WHEN Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) got independence from Britain in 1964, it was one of Africa's richest and most developed countries. It has vast copper-ore deposits and some of the best land and most copious water in the continent. Yet now, largely due to poor leadership, it is one of the poorest. Under President Levy Mwanawasa, who ran the place from 2002 until he died a year ago, things began to look up. But after a year in the job his successor, Rupiah Banda, is beginning to raise fears, especially among foreign investors and donors, that his country may be returning to some of its bad old ways.
One reason is that Mr Banda, who was foreign minister under Zambia's founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, has been chumming up with Mr Kaunda's disgraced successor, Frederick Chiluba. Apart from the successful privatisation of the mines, Mr Chiluba's ten-year reign from 1991-2001 is remembered mainly for its economic mismanagement and corruption. In 2007, in a civil case brought by Zambia's government before London's High Court, Mr Chiluba was found guilty of embezzling £46m (then $95m) of public funds. The ruling has yet to be enforced in Zambia.
In August, to widespread disbelief, Mr Chiluba was acquitted after a six-year criminal trial in a Zambian court of embezzling $500,000. The head of a government anti-corruption task force lodged an appeal but was promptly sacked by Mr Banda and the appeal rescinded. Independent organisations called on Zambians to remonstrate by honking their horns every Friday at 5pm. But after some of the protesters were arrested for “disturbing the peace”, the movement petered out. “People are scared,” says a diplomat. “The state is still powerful and potentially nasty.”
Some Western donors, who are giving around $700m in budget aid this year, about a quarter of the government's spending, also expressed surprise at the government's decision not to appeal against Mr Chiluba's acquittal. The state-controlled media then vilified them for meddling in Zambia's internal affairs and for holding “dark-corner meetings” to plot the government's overthrow. As Mr Banda was away at the time, it is hard to tell how fully he endorsed such attacks.
A number of other shenanigans have added to the worries. For a start, independent observers questioned Mr Banda's narrow victory over his chief rival in last year's presidential election. The opposition called foul, in vain. An anti-corruption campaign launched by Mr Mwanawasa seems to have ground to a halt. The Dutch and Swedish governments suspended aid to Zambia's health ministry after officials were found to have creamed off 10 billion kwacha ($2.1m). Some members of Mr Banda's own party are dismayed. One of them, George Mpombo, recently stepped down as defence minister, citing Mr Banda's “anti-democratic acts”.
Thanks partly to Mr Mwanawasa, Zambia has been viewed as a stable democracy with independent courts and a fairly free press. Though it is still near the bottom of the UN's human-development index, it is ranked quite high for governance and freedom, coming 18th out of Africa's 53 countries. Now it is in danger of slipping.
Its economy, on the other hand, has been doing fairly well, though copper prices dived from nearly $9,000 a tonne in July last year to $2,800 in December. Many mines nearly closed. But world prices have leapt back to nearly $6,900 a tonne, pushing Zambia's projected output this year up to 666,000 tonnes, three times its level when the mines were sold off a decade ago, though not yet back to the 730,000-plus tonnes being produced when Mr Kaunda nationalised the industry in the early 1970s. According to the finance minister, copper accounts for 17% of Zambia's GDP (a third, if you include spin-offs) and 80% of foreign earnings.
After a recent two-week inspection, an IMF team praised the government for its fiscal management in a hard time, and says GDP should go on growing by more than 5% this year after expanding by an average of nearly 6% for the past nine years, Zambia's longest period of growth since independence. But it needs to grow by at least 7% to reduce poverty appreciably. Some two-thirds of Zambia's 12m-plus people live below the poverty line. And more than 100,000 Zambians die every year from malaria and HIV/AIDS.