OPINION: Zambia’s stabilisation is not luck, it is discipline

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Two straight months of 6.5 per cent inflation add up to more than a statistical coincidence. If there is a lesson in July’s reading, argues economist Kelvin Chisanga, it is that economic policy, when sustained, works.

There is an argument heard whenever a developing country manages to tame inflation: it got lucky. A good harvest, a commodity price spike, a favourable external environment. Zambian economist Kelvin Chisanga rejects that reading for his own country. To him, the 6.5 per cent annual inflation recorded in both June and July 2026, half the 13.0 per cent of a year earlier, is not a statistical accident. It is the visible output of a macroeconomic stabilisation programme that is, at last, delivering results.

The case rests on numbers that are hard to dismiss. GDP growth accelerated to 7.7 per cent in the first quarter. International reserves hit a record $6.5bn. The kwacha, which was depreciating uncontrollably two years ago, has stabilised at around 18.39 to the dollar, one of the best currency performances in the world in 2026. For Chisanga, this is not a coincidence of isolated indicators. It is the snapshot of an economy that has recovered the anchor it was missing.

“Households benefit from improved purchasing power, businesses gain greater certainty for planning and investment, while government and financial institutions operate in a more stable economic environment.” (Kelvin Chisanga, to The Mast)

It is a line that could pass for official messaging, but it accurately describes the mechanism any developing economy is chasing: once inflation stops eating into wages, economic agents stop pricing decisions around uncertainty and start planning for the medium term. That, more than the standalone figure of 6.5 per cent, is the gain Chisanga is really pointing to.

Anyone inclined to discount the argument can point, fairly, to the signs of fragility: non-food inflation rose from 6.0 to 6.7 per cent, driven by energy and imported goods; copper output again missed its 1-million-tonne target; and this year’s primary surplus forecast was cut from 3.8 to 1.1 per cent of GDP just days before the August 13 election. These are legitimate objections, and no serious economist should wave them away.

That is precisely where Chisanga’s intervention carries weight: he is not asking for complacency, he is asking for continuity. His prescription is explicit (fiscal discipline, policy consistency and continued private-sector-led growth) and it doubles as a warning to the outgoing government and to whoever succeeds it. The gains of the past two years are not set in stone. They can unwind as quickly as they built up, if the pre-election temptation to spend more and collect less overrides the discipline that brought inflation back inside the Bank of Zambia’s target.

The argument, at bottom, reaches beyond Zambia. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, disinflation is going into reverse on the back of global fuel prices: ten of the continent’s largest economies posted higher inflation in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier. Zambia is the exception. If Chisanga is right, that exception owes nothing to luck and everything to a discipline the country chose to keep even when it would have been politically easier not to. And it is that discipline, more than the 6.5 per cent print itself, that will be on the line on August 13.

Not everyone agrees with this reading. Critics of the government argue that the current stability owes as much, or more, to the international copper rally as to any domestic policy merit, and that the downward revision of the primary surplus is itself evidence that discipline has already started to slip under electoral pressure. The definitive answer to that dispute will only arrive after the vote, once it is clear whether the next government, whoever forms it, is willing to defend the formula Chisanga describes, or spend it.