The Editor Zambia
Disgruntled former Patriotic Front (PF) diplomat Kellys Kaunda’s attempt to dismiss President Hakainde Hichilema’s Grow Zambia Agenda as merely an old story being retold is less an economic critique than an exhibition of how little he understands the distinction between an economic system and an economic development strategy.
Kaunda’s fundamental mistake is to assume that because Zambia remains a mixed, predominantly market-based economy, nothing fundamentally different can be happening in the country’s economic policy. That is simply wrong.
Virtually every modern economy operates through some combination of markets, private investment, and strategic government intervention. 
What matters is not whether capitalism exists, but what government does with the policy instruments available to it to expand production, attract investment, create jobs, increase productivity, and distribute the benefits of growth.
The Grow Zambia Agenda is, therefore, not rendered meaningless simply because Zambia embraced liberalisation in 1991.
The relevant question is whether the current administration is creating different conditions for economic expansion and whether those conditions can translate into higher incomes, more investment, greater production, and improved livelihoods.
Kaunda also makes the rather extraordinary assertion that because the private sector has never eliminated inequality, the private sector is somehow the problem.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. No serious economist argues that private investment alone magically eliminates poverty or inequality.
The private sector creates productive capacity, businesses, employment, and tax revenues, while the government provides the regulatory, infrastructural, educational, and institutional environment in which that activity can occur.
The real economic challenge is, therefore, not to choose between “bottom-up” and “top-down” economics as though these were mutually exclusive alternatives. It is to construct a functioning economic ecosystem in which investment, infrastructure, skills, finance, agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and social protection reinforce one another.
Out of personal frustrations, Kaunda’s argument about the informal sector is similarly simplistic. The existence of a large informal economy is not evidence that Zambia should abandon private-sector-led growth.
It is evidence that Zambia needs to make it easier for informal enterprises to become productive, formal, and scalable businesses.
That requires access to affordable finance, markets, electricity, roads, digital infrastructure, skills, technology, and predictable regulation.
Indeed, this is precisely where an investment-led growth strategy can make a difference. When a new mine expands, when an agricultural value chain develops, when tourism infrastructure is established or when renewable energy capacity increases, the economic impact does not end with the investor.
There are suppliers, transporters, contractors, farmers, service providers, workers, and small businesses that can participate in those value chains.
The challenge for government is to ensure that Zambians participate meaningfully in those opportunities. That is a legitimate debate. But dismissing investment because it does not automatically solve every social problem is economically unserious.
Kaunda also appears to misunderstand the role of government in attracting investment. Calling the government the “public relations officer for big business” ignores the fact that countries compete aggressively for capital.
Zambia is competing not merely against neighbouring countries but against economies across Africa and the developing world for mining capital, manufacturing investment, tourism projects, energy investment, and agricultural finance.
Capital goes where investors see opportunity, stability, infrastructure, markets, and reasonable policy certainty. Government therefore has a legitimate responsibility to market Zambia as an investment destination. That is not servility to business; it is economic competition.
More importantly, investment is not incompatible with social development. The government needs revenue to finance schools, hospitals, roads, water systems, and social protection.
Where there is little economic activity, there is little taxable activity. Where there is little investment, there is little productive capacity. And where there is little productive capacity, governments struggle to generate the revenues necessary to finance development.
Kaunda’s argument consequently falls into the classic trap of demanding redistribution without sufficiently explaining how the economy will generate the wealth to be redistributed.
His criticism of the Grow Zambia Agenda would have been more credible if he had presented a concrete alternative: Which sectors should government prioritise? How much should be invested? Where should the money come from? What fiscal reforms are required? How should productivity be increased? How should informal enterprises transition into formal businesses? How should agricultural production be connected to manufacturing? How should Zambia attract capital while maximising local participation?
Instead, he presents inequality as though merely identifying it constitutes an economic solution.
Nobody should pretend that Zambia’s economic problems will disappear overnight. Poverty, unemployment, inequality, informality, and low productivity are serious structural challenges. But acknowledging those problems does not make an economic strategy defective.
The Grow Zambia Agenda should therefore be judged on measurable outcomes, implementation and its capacity to expand Zambia’s productive base, not on the intellectually lazy argument that because Zambia remains a market economy, nothing has changed.
Kaunda is entitled to oppose President Hichilema’s economic programme. What he is not entitled to do, however, is substitute economic slogans for economic analysis.
Zambia does not need ideological posturing. It needs investment, production, productivity, jobs, exports, infrastructure, skills, enterprise development, and disciplined economic management.
That is the conversation the country deserves.
