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This chapter explores how bloggers in two Zambia online publications represent women politicians and how interlopers ‘frame' such politicians so as to exclude them from the public spaces. It argues that although ICTs are generally thought to be facilitators of women's empowerment, they can also be used to dis-empower the women with the full utilisation of cultural or religious frames and practices. It is further said that ICTs have both a positive and negative edge to them and thus should be used much more carefully.

This chapter explores the manner in which Zambian university students engage with public policy decisions which are of immediate and future interest to them. It observes that the youths may have little faith in representative democracy and instead are utilizing social media platforms to directly engage with decision-makers and publics, and thus subverting the essence of the authority of parliament. The study uses descriptive survey design and the methodology of “Briscolage” to capture and scrutinize two politically charged cases, and concludes that the youth globally may be challenging liberalism and in that way fashioning a new narrative entrenched in postmodernism.

In the 1990s following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in Germany and the death of Apartheid in South Africa, several cross-national initiatives were undertaken in Africa to strengthen the role of the media in nascent democracies. Some 30 years later, several of these initiatives are dead while the surviving ones are on the brink of folding. This discussion takes a critical historic synopsis by exploring the conjectural and chronological foundations for such media initiatives, in particular, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It concludes that while much was accomplished, these foreign-inspired endeavours are no longer valid, useable or germane and ought to be abandoned. That way, Africa shall define its own urgencies, priorities and destiny without the external stimulus.

Ideally, social media are positive agents for modernization, empowerment, and gender equity in developing countries. This chapter scrutinizes that assumption by reflecting upon social media representation of leading Zambian women politicians at critical times in their political lives. It highlights the language used in blogs by critically examining its meanings through discourse and rhetoric analysis. Then, it is argued that social media are now extensively used to switch the tide against women occupation of social spaces. The chapter concludes that social media are avenues for hate speech and new glass ceilings and have been appropriated by patriarchy as oppressive tools in sub-Saharan Africa.