When aid becomes leverage, Zambians must ask:
Where is Zambia First?
By
Prof. Cephas Lumina
THE New York Times report of 16 March 2026 titled, “US Considers Withholding HIV Aid Unless Zambia Expands Minerals Access” should shame, alarm, and awaken this country. According to the paper, the United States is considering withholding lifesaving HIV assistance to Zambia unless our government signs an arrangement that would broaden American access to Zambia’s critical minerals. The reported package is extraordinary in both scale and implication. Zambia would receive US$1 billion in health funding over five years if it commits US$340 million in new domestic health spending, while another arm of the package would restructure a US$458 million Millennium Challenge Corporation grant and require regulatory changes in mining and other sectors. The same report says 1.3 million Zambians rely on daily HIV treatment financed through the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
No serious independent country should find itself in a position where access to antiretroviral treatment for its citizens can be entangled with negotiations over copper, cobalt, and other strategic minerals. Yet before we exhaust ourselves denouncing Washington, we must confront a more uncomfortable truth. This story is not just about US power politics. It is also about Zambian weakness, secrecy, and policy failure.
The question before us is: How did a country so rich in natural resources become so dependent, so exposed, and so easily pressured?
The answer is not singular. It lies in a toxic combination of constitutional disregard, lack of transparency, weak domestic resource mobilisation, poor mining policy, illicit financial flows, corruption, and a foreign policy too often insufficiently anchored in the country’s own strategic national interest.
A nation rich in minerals, yet exposed to pressure
The reported offer of US$1 billion over five years is large, and that is precisely why this moment is so revealing. Zambia is not a country without resources. It is not a country without leverage. It sits on minerals that powerful states increasingly view as indispensable to industrial production, energy transition technologies, and geopolitical competition. That is why they want them.
So, the deeper scandal is not merely that a major power may be acting like one. It is that Zambia remains vulnerable enough to accept an offer built around US$1 billion in health funding, US$340 million in domestic co-financing, and a reworked US$458 million grant, thereby placing the country in such a morally and strategically compromised position. Those are not just figures. They are a measure of our exposure.
And that exposure did not appear overnight. It is the product of years of poor choices, years of underperformance in revenue mobilisation, years of leakage, and years of mistaking mineral extraction for actual national development.
A country can be rich in resources and still govern itself into weakness. Zambia is now being forced to confront that truth.
Constitutional obligations are not optional
Because the reported MOU has not been publicly disclosed, I do not pretend to know every clause it contains. But that uncertainty does not weaken the constitutional point. It strengthens it. Matters involving public health, strategic minerals, foreign funding, national data, biological samples, and long-term regulatory commitments cannot be handled as though they belong only to a small circle of officials. The Constitution does not permit that style of government.
Article 8 identifies our national values and principles, including morality, ethics, patriotism, democracy, constitutionalism, human dignity, equity, social justice, good governance and integrity. Article 9 makes clear that these values must guide the development and implementation of State policy. Article 90 states that executive authority derives from the people of Zambia and must be exercised in a manner compatible with social justice and for the people’s well-being and benefit. Article 63 gives the National Assembly the power to approve international agreements before ratification.
These are constitutional obligations. A memorandum that reportedly touches essential health services, foreign funding, strategic minerals, and the wider national interest cannot lawfully be treated as a private arrangement between a few officials. It must be negotiated in a manner consistent with human dignity, social justice, integrity, accountability, and public benefit.
That is why secrecy is not a side issue here. It is part of the substance of the problem.
Secrecy weakens the state
The Zambian public has not been given details of the reported MOU. Parliament has not debated it. Citizens do not know the full conditions, trade-offs, or long-term risks. Yet what is reportedly at stake is profound: US$1 billion in health support, US$340 million in domestic spending commitments, a US$458 million grant linked to wider regulatory change, and concerns over provisions that may reportedly require Zambia to share health data for ten years and biological specimens for twenty-five years, even though the health funding itself would last only five years.
Governments often defend opacity in the language of diplomacy or pragmatism. But secrecy has not strengthened Zambia’s hand. It has weakened it. When the country shuts out debate, it denies itself access to its own intelligence. Economists, constitutional lawyers, mining specialists, tax experts, public health professionals, parliamentarians, and civil society are excluded from helping the country price the trade-offs, stress-test the assumptions, and identify stronger alternatives.
What secrecy produces is not strategy, but a famine of ideas. Transparency is not just a democratic virtue. It is a negotiating asset. It broadens the range of options. It exposes weak assumptions before they harden into commitments. It helps a country define its red lines. It can prevent panic from becoming policy.
Instead, Zambians have found themselves in the humiliating position of learning about a matter of profound national consequence through foreign reporting.
That is not how a sovereign republic should conduct itself.
Aid dependence has become a strategic vulnerability
This episode also exposes a deeper failure. It is one thing for aid to save lives. It is another for dependence on that aid to become so entrenched that it creates strategic vulnerability. Undoubtedly, PEPFAR has saved lives in Zambia. That should be acknowledged. But gratitude for external support cannot become an excuse for avoiding a harder national reckoning.
The same report indicates that Zambia has received more than US$6 billion in PEPFAR assistance over the past two decades. That figure should disturb us as much as it reassures us. It tells two stories at once. The first is one of lifesaving support. The second is one of prolonged structural dependence. A country does not receive assistance on that scale for that long without exposing a basic weakness in its own domestic financing base.
That is the uncomfortable truth. After more than sixty years of independence, Zambia should not still be in a position where continuity of core health services can be threatened by shifts in foreign political priorities or geopolitical bargaining.
Yet that appears to be exactly where we are.
The numbers expose the contradiction
The contradiction becomes even sharper when the reported figures are assessed against the country’s own public finances. The 2026 national budget is K253.1 billion. Parliamentary budget analysis indicates that health is projected to account for 9.9 per cent of that total, roughly K25.1 billion. At the same time, Zambia’s external public and publicly guaranteed debt was expected to reach about US$21.7 billion at end-2025.
These are not disconnected statistics. They describe the structure of the Zambian state. We are trying to finance a health sector of K25.1 billion, manage a national budget of K253.1 billion, and carry an external debt burden of about US$21.7 billion, while still depending on external financing for HIV treatment in a country with world-class mineral assets.
That is not simply unfortunate. It is a developmental contradiction.
The reported requirement that Zambia commit US$340 million in additional domestic health spending only sharpens the point. It effectively tells Zambia to do more of what it should already have been doing through its own fiscal system. But the reason the state struggles to do so is not mysterious. Zambia has not captured enough fair value from the wealth it already has.
Mineral extraction alone is not development
Now place those health and debt numbers next to mining. Zambia’s copper production rose from 732,583 metric tonnes in 2023 to 820,676 metric tonnes in 2024. Reporting on 2025 output indicates production of about 890,346 metric tonnes, still below the one-million-tonne target but clearly rising. Meanwhile, the extractive sector accounted for 17 per cent of GDP, 25 per cent of total government revenue, and 74 per cent of exports in 2024. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative also notes that mining accounted for 44 per cent of government revenues in 2022.
These are enormous numbers. They should force a national reckoning. Citizens are expected to celebrate rising copper production, rising export performance, and renewed optimism in mining. But output is not the same as transformation. Tonnage is not the same as development. Export earnings are not the same thing as broad public benefit. If production rises from 732,583 tonnes to 820,676 tonnes and then to roughly 890,346 tonnes, while the country still cannot confidently finance critical health needs without external leverage, then the central question is obvious: growing for whom?
That question goes to the heart of the national interest. A minerals regime that generates impressive export figures while leaving the state fiscally constrained, hospitals under pressure, and debt distress unresolved is not delivering development at the level it should.
Who benefits from Zambia’s mineral wealth?
At the centre of this problem is the country’s weak approach to domestic resource mobilisation. The country’s mineral wealth should, under any sensible patriotic policy framework, be one of the main foundations for financing development. The critical minerals that powerful states now want access to should already be making a decisive contribution to the health sector, debt reduction, and broader economic resilience.
Yet that has not happened, not because the minerals lack value, but because the country has too often failed to capture a fair share of that value. Successive governments have tolerated weak fiscal arrangements, unstable tax policy, unnecessary incentives, poor enforcement, and investment models in which foreign firms extract immense wealth while the public purse remains too fragile to finance health, education, industrialisation, and social protection at the required level.
The problem is not foreign investment as such. The problem is a model that socialises the costs and privatises the gains.
There is no developmental logic in giving away public revenue through generous concessions and then pleading poverty in the health sector. There is no national wisdom in subsidising wealth extraction while underfunding the services that sustain life. There is no constitutional seriousness in celebrating mineral exports while failing to ensure that the owners of the resource, the citizens, receive a fair and lasting share of the benefits.
That is why the governance questions around major assets such as Konkola Copper Mines, Mopani, and First Quantum-linked operations matter so much. These are not merely commercial questions. They are constitutional questions about whether Zambia is managing strategic resources in the interests of its people.
Illicit financial flows are draining public finances
Even where tax frameworks exist, they are too often undermined by illicit financial flows. This is one of the least discussed and most destructive features of Zambia’s political economy. Revenue that should support public investment is lost through mispricing, mis-invoicing, tax evasion, aggressive profit shifting, opaque corporate structures, and related leakages. The result is not just reduced revenue. It is reduced sovereignty.
The amounts involved are not trivial. They are substantial enough to alter the country’s development trajectory if effectively addressed. When a country loses billions through illicit financial flows, it is not merely losing money. It is losing hospital beds, medicines, classrooms, roads, jobs, and fiscal sovereignty. It is losing the capacity to say no to harmful foreign conditionalities.
That is why tackling illicit financial flows must be understood as a core national development priority.
Corruption has human consequences
The same applies to corruption. Corruption is not merely a moral issue. It is a budget, health, and sovereignty issue. Every inflated contract, every hidden beneficial owner, every politically protected scheme, and every illicitly externalised dollar is money that cannot finance ARVs, laboratories, nurses, rural clinics, or disease surveillance. Corruption has a budget line. It has consequences. It has victims.
Too often, corruption is discussed in abstract moral terms, detached from its practical consequences. But corruption is not abstract. It affects whether a health post gets built, whether a medicine order is completed, whether staffing levels improve, and whether the State can meet its obligations to citizens without having to negotiate from desperation.
A country cannot complain about foreign leverage while tolerating domestic theft. Every kwacha lost to corruption weakens the Republic’s bargaining power. Every act of impunity makes sovereignty cheaper.
Weak public finances produce weak sovereignty
This is also why the debt conversation must be reframed. Costly debt restructuring, fiscal consolidation, and the pain that follows do not emerge in a vacuum. They become politically unavoidable when the state fails to capture a fair share of the value generated from its own minerals and fails to stop the leakages that hollow out the revenue base. Once trapped in that cycle, the country pays through tighter budgets, slower development, pressure on household incomes, and reduced room for independent national policy.
That is the larger lesson of this moment. The health funding story, the mining story, the corruption story, the illicit financial flows story, and the debt story are not separate stories at all. They are one story, told through different institutions and in different forms. A country that does not build fiscal strength from its own assets will, sooner or later, find itself negotiating from weakness. And weakness invites pressure.
Zambia must finally put Zambia first
So yes, this is a story about America First. The reported US position is plain enough: aid may be used as leverage to secure a strategic advantage. That is what major powers do when they pursue their interests. The more uncomfortable and more embarrassing question is not what Washington is doing, but what Zambia is doing. Where, in all of this, is Zambia First?
A Zambia-first posture would not mean isolationism, hostility to investment, or a rejection of international cooperation. It would mean approaching the world with seriousness, constitutional fidelity, strategic clarity, and national self-respect. It would mean welcoming partnerships that genuinely serve the country, while refusing arrangements that turn human vulnerability into leverage over national resources. It would mean drawing clear red lines: essential health support should never become a bargaining chip for access to minerals; citizens’ data and biological materials should never be surrendered through opaque frameworks; regulatory systems should never be reshaped under pressure and without public scrutiny; and strategic national assets should never be negotiated as though Zambians have no constitutional right to know what is being done in their name.
The required response is not difficult to identify. The reported memorandum must be published. Any binding commitments must be subjected to full parliamentary scrutiny. Every such arrangement must be measured against Articles 8, 9, 63, 90, and 92 of the Constitution. Zambia must overhaul domestic resource mobilisation in mining, end unjustified incentives and reckless giveaways, and strengthen tax enforcement, contract transparency, and oversight of strategic assets. It must confront illicit financial flows with the same seriousness as their fiscal consequences, treat corruption as an assault on development rather than occasional anti-graft theatre, and build a credible medium-term plan to finance a much larger share of the health sector, including HIV treatment, from domestic resources.
None of this is impossible. Zambia has the resource base. What has too often been missing is the political will, the constitutional seriousness, and the development vision anchored in national dignity to act on it. Because the deepest humiliation in this moment is not simply that a powerful country may have tried to use money as leverage. Powerful countries do that. The deeper humiliation is that Zambia, despite having a K253.1 billion national budget, a health allocation of roughly K25.1 billion, copper output approaching 890,346 metric tonnes, and a mining sector accounting for 74 per cent of exports, still appears vulnerable enough for outsiders to believe that US$1 billion can buy leverage over our sovereignty, our health security, and our policy space. Zambia should never have been placed in a position where the lives of 1.3 million people could be weighed against access to its minerals. That should be the line, and this should be the moment when Zambia finally decides to mean it.
