🇿🇲 CLOSE-UP | Zambia’s Mining Regime Since 2021: A Return of Capital, Test of Governance
Zambia’s mining comeback is being powered by a global copper rush that has little to do with sentiment and everything to do with need. Demand is being pulled by three engines at once: AI-driven data centres, the clean-energy buildout, and defence supply chains, all of which rely on copper as the “workhorse” metal for grids, wiring, batteries, and industrial systems.
This is why Zambia has re-entered the strategic conversation in 2025–2026, not as a feel-good story, but as a supply story, and supply stories attract money quickly.
President Hakainde Hichilema is leaning into that moment. At the African Mining Indaba, he told investors, “We have the investors back,” and said more than $12 billion had flowed into the sector since 2022. This matters because it signals what his administration is trying to sell: predictability, de-risking, and a state that wants capital at scale, not episodic project-by-project deals. It also frames mining as the lead sector in the broader economic reset he has marketed since taking office.
The output numbers are moving in the same direction. Zambia’s copper production rose 8% to over 890,000 metric tonnes last year, and mining still accounts for a large share of export earnings, meaning the kwacha’s story and the copper story remain joined at the hip.
Foreign exchange inflows rise when volumes and prices rise, and that typically improves currency stability, import costs, and liquidity in the formal market. The risk is that citizens see a stronger kwacha and assume it is “magic,” when it is often just commodities and confidence working together.
The policy shift since 2021 has been about tightening the state’s grip on rules, not necessarily tightening the state’s grip on mines. One marker is legislative. The Geological and Minerals Development Act, 2025 (Act 2 of 2025) was assented to in April 2025 and commenced in June 2025, updating the legal framework around geological survey, mapping, exploration, and artisanal mining structures.
This is the “boring” work investors read closely because it shapes licensing certainty, oversight tools, and the enforcement culture.
Another marker is the push for local value capture, not only through rhetoric but through rule design. The government has introduced local content regulations intended to raise Zambian participation in mining supply chains.
These instruments are politically attractive because they promise jobs and local enterprise, but they are also technically risky if they become a rent-seeking lane or a disguised procurement cartel. The credibility test is whether local content becomes competitive capacity-building, not a new extraction layer.
The administration is also selling a bigger idea: Zambia as a regional platform, not merely a mine site. UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan recently described Zambia as a strategic hub that has turned “landlocked” into “land-linked,” positioning it as a transit and energy corridor for regional trade frameworks. That message fits the mining regime’s new pitch: minerals should anchor logistics, power, and industrial nodes, not just leave the country as raw export.
The biggest gap in the story remains the same old African problem: extraction can expand while living standards stagnate. More than 70% of Zambians live in poverty, which makes the political stakes brutal. Citizens will not celebrate copper tonnage if the copper belt still feels like a sacrifice zone and Lusaka still feels like a pressure cooker. When governance is weak, booms enrich elites, fund politics, and harden inequality. This is the difference between a mining boom and a development boom.
Environmental credibility is the other fault line. Zambia has fresh scars, including the 2025 spill from a tailings facility that contaminated waterways linked to the Kafue system, reminding the country that production targets mean nothing if regulatory enforcement fails. The mining regime cannot be judged only by licences issued and tonnes produced. It will be judged by whether it can keep communities safe, water systems intact, and remediation costs real, not rhetorical.
The deeper question for 2026 and beyond is whether Zambia is building a mining state or just hosting mining. A mining state uses the boom to expand technical capacity, enforce compliance, build downstream capability, and convert mineral rents into public goods that citizens can see.
Hosting mining is the easy part: dig, export, announce growth, repeat. Zambia’s new narrative is ambitious. The measure of seriousness will be whether the rules bite equally across operators, whether value-add is negotiated into deals without killing competitiveness, and whether copper’s global moment becomes Zambia’s domestic moment, not another chapter in “pit-to-port” history.
© The People’s Brief | Ollus R. Ndomu