Zambian and African sport, the creative economy and the business of entertainment — football, athletics, music, film and the money around them.
Somalia’s football federation says the United States’ refusal to admit referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan has deprived the country of a historic World Cup debut, a day after he was turned back at the border despite holding a valid visa.
The United States has denied entry to Somali referee Omar Artan, who was set to be the first Somali to officiate at a World Cup, citing vetting concerns. FIFA has dropped him from the roster, in a case that underlines US entry risk for African travellers to the co-hosted tournament.
Three football rule changes arrive for the 2026 World Cup in the USA, Mexico and Canada: an eight-second limit on goalkeepers holding the ball, red cards for players who cover the mouth, and broader VAR review. The Laws are set by the IFAB and applied by FIFA — and they reach Zambian football over time.
Zambia's IBA denied banning campaign songs but ordered Hot FM to stop airing an inflammatory track and issued election content guidance ahead of the 13 August general election.
Muzala Samukonga, Zambia's Olympic 400m bronze medallist and 2022 Commonwealth champion, is building what his team describes as Zambia's first athletics academy, a project nearing launch that aims to give aspiring athletes the foundations and opportunities to succeed at home. The athlete-led venture targets a long-standing gap in Zambian sport: raw talent without the facilities, coaching and pathways that turn it into international results. It arrives as Samukonga, still only in his early twenties, anchors a new generation of Zambian track athletes.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup, the first with 48 teams and co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, hands Africa a record nine automatic places plus an inter-confederation play-off slot, nearly double its presence at Qatar 2022. Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa, Ivory Coast and Cape Verde are among the qualifiers. Zambia is not: the Chipolopolo finished fourth in their group behind Morocco, leaving the 2012 African champions still chasing a first men's World Cup as the 2030 cycle approaches.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to avoid the media during a Norway visit has set off a storm over press freedom in the world's largest democracy. The incident itself is minor — a skipped joint press conference. The reaction is the story: it crystallised long-running concern about the space for independent journalism in India. For readers tracking how democracies handle scrutiny, the episode is a useful marker, and the press-freedom question travels well beyond India.
The Africa Cup of Nations 2027 qualifying draw has produced its first headline pairings, with Ghana drawn to face Ivory Coast in a group of real weight. For Zambia's Chipolopolo, the qualifying campaign is the next test of a rebuild that has promised more than it has delivered at senior men's level. Here is how AfCON qualifying works, where Zambia stands, and what the campaign needs to look like.
Amina Orfi, 18, beat compatriot Nour El-Sherbini in a five-game final to win the PSA World Championship title in Giza on 17 May 2026. The result hands Africa another title in a sport the continent has quietly dominated for two decades. For Zambian sports administrators, the story is the long-term institutional model that Egyptian squash has built — and what an African individual-sport pipeline actually looks like at full strength.
Panama qualified for the FIFA World Cup 2026 — the country's second appearance in eight years. The football economics here are not glamorous: Panama has roughly four million people and a GDP smaller than several African economies. What it did with the sport — federation governance, diaspora pipeline, club investment — is the kind of small-economy story Zambia's Football Association of Zambia and broader sport administrators should be reading carefully.
The Africa Soft Power Summit runs in Nairobi from 20 to 23 May 2026, drawing investors, creators, policymakers and technologists around a single question: when finance, creativity and human capital compound together, what becomes investable? For Zambia — whose creative economy sits behind only mining and agriculture in informal earnings but barely registers in formal capital allocation — the answer matters.
Sports & Entertainment covers the sport and creative-economy beat for Kwacha News — Zambian and African football, athletics, individual sports and the federations behind them, alongside the music, film, creator-economy and cultural-industry stories that shape the continent's soft power. The section reads sport and entertainment as economic stories: who is getting funded, what is scaling, where the federations and broadcasters stand, and how Zambian and African audiences and exporters fit into the global picture.
