Lusaka was having a power cut, so the only light in the restaurant was from Fumba Chama’s mobile phone. The rapper, better known as PilAto, had just finished uploading a new track to Twitter. The bitter-sweet lyrics (in Bemba) of Yama Chinese describe the concerns of many Zambians: ‘They put on smart suits and fly to China to sell our country. The roads belong to China. The hotels are for the Chinese. The chicken farms are Chinese. Even the brickworks are Chinese.’
PilAto (an acronym for ‘people in the lyrical area taking over’) is a voice for Zambia ’s voiceless. In May 2018 he returned from six months’ self-imposed exile in South Africa, where he had fled after death threats over another rap, Koswe Mumpoto (Rat in the Pot), denouncing corruption in President Edgar Lungu’s government.
Resentment of China is growing, especially in the Copperbelt region, which generates 70% of Zambia ’s export earnings. The government is widely criticised over its social policies. Cosmas Mukuka, secretary-general of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, told me that some private Chinese companies operating in Zambia, hiding in the shadow of the mining multinationals, ‘are not following the recommendations of the International Labour Organisation’.
In December 2018 John Bolton, then US national security advisor and responsible for revealing Washington’s new Africa strategy, claimed that China planned to take over some state-owned enterprises if the Zambian government defaulted on its debt. This was a reference to an article published three months earlier in the Africa Confidential newsletter, claiming that the state electricity company Zesco was ‘in talks about a takeover by a Chinese company’, which raised concerns about ‘national sovereignty and Chinese ownership of key components of the country’s infrastructure’.
Source: Le Monde Diplomatique
