutional Court. Kasonde describes the relief as short-lived. A separate statement soon followed from the Chief Administrator, asserting that no petition had been received by the deadline. The Secretary to the Cabinet then announced that Hichilema’s inauguration would proceed on 1 September, citing that same claim.

Zambia Supreme Court Building in Lusaka.

This is worth pausing on, because it is not the same story as an election being rigged. The government never had to win an argument about the vote count. It only had to keep the question of whether a petition existed unresolved for as long as the Constitution’s window allowed. It then declared that no petition existed, even though its own Chief Justice had said otherwise days earlier. Human Rights Watch called the closures a direct denial of access to justice. Zambia’s Chapter One Foundation has since petitioned the Constitutional Court to declare the shutdown itself unlawful, a case the judiciary has yet to determine.

That distinction matters more than it might look. An election stolen at the ballot box is a familiar kind of theft, and African courts, however imperfectly, have a template for adjudicating it. They recount the votes, examine the forms and hear the witnesses. An election defended by making it unclear whether a challenge was ever properly lodged is a different kind of theft. It does not ask a judge to rule wrongly. It asks nobody to rule at all, for as long as possible, and then lets one government spokesperson’s account overwrite another’s. Zambia’s Constitution gives a losing candidate, or any citizen under the 2016 reforms that opened standing to the public, seven days to file a petition, full stop. That looks like a strength on the page. There is no room for endless litigation, and an inauguration proceeds on schedule. But a fixed, short deadline is only a safeguard if two things are guaranteed independently of the government it might rule against. Those are access to the forum that enforces it, and a single, reliable account of whether a filing was received. Zambia guaranteed neither.

This is not a uniquely Zambian vulnerability, even if Zambia is where it has shown most starkly. Many African constitutions pair a short, rigid deadline for presidential election petitions with a judiciary that remains administratively dependent on the executive. Its premises, staff and even its official website all answer, in practice, to the very branch of government a petition would be filed against. Kenya’s Constitution gives challengers the same seven days to file. It then gives the Supreme Court a further fourteen days to hear and determine the petition, regardless of how complex the evidence turns out to be. The assumption built into these clauses is that the state’s only leverage over the outcome runs through the courtroom, in how a judge rules or how fast a registry processes filings. Zambia shows the leverage can sit just as easily outside the courtroom, in whether there is a courtroom to walk into, or a working inbox to send a petition to, at all.

The Law Association of Zambia said it was concerned by the closures and by the presence of armed personnel at court premises. It added that no formal explanation had been given for either the closure or its duration. Constitutional law scholar Cephas Lumina has separately argued that the judiciary’s own account of the timeline works against it. If Hichilema was declared president-elect on 18 August, he notes, the seven-day period runs to 25 August. That is precisely the date Kasonde herself gives as her deadline, not 24 August, the day the courts closed. Lumina also points to two other provisions. Article 118 bars justice from being delayed or denied on technical grounds. Article 122 guards judicial independence. Together, he argues, they may require the Constitutional Court to treat Kasonde’s improvised filing as valid, rather than let a security lockdown quietly become a procedural bar.

Zambia has not calmed down since Hichilema’s inauguration. Kasonde’s essay describes continuing abductions, arbitrary arrests, and the revocation of critics’ passports. On 14 September, the Independent Broadcasting Authority announced it would audit election-period broadcasts across radio and television. None of this required a single unconstitutional statute. Nobody amended Article 101 or Article 103. No judge issued a ruling that lawyers could appeal. The constitutional promise of seven days to petition depends on two ordinary things. One is a courthouse that opens its doors. The other is a single truthful account, from the institution meant to guard the Constitution, of whether a citizen’s petition ever reached it. Zambia is still waiting to find out whether either one can be relied on again.