🇿🇲 EDITORIAL | Zambia Cannot Afford Campaign Economics Built on Applause
There is a dangerous trend emerging in this election campaign. It is the normalisation of economic illiteracy as a political strategy. Instead of explaining difficult policy choices honestly, some politicians have discovered that it is easier to ridicule economics itself. Foreign exchange reserves become “useless figures.” Inflation becomes “big English.” Fiscal discipline becomes an inconvenience. Complex national challenges are reduced to applause lines designed for campaign rallies. This may produce cheers in the moment. It does not produce sound government.
Brian Mundubile has every democratic right to challenge the UPND government’s economic record. Opposition politics exists for precisely that purpose. If he believes macroeconomic stability has failed to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, he should make that case. Many households continue to struggle with high living costs despite improving national indicators.
This is a legitimate political argument. But it is entirely different from telling citizens that foreign exchange reserves do not matter or suggesting that inflation is somehow irrelevant to their lives.
Such statements do not simplify economics. They misrepresent it. Foreign exchange reserves are not savings that government keeps hidden from poor people. They are the country’s financial insurance. They keep fuel flowing when global markets tighten. They pay for medicines, fertiliser and industrial imports. They reassure investors that Zambia can honour its obligations. They protect the kwacha when markets come under pressure. Countries do not accumulate reserves because they enjoy pleasing international institutions. They do so because every serious economy eventually faces external shocks. Zambia learned that lesson the hard way.
History makes this debate even more uncomfortable. The political tradition from which the Tonse Alliance has emerged governed Zambia until 2021. Those years ended with sovereign default, unsustainable public debt, weakening reserves and inflation above twenty percent. The administration that followed inherited the difficult task of restructuring debt, rebuilding reserves and restoring confidence in the economy. That history cannot simply be erased because the campaign platform has changed. It invites an obvious question: if the economic thinking being presented today is different, where was that thinking when Zambia was sliding into default?
The contradictions do not end there. Alongside attacks on inflation and reserves have come promises to cancel student loans, increase meal allowances, restore debt swaps, expand fertiliser support, establish new ministries, release convicted PF figures and finance a long list of new government programmes. Every one of those promises costs money. None exists outside the national budget. Yet very little has been said about how they would be financed without increasing borrowing, widening the fiscal deficit or placing new pressure on the very macroeconomic stability now being dismissed
Mundubile’s campaign style partly explains why these contradictions have escaped sustained scrutiny. He speaks quickly, confidently and continuously. One promise flows into another with barely enough time for listeners to ask how the previous one would work. It is an effective political performance. Speed creates momentum. Momentum creates excitement.
Excitement often discourages scrutiny. But governing is not a campaign rally. Ministers cannot present budgets at the speed of campaign speeches. The Treasury eventually demands numbers. Markets eventually demand credibility. Arithmetic eventually catches up with rhetoric.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this campaign is not the promises themselves but the assumption behind them. Increasingly, politicians appear to believe that voters no longer require coherent economic explanations. They believe slogans can replace fiscal plans, that emotion can replace evidence and that confidence can replace competence. That is an insult to the intelligence of the Zambian electorate.
Citizens deserve to know not only what a politician intends to do, but also how it will be paid for, how it will affect inflation, how it will protect the currency and how it will avoid repeating mistakes of the past.
Democracy does not require politicians to agree. It requires them to persuade honestly. There is nothing wrong with offering hope. There is everything wrong with asking citizens to suspend arithmetic in order to believe it. Zambia is choosing a government, not a motivational speaker. The presidency demands more than confidence behind a microphone. It demands mastery of the numbers that determine whether a nation prospers or declines.
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