Zambians cannot eat indicators, Tonse says
By Ludia Ngwadzai
THE Tonse-PF Pamodzi Alliance has hit back at the United Party for National Development (UPND)’s response to New Heritage Party President Chishala Kateka’s advise to the ruling party to stop relying on statistics in its campaign.
Media director Brian Matambo said there was something profoundly wrong with asking hungry citizens to admire national economic indicators while their household budgets collapsed and they struggled to afford basic needs.
Matambo said the UPND’s reply to Kateka tried to bury a serious national argument beneath macroeconomic vocabulary, personal insults and unsupported accusations of tribalism.
“There’s something profoundly wrong with a political argument that asks hungry citizens to admire the condition of the national balance sheet while their own household balance sheets are collapsing,” he said.
Matambo said the debt restructuring programme and macroeconomic stability were genuine accomplishments.
He cited International Monetary Fund (IMF) data from May 2026 showing inflation had declined to 6.8 per cent in April and international reserves had risen to about US$6.4 billion.
Matambo said debt restructuring and improving indicators could not erase widespread poverty, the cost-of-living burden or deteriorating public services.
“A government cannot demand applause merely because it has repaired certain national accounts. It must demonstrate that the repair has reached the market trader, the subsistence farmer, the pensioner, the unemployed graduate, the miner, the teacher and the mother standing in a clinic without essential medicines,” he said.
Matambo said the purpose of economics was human welfare, and when economics becomes detached from the human being it stopped being development.
It became accounting.
He said a falling inflation rate did not mean prices had returned to previous levels.
It only meant prices were rising more slowly, while the accumulated increases remained.
“Zambians cannot eat economic indicators, an election is also a judgment upon the household balance sheet,” Matambo said.
The UPND’s claim that democracy is healthy simply because courts, churches, opposition parties and newspapers still existed set a remarkably low standard.
Modern democratic decline was often gradual.
Institutions might remain standing while their independence was weakened, and elections might continue while competition became unequal.
