Guest Op-Ed : Lukson Mulako Sikananu
As global shocks reshape local economies, journalists are tasked with connecting distant events to everyday realities, navigating political pressure, limited information, and the need for nuance in a high-stakes election moment.
Living in an international and developed city like Amsterdam, global events do not feel distant. They are present in everyday conversation, in policy debates, and across the media landscape. The American-Israeli led war on Iran, the broader conflict in the Gulf region, tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, and disruptions to global energy markets move quickly from headlines into public discourse. These are not abstract developments. They are followed, discussed, and understood as events with real consequences.
What differs is how those consequences are experienced.
The Netherlands, as a highly integrated economy, is closely tied to global political and economic systems. When tensions rise in key energy corridors such as the Strait of Hormuz, where a significant share of the world’s oil supply passes through, markets react almost immediately. Prices shift, forecasts adjust, and policymakers respond. Yet for most people, the economic effects are buffered. Institutional systems absorb much of the shock. While costs may rise, the impact is often gradual, managed, and less disruptive to everyday life.
From the vantage point of my Amsterdam balcony overlooking the Rembrandt Park, global crises feel close but not necessarily destabilising.
But I often find myself thinking about home.
In Zambia, the same events do not arrive through policy discussions or market forecasts. They show up in more immediate and tangible ways. A rise in fuel prices. Higher transport costs. The quiet recalibration of household budgets. The connection to events thousands of kilometres away is rarely clear to those living through it, yet the consequences are direct and difficult to ignore.
And this is happening at a particularly delicate moment.
Since 2023, Zambia has shown signs of economic recovery. There has been cautious optimism about macroeconomic stability and growth prospects.
But these gains remain fragile.
Zambia’s economy is still highly exposed to external shocks, particularly through fuel and import dependency. Recent reporting has already pointed to renewed pressure on the cost of living and currency stability, highlighting how swift external shocks can unsettle local progress.
The fragility, however, is not only economic. RightsCon, one of the world’s foremost gatherings on digital rights, technology, and civil society, was scheduled to take place in Lusaka this month. Its cancellation, under circumstances that pointed to pressure from foreign governmental actors, was quietly significant. This is itself a data point about the conditions in which journalism and democratic participation are being asked to operate.
Reporting on politics in a young and still evolving democracy is already a complex task. Information is not always readily accessible, either to journalists or to the public. In many cases, reporting relies heavily on statements from those in power and those contesting it. Stories can easily become a matter of competing claims, not necessarily out of poor practice, but because of structural limitations in how information is produced and accessed.
But there is a deeper problem, one that precedes the information environment.
Much of what passes for election reporting is, at its core, event reporting. Coverage tends to follow the rhythm of the campaign: rallies, candidate statements, polling data, and endorsements. It is reactive, episodic, and structured around political actors rather than around the systems those actors operate within, or the citizens for whom those systems are meant to serve. This approach is not without value. But it does something problematic: it presents elections as the primary site of democratic life, when elections are, in fact, only one expression of it.
Democracy is not a moment, it is a set of conditions, institutions, and norms that determine whether those in power are held accountable by media and other democratic institutions, whether citizens can participate freely and meaningfully, and whether the outcomes of elections translate into governance that reflects public interest and serves people. When reporting treats elections as the beginning and end of the practicing democracy, it risks missing the deeper dynamics that determine whether that story is actually a democratic one.
When a complex global issue enters the picture, such as tensions in the Gulf and their impact on energy markets, the demands on journalism become even more acute. It is no longer enough to relay competing claims or track poll movements. There is a need to interrogate, to connect, and to explain. To show how a disruption in a distant shipping route can influence the cost of transport in Lusaka. To make visible the pathways through which global events shape local realities, and to situate those realities within the political choices that are being made and evaluated.
This is not an easy role to play.
Journalists are expected to sit somewhere between power and the public. Not simply as conveyors of information, but as actors who shape how that information is understood. In doing so, they operate within the same power structures they are expected to scrutinise, while also serving audiences who rely on them for clarity. The tension is structural, and it does not resolve itself.
In an election year, these pressures compound.
In Zambia, with a general election approaching this August, economic pressures are already central to political discourse. The cost of living, fuel prices, and broader economic concerns are not merely policy issues. They are personal. They shape how people think about leadership, about who bears responsibility, and about what direction the country ought to take.
I often think about what this means at a household level. About the kind of decisions my own mother will have to make when she goes to cast her ballot on August 13. The effects of global events, like tensions in the Gulf, are already finding their way into her daily expenses. Yet the origins of those effects remain distant and opaque, rarely explained in terms that connect the global cause to the local consequence.
During election periods, there is a natural tendency to simplify. Political actors present clear narratives about what is going wrong and who is responsible. Slogans such as “more money in your pockets” or “Make America Great Again” gain traction precisely because they are emotionally resonant and easy to hold, even when the structural pathways to delivering on them are left unexamined.
This is where the gap between electoral coverage and democratic reporting becomes consequential.
The role of journalism is not only to report what political actors are saying, but to interrogate those claims and situate them within broader context. To distinguish between what is driven by domestic policy decisions and what is shaped by global economic forces beyond any single government control. To ask not only who is winning the campaign, but what kind of political and institutional environment the election is taking place within, and what its outcome will determine.
This gap matters. It shapes how individuals interpret their circumstances, how they assign responsibility, and ultimately, how they make decisions at the ballot box. Democracy is weakened not only by overt interference or institutional failure, but by the quiet erosion of the informed public understanding on which it depends.
The question I am pondering is not whether journalists in these contexts want to do better. Most do. The question is whether the frameworks, training, and editorial cultures available to them equip them to move beyond the event of an election. To cover not just who might win, but what kind of democracy the winning will take place within, and what the result will mean for the people most exposed to its consequences.
The cancellation of RightsCon in Lusaka just last week is worth pausing in this context. That this happened in an election year, in the host country, is not incidental. It illustrates how the environment surrounding an election can be shaped; through pressure, interference, and the quiet contraction of civic space in ways that never appear on a ballot but profoundly affect what the ballot can mean.
That, perhaps, is the more difficult and more important question election journalism has yet to fully answer.
Note: “More money in your pockets” was a prominent campaign message of Michael Sata, whose 2011 electoral victory was built in part on a populist appeal centred on improving the economic conditions of ordinary Zambians.