Zambia: The World’s Most Polite Economic Crash Test Dummy
Victoria Falls rumbles like an overworked espresso machine while the rest of the planet argues about whose currency is collapsing fastest. Downstream, Zambia—population 20 million, GDP roughly the cost of a Silicon Valley parking lot—keeps calm and carries on, which is what you do when carrying on is the only option left on the menu.
To the outside world, Zambia is that polite guest at the geopolitical dinner party who keeps refilling everyone’s glass while quietly wondering if anyone noticed the host just pawned the silverware. Copper still pays the rent—about 70 % of export earnings—yet the price chart looks like a polygraph administered to a pathological liar. Beijing, the patient banker of last resort, has already renegotiated its loan covenants twice, proving that “debt-trap diplomacy” is really just a polite phrase for “recurring nightmare with compound interest.”
Meanwhile, the IMF—think of it as the planetary equivalent of a payday-loan shop with better branding—has swooped in with another Extended Credit Facility, complete with the ritual austerity diet. Subsidies on fuel and maize have been trimmed the way a frustrated barber trims a mullet: enthusiastically, unevenly, and without much consultation. Inflation is now sprinting at double digits, which is excellent news for anyone who enjoys watching numbers race each other like drunken greyhounds.
But here’s the kicker: Zambia is also ground zero for the global green-energy gold rush. Cobalt, nickel, manganese—every mineral required to make a Tesla feel virtuous—lies under Zambian soil. Suddenly the same governments that spent decades lecturing Lusaka about fiscal prudence are elbowing each other to sign “strategic partnerships,” a term diplomats use when they want to get engaged without actually proposing. The European Union, fresh from discovering that Russian gas is a temperamental date, has pledged €1.8 billion in green-industry funding. Washington, never one to be outbid at an auction of influence, dispatched Vice-President Harris last spring to announce “the future of electric mobility starts here.” The future, apparently, starts with a photo-op and ends with a feasibility study scheduled for sometime after the next lunar eclipse.
Back home, President Hakainde Hichilema—elected on a tsunami of hope so large it had its own weather system—now governs a country where 60 % of the population is under 25 and half of them are underemployed. That demographic dividend looks less like a dividend and more like a ticking IOU. Social media is awash in memes comparing the kwacha to a Netflix subscription: keeps getting cheaper, but the content stays the same. Still, Zambians retain a genetic immunity to hysteria, possibly because the alternative is simply too exhausting. When the central bank recently introduced new “inflation-resistant” banknotes, the joke in Lusaka’s bars was that the notes were so secure even their own value couldn’t break in.
Globally, Zambia’s predicament is a pocket-sized parable for the late-capitalist era: post-colonial state meets post-neoliberal hangover, garnished with climate change and served on a bed of critical minerals. If the country can convert geological luck into broad-based prosperity, it becomes the poster child for “just transition.” If it can’t, it remains what hedge-fund analysts privately call “optionality”—a polite word for “place to park risk until someone figures out the exit.” Either way, the waterfalls keep falling, indifferent to tariffs, tweets, or the eternal optimism of consultants arriving with PowerPoint decks thicker than the Zambezi in flood season.
So raise a glass—preferably of Mosi lager, not imported champagne—to Zambia: the nation teaching the planet that survival is just another export commodity, priced daily in the currency of whatever crisis happens to be trending.
