The Messiah Complex in Zambian Politics

⚖️ EDITORIAL | The Messiah Complex in Zambian Politics

Brian Mundubile’s one liner that President Hakainde Hichilema has “failed at everything” sounds powerful on a loudspeaker. It collapses once you put numbers on the table.

When PF left power in 2021, Zambia had already defaulted on its Eurobond debt, becoming the first African country to stop paying during the Covid period after missing a 42.5 million dollar coupon in November 2020. Public debt had climbed to about one and a half times the size of the whole economy. Inflation averaged about 22 percent in 2021, while the kwacha had slumped from about K8 per dollar in 2015 to around K20 per dollar by 2021. This was not ordinary turbulence, it was a full macroeconomic breakdown.

That is the toilet analogy. One government spent ten years filling the bowl and walking away without flushing. The smell that citizens complain about today did not begin in August 2021. It began when PF piled on debt, lost control of prices, and drove investors to the exit while the party celebrated “unprecedented infrastructure.”

Three years later, the picture is mixed, not perfect, but very different from “failed at everything.” Zambia has negotiated a restructuring of 6.3 billion dollars with official creditors under the G20 framework and reached an agreement in principle with private bondholders, a key step to clearing the default and reopening normal access to finance. The Bank of Zambia reports that reserves have risen to about 5.2 billion dollars, covering more than five months of imports, helped by IMF disbursements and improved external inflows.

Inflation, while still painful, has fallen from PF’s 22 percent average in 2021 to the low to mid teens and is projected by the central bank to move closer to the 6 to 8 percent target band over the next two years. These are signs of a country slowly climbing out of a hole, not a country where “nothing” has been fixed.

Energy is the easy attack line. Load shedding today hurts households and businesses. But power cuts did not start with Hichilema. Under PF, Zesco was already implementing cuts of up to 15 hours per day in 2019 because of low water levels and years of delayed investment. The drought that has cut current generation is real, even if citizens are tired of hearing about climate. Any serious critic has to show how they would add new generation capacity, over what time frame, with what money, and how they would avoid another debt trap after the last one almost broke the country.

This is where Mundubile’s message becomes thin. His interviews are full of verbs and adjectives, very light on numbers and sequencing. He talks about ending load shedding, rebuilding agriculture, fixing tribalism and restoring growth.

He rarely explains which contracts he would cancel, which subsidies he would restore or remove, how he would pay for new power stations after his own party’s borrowing binge closed many doors, or how he would deal with the same civil service and parastatal culture that PF left behind. He points to his record in Mporokoso and in Northern Province. That may show local competence, but it does not rewrite the national record of a party that presided over default, double–digit inflation and a currency collapse.

The temptation for every opposition figure is to speak like a saviour. Hichilema did it in opposition. He boasted of his Dubai formula to fix energy issues. Hichilema promised to bring the dollar to K14 after being sworn-in. This was Messianic complex at play. Mundubile is doing it now. The risk for voters is that they reward the loudest promise instead of the clearest plan.

The honest starting point is simple. PF broke the economy on its watch. UPND is repairing parts of it and failing in others. Any PF candidate who pretends to arrive with clean hands is editing out a decade of history.

Citizens deserve more than a new Messiah in a different colour chitenge. They deserve to ask Mundubile and every other hopeful: how many megawatts, by when, at what cost, with which lenders, under what debt limits, and what is your plan to keep inflation in single digits without collapsing jobs. Until those answers come, “HH has failed at everything” remains what it is. A campaign line, not an economic truth.

© The People’s Brief | Editors | 14/11/25