Zambia, home to some twenty two million people and custodian of one of Africa’s most consequential mineral endowments, goes to the polls on Thursday in a presidential election that will be read well beyond its borders as a test of whether market friendly reform can deliver tangible improvement in ordinary lives. President Hakainde Hichilema is seeking a second term against a field of thirteen other contenders, according to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems’ election snapshot for the vote, in a contest that Zambians, and much of the continent watching alongside them, will judge less on ideological positioning than on the quotidian question of whether copper wealth is finally translating into shared prosperity.
The country’s economic story cannot be told without copper. Zambia remains Africa’s second largest producer of the metal, trailing only the Democratic Republic of Congo, and ranks eighth globally according to the United States Geological Survey’s mineral commodity assessments. Copper generates roughly seventy percent of export earnings, and the government has set itself the ambitious target of tripling annual output to three million metric tonnes by 2031, positioning the country as an indispensable supplier to a world electrifying its vehicles, grids and renewable infrastructure. That ambition has drawn serious capital, including from KoBold Metals, the venture backed by prominent international investors, which broke ground in May on a project valued at some two billion United States dollars and expected to rank among Zambia’s largest copper mines. For a continent long accustomed to exporting raw minerals while capturing little of the downstream value, the scale of this investment cycle, and the terms on which it proceeds, will matter as much as the tonnage extracted.
Zambia’s economic narrative is inseparable from its recent history of debt distress, a history it shares with several African economies that borrowed heavily against commodity revenues only to be caught out when prices turned. In 2020, Zambia became the first African sovereign default of the Covid era, the product of years of accumulated borrowing colliding with collapsing commodity income. What followed was a landmark restructuring involving both official and private creditors, which unlocked an International Monetary Fund programme and eased the pressure on public finances. Zambia’s public debt as a share of gross domestic product stood above ninety percent in 2025, according to the government’s own debt sustainability analysis published in March, a marked improvement on the peak of some 124 percent recorded in 2021, though the country remains classified as being at high risk of debt distress. China remains Zambia’s largest bilateral creditor, owed approximately 4.5 billion United States dollars, equivalent to roughly fifteen percent of total public and publicly guaranteed debt according to the IMF, a fact that has made Lusaka’s restructuring a closely observed case study in how Beijing engages with Western governments and multilateral institutions to resolve sovereign distress.
China’s footprint in Zambia extends well beyond creditor status. Chinese capital and enterprise have built a broad economic presence across copper mining, road and airport infrastructure, power generation and industrial parks, and Beijing played a central role in the debt negotiations that stabilised the country’s finances. That presence is not without its tensions, and questions periodically surface over labour conditions, local employment practices and the broader question of dependence on foreign capital, concerns that deserve airing on their own terms rather than through the lens of great power rivalry that so often flattens African agency in these discussions. Zambia’s engagement with China, like that of many of its neighbours, is best understood as one instrument among several in a wider strategy of resource backed development, not as evidence of a binary geopolitical alignment.
Since gaining independence from Britain in 1964 under founding president Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia has built a reputation as one of Southern Africa’s steadier democracies, marked by peaceful transfers of power that many of its regional peers have struggled to match. Hichilema, a businessman who finally won office in 2021 on his sixth attempt, has pursued liberalising economic reform, abolished the death penalty and worked to rebuild investor confidence after years of fiscal strain. As Oxford Economics has noted in its assessment of Zambia’s re election prospects, Hichilema’s chances have been aided considerably by a divided opposition. His government’s handling of the unresolved matter of former president Edgar Lungu, who died in June last year and remains unburied amid a dispute between the state and his family over where he should be laid to rest, has exposed real fault lines within Zambian politics. A South African court ruled in June that Lungu could be buried there, a decision the Zambian government said it disagreed with but would not contest further, a resolution that speaks to a political culture still capable of absorbing disagreement without rupture.
Beyond questions of copper and credit, Zambia carries a natural inheritance that belongs to the wider region rather than to any single flag. Victoria Falls, known before European contact as Mosi oa Tunya, the smoke that thunders, straddles the Zambezi River on the border with Zimbabwe and stands among the most spectacular waterfalls on earth. Named by the Scottish explorer David Livingstone after Britain’s queen in 1855, the falls remain a reminder that the naming conventions imposed on African landscapes rarely displaced the meanings their own peoples had already given them. As a UNESCO World Heritage site anchoring a tourism economy that extends into the South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi national parks, Victoria Falls is a shared regional asset whose value, like that of Zambia’s copper, will depend on how deliberately the benefits are channelled toward the communities who have always called this land home.
Whatever Thursday’s result, Zambia’s trajectory offers a useful corrective to narratives that treat African economies as passive recipients of external fortune. From debt restructuring to critical mineral strategy, Lusaka has shown a capacity to negotiate its own terms with creditors, investors and neighbours alike, a capacity that deserves to be read as agency rather than exception.
