A few weeks back, I congratulated Hakainde Hichilema on his re-election as Zambia’s President. I did so with the confidence of a journalist who had watched the votes come in, watched the results settle and, perhaps a little too quickly, decided the story had acquired its ending.

It hadn’t.

I should probably begin by repeating the confession I made in my earlier piece. During the early stages of vote counting, when main challenger Brian Mundubile appeared to be doing rather better than I would have liked, I experienced that uncomfortable sensation of discovering that the supposedly neutral journalist has a private individual lurking somewhere inside him. I wanted Hichilema to win because I had developed a liking for him, despite knowing perfectly well that wasn’t ideal for a journalist.

It wasn’t difficult to understand where that soft spot came from. Hichilema had spent years in opposition, enduring relentless political persecution before finally breaking through in 2021 and winning the Presidency. His subsequent economic record gave me further reason to regard his re-election favourably. Restructured debt, increased foreign direct investment and the restoration of inflation to within the Zambian central bank’s target range seemed to offer evidence of a government that was doing the difficult work of turning around an economy wrecked by previous administrations.

So, when the result went Hichilema’s way, I congratulated him. Looking back now, I wonder if I was a little too quick to decide that the story was over. The votes had been counted, Hichilema had won and I had my explanation ready: his long, bruising years in opposition, his 2021 breakthrough and what I saw as a respectable economic record since taking office.

While none of that was invented, I was writing at a moment when the story was still unfolding, and journalism has this peculiar habit of demanding that those of us who practise the craft explain what something means almost as soon as it happens. By the time events have had a chance to reveal their complications, we have already told our readers what those events mean.

But the warning signs were already there and were not particularly difficult to find; I simply didn’t give them enough weight. On August 15, while the results were still being tallied, the EU observer mission described the election as a competitive contest, but one conducted on an “uneven playing field”, while Southern African Development Community (SADC) observers said that although voting was peaceful at almost all the polling stations they had visited, they had received reports, which they could not independently verify, of intimidation, assault, abductions and property damage in five provinces.

During vote counting, the process was temporarily suspended, creating what the SADC mission described as “uncertainty and anxiety”. In its comments, the EU mission called for a full explanation.

Then, as the media later revealed, came events that made those earlier warnings look considerably less academic. On election night, security forces stormed a property linked to Mundubile on the pretext that high-grade military weapons were kept there, fatally shooting a Mundubile ally and former Cabinet Minister in the process.

The concerns deepened on August 24, when Mundubile sought to challenge the result. It was the final day allowed by the Constitution to lodge a petition, yet the gates of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court were locked and police cordoned off the premises. Whatever the justification, the timing was deeply troubling. The impression created was that an opposition candidate seeking to challenge an election result was effectively shut out of the courts when access to them mattered most.

By then I was beginning to appreciate what we journalists call “journalism’s front stage” – the expectation that we stand before the audience, as it were, and make sense of what is happening, often while events are still unfolding. The trouble is that what’s happening behind the scenes can change the story completely, and sometimes it catches up with us before we expect it.

Journalism has a long history of ‘front stages’ getting ahead of the story. One of my favourites is The Washington Post’s 2016 obituary of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which had been prepared in advance for publication the moment he died, but carried the byline of JY Smith, who had died ten years earlier! And then there is the famous ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1948, which confidently declared Thomas Dewey the winner of an election Harry Truman actually won.

My ‘Hichilema wins again – Phew!’ piece may not be as spectacular as the Castro obituary or the Dewey headline, but I now recognise the same temptation in it. I saw an election result I was pleased with, and I was too quick to turn it into a settled story. Zambia, rather inconveniently, was still writing its own story.