On the 24th of October, Zambia turns sixty-one with much to admire, but without the compounding progress that endurance requires. The country modernized the scaffolding it inherited at independence more than it redesigned it, which helps explain why outcomes so often plateau: when institutions are tuned for continuity rather than compounding, time quietly becomes an adversary. The arithmetic here is blunt. In current-dollar terms, Zambia’s GDP per capita sits near the mid-$1,000s and has been broadly flat over the past decade, while the United States’ nominal GDP almost doubled (roughly $15 trillion in 2010 to about $30 trillion in 2024–25) and China more than doubled per-capita income over a similar span. A decade of weak gains at home is not just “lost growth”; it is forfeited compounding—state capacity, bargaining power, and know-how that would otherwise be building on itself.
Demographics magnify the stakes. Zambia shares the continent’s youth bulge, with a median age in the teens and an unusually high share of under-15s. That is an opportunity only if policy converts youth into productivity; otherwise, it hardens into frustration. Brookings’ Foresight Africa 2025–2030 underlines this window: Africa’s youthful structure can be a dividend, but only with institutions that translate it into skills, jobs, and investment; absent that, the same structure becomes a drag. In other words, compounding must be planned and then protected—because demographics alone do not guarantee it.
All of this is colliding with the frontier’s shift toward embodied artificial intelligence—software fused to robots, trained and run on vast compute, and anchored by energy-hungry data-centres. The Economist has pressed the core question plainly: what if AI makes global growth explode? If even directionally right, rich countries that already control the stack—chips, capital, standards, and cheap, reliable power—will capture step-changes in productivity. For late industrialisers, the risk is technological lock-in: becoming permanent importers of capability rather than producers, unless they position around the inputs of the new production function—electrons, sites, cooling water, rights-of-way, minerals processing, and predictable rules.
The energy side of the stack is no longer a footnote—it is the choke point. Data-centre demand tied to AI is surging; power, land, and cooling constraints are beginning to shape where investment can go. Analyses this year and last show the same directional signal: global data-centre electricity demand could more than double by 2030, with AI-specific loads accelerating that curve; hyperscalers are hunting for gigawatts of firm power, and the build-out will favour jurisdictions that can deliver electrons, permits, and certainty at speed. If Zambia wants to participate rather than be sidelined, it must treat energy and siting as export industries in their own right.
Put together, the diagnosis is not complicated, but it is urgent. First, time has been undervalued in policy and administration; when approvals, payments, cases, and connections take too long, private decision-makers stop compounding. Second, inherited institutional forms were rarely re-architected around a Zambian civilizational aim, which leaves policy oscillating between two exhausted poles—statist nostalgia and 1990s orthodoxy—rather than specifying what sovereignty should mean now. Third, the frontier is reconfiguring around compute, power, and standards; countries that control inputs will rent out their advantages, while those that do not will rent their future.
The new production function: compute, power, chips, data
If the 1990s production playbook was “cheap labour + openness,” the AI-era playbook is “cheap, reliable electrons + compute + connectivity + standards.” In practice, the stack that drives value now is chips → data centres (power, cooling, land, fibre) → data/standards → capital and rules. Countries that control those inputs will rent out their advantages; those that do not will rent their future.
Start with power. AI-class data centres are electricity machines with servers attached. The International Energy Agency estimates global data-centre electricity demand will roughly double to ~945 TWh by 2030, growing ~15% per year—over four times faster than total electricity demand—and AI loads are the main accelerator. The IEA’s 2025 update and technical annex show similar ranges and warn that grid constraints and siting bottlenecks are now binding in multiple regions. For any host country, “firm power + permits + cooling water” is no longer a footnote; it is the gating item.
Industry behaviour is converging on that reality. Hyperscalers are scouring the world for multi-gigawatt campuses, long-term power purchase agreements, and novel energy pairings (e.g., behind-the-meter renewables with firming, dispatchable thermal, and—in some cases—nuclear). The Economist has chronicled how AI’s “voracious appetite for power” is re-drawing the map of investable sites and why delays increasingly trace back to electrons, not silicon. Its coverage also cautions that project economics are murky unless utilisation and power contracts are nailed down. For policymakers, the translation is simple: treat electrons and sites as export industries; make interconnection, permitting, and water/cooling rules predictable and fast.
Then chips. Capability is bounded by access to advanced accelerators and the memory that feeds them. Since 2022, the United States and allies have repeatedly tightened export controls on AI-relevant chips, high-bandwidth memory, and model-weight transfers, with 2024–2025 rules extending to third-country routing and data-centre deployments. CSIS summarises the tightening wave; the Congressional Research Service describes the January 2025 “AI Diffusion Rule,” which groups countries by licensing tier to curb leakage; the FT has documented both enforcement and the emergence of black markets, as well as China’s countermoves on “compliant” chips and customs crackdowns. For late-industrialisers, strategy means aligning to stable supply chains, avoiding sanction risk, and specialising in inputs and hosting rather than betting on restricted silicon.
Next, data centres themselves. The physical bill of materials is predictable—land close to transmission, high-capacity feeders, water (or dry-cooling allowances), fibre routes, and construction supply chains. What has changed is scale and placement pressure. Power-hungry AI racks raise site power density, pushing utilities and regulators to triage scarce capacity; credible studies now expect data centres to account for a material share of incremental electricity demand this decade (with ranges by market) and emphasise grid bottlenecks and project delays where siting and interconnection rules are slow. That makes “time-to-yes” and grid planning national competitive variables, not just good governance.
Finally, standards, data governance, and capital. The economic rents in AI will accrue to jurisdictions that can host trusted compute (privacy/security regimes that global firms accept), move data across borders lawfully, and enforce contracts predictably. Brookings’ Foresight Africa essays argue for coupling digital inclusion with credible electricity access and cautions against naïve technosolutionism: AI can widen divides unless infrastructure and rules are built first. For Zambia and peers, that argues for an “inputs first” strategy: power, grid, land and rights-of-way, water/cooling, fibre, and legal predictability—then selective bets on minerals processing, model hosting, and sectoral AI where we have data advantages.
What this implies for strategy (summary):
1. Treat firm power and grid capacity as tradables. Bankable PPAs, transparent interconnection queues, and water/cooling guidance are now as important as tax rates. (IEA; Economist; BP Energy Outlook 2025.)
2. Court compute as an export industry, but price time: fast permits, standardised contracts, corridor zoning, and service-level agreements for utilities. (The Economist; IEA.)
3. Align to chip-control realities. Avoid routes that trigger export-control risk; partner where supply is lawful and reliable; specialise in inputs and hosting rather than restricted silicon. (CSIS; CRS; FT.)
4. Build trusted-host status: data protection laws, cross-border transfer rules, and credible dispute resolution that global firms recognise. (Brookings.)
The frontier has moved. In the AI era, sovereignty is less about writing apps and more about controlling the inputs that make computation possible—and making them investable at speed.
From inheritance to design: institutions that actually compound
Zambia’s core problem is not just “policy choice A vs B,” it’s architecture. We modernised what we inherited at independence more than we designed for our aims, which is why outcomes plateau: when institutions are tuned for continuity, time becomes an adversary rather than an asset. Comparative reporting on African justice systems, for example, shows how formal reforms to woo investment often coexist with slow case cycles and low confidence—symptoms of systems optimised for procedure over throughput. The surface still looks Westminster; the plumbing still leaks time.
A compounding state starts by pricing time. Make time visible in government—approvals, payments, interconnections, and case resolution—then bind leaders to it. The macro case is straightforward: where credibility and administrative execution improve, private investment pulls forward and concessional finance arrives on better terms. Zambia’s most recent IMF review says the quiet part out loud: program performance has been “broadly satisfactory,” quantitative targets met, and structural benchmarks mostly delivered—signals that cut risk premia and crowd in capital if administrators keep hitting deadlines. Tie bonuses and promotions to cycle-time reductions and you convert bureaucracy from a sink of time to a mint of compounding.
Second, build finance that keeps value on-shore. Domestic savings must survive inflation, fees, and opacity long enough to compound. Brookings’ Foresight Africa 2025–2030 flags domestic resource mobilisation and long-term savings depth as the bedrock of sustained growth; when households and institutions can hold instruments that reliably beat inflation, patient capital emerges for grids, water, housing, and industry. That requires consumer-protective products, transparent fee caps, credible solvency rules for pensions/insurers, and pipelines of bankable domestic assets—so our own savings finance our own build-out rather than leaking abroad.
Third, practice industrial policy with bottleneck realism. In the AI era, the new production function is electrons + compute + sites + standards. That argues for a tight set of state capabilities: planning and permitting for power and grid upgrades; predictable land, water, and cooling rules for data-centre-class sites; rights-of-way and fibre corridors; and a competent contracts office to standardise bankable PPAs and availability-based concessions. The energy and siting constraints are not theoretical—global data-centre demand is set to roughly double by 2030, with AI the principal accelerant. Jurisdictions that deliver electrons and permits on time will host; those that don’t will watch.
Fourth, make law that others can trust. Investment follows enforceability. That means commercial courts with service-level targets (filing-to-judgment days published), specialist benches for infrastructure and competition matters, strict limits on ex parte relief in contract disputes, and digitised registries that are admissible as evidence. The point isn’t to cosplay Britain—robes and wigs are a sideshow—but to engineer predictability and speed. Where African systems have lagged, the common thread is throughput; redesign around that and confidence climbs.
Fifth, align to chip-control reality without getting caught in it. Export-control regimes on advanced semiconductors and AI hardware are fluid and tightening. The FT, CSIS, and the U.S. government’s own notices document how rules have expanded and shifted across 2024–2025, altering who can import which accelerators and where they can be deployed. For a late-industrialiser, the practical move is to specialise in inputs and hosting—firm power, compliant sites, lawful supply chains, trusted data regimes—rather than gamble on restricted silicon.
Translate this into a Zambia playbook (concrete moves):
1. Time-to-Yes statute. Put statutory clocks on permits, utility interconnections, customs clearances, and first-instance commercial cases; if the state misses, fees drop automatically and officials’ performance scores do, too. Pair with public dashboards. (This operationalises the IMF’s “credibility + execution” channel into compounding.)
2. On-shore compounding. Launch low-fee, inflation-indexed retail savings notes and unitised pension products with plain-English disclosures; allow pensions/insurers to hold more domestic infrastructure paper under clear risk-based capital rules. (Brookings: domestic resource mobilisation and savings depth as growth levers.)
3. Grid & sites as export industries. Create a one-stop grid office that publishes interconnection queues and standard PPAs; zone two or three “compute-ready” corridors with pre-cleared land, water/cooling allowances, and fibre wayleaves; enforce construction SLAs. (IEA: power demand from AI/data centres will bind; hosts with electrons + permits win.)
4. Trusted-host law. Pass a data-protection/cross-border transfer regime aligned to major partner standards; stand up a specialist technology disputes list; adopt model contracts for cloud/colocation with mandatory arbitration venues recognised by hyperscalers. (Confidence in enforcement is a recurring constraint in African justice coverage.)
5. Controls-aware procurement. Mandate export-control due diligence for any public or PPP compute purchase and require vendor attestations on lawful chip origin and deployment. Track allied rule changes and update guidance quarterly. (Controls are moving targets; compliance is a capability, not a memo.)
The principle is simple: engineer time, trust, and throttle-points into the state. Time—so private actors can plan and compound. Trust—so contracts and data flows are bankable. Throttle-points—so Zambia controls inputs others must rent. Do that, and inherited forms stop fighting the future; they start compounding it.
Zambia’s legal architecture is split-brained. Civil law—courts, registries, commercial codes—runs on one track; customary law—chiefs’ authority over land, lineage, and local order—runs on another. The result is predictable: insecure expectations, conversion fights, and slow, expensive transactions in the very factor (land) that should be the country’s growth platform. The cure is not to romanticize pre-colonial forms or to bulldoze them under a single code. It is to design a modern, rules-bound hybrid—a Malay-style interface that secures ancestral patrimony, protects citizens and firms, and lets value compound.
Start with the facts on the ground. A majority of Zambia’s territory remains under customary tenure administered by chiefs, though the oft-repeated “90% customary” statistic is exaggerated; rigorous estimates put the share closer to ~54%. Customary rights are real in allocation and use, yet they float outside the civil hierarchy that decides title, collateral, takings, and remedies—because the post-1995 settlement left allodial ownership in the state while recognizing chiefs as custodians in practice. That structural vagueness is an anti-investment tax: households cannot collateralize confidently; firms cannot price time; disputes ping-pong between forums. The literature is unusually clear on these points, and it is Zambian: FAO and USAID profiles trace the statutory history; Sitko et al. quantify the geography and debunk the 90% claim; field assessments show how documentation gaps suppress adoption of higher-return practices.
Comparators show a way to engineer the interface. Malaysia’s constitutional order explicitly nests indigenous/customary jurisdictions within a single civil hierarchy. In Sabah and Sarawak, native customary rights (NCR) and native courts are recognized by statute; their decisions and evidentiary records feed into the civil system, which can order compensation or enforce boundaries against state and private actors. Over time, Malaysia’s courts have developed a body of case law that gives NCR justiciable bite precisely because the interface is specified in law rather than left to “comity.” The point is not that Malaysia equals Zambia; it is that a federated, rules-bound hybrid can turn custom from a parallel universe into a source of enforceable rights.
The Gulf states offer a different, salient lesson: traditional authority can be given statutory teeth without sacrificing deal-speed. Monarchies in the GCC fused tribal legitimacy with codified mediation and arbitration forums; the system channels customary standing into state outcomes through recognized procedures, producing fast, predictable settlements that markets can price—even if Western observers often criticize other aspects of rights protection. The legal scholarship on sulh (customary reconciliation) and the Congressional Research Service’s institutional mapping of the UAE’s justice machinery illustrate how these hybrids actually work in practice: traditional fora are procedurally linked to state enforcement, so parties know which judgments bind.
Africa has already proven that patrimony can be made productive when custom is translated into juristic form. The Royal Bafokeng Nation converted historical communal rights into enforceable property and royalty streams, then professionalized governance through corporate vehicles with audited accounts, litigating and contracting in civil courts while retaining communal ownership. Whatever one’s view of particular deals, the governance stack is portable: community rights → juristic person → audited finance → civil-court enforceability. The financial press and academic case studies have chronicled the model over three decades, including the 2006 conversion of royalties into equity and the building of an investment arm with professional oversight.
Zambia can build its own hybrid on five pillars.
1) Define who chiefs are in the civil order (authority with duties). Today chiefs allocate in customary space but have uncertain standing in the civil hierarchy. A modern hybrid would recognize chiefs as public trustees of communal land, with fiduciary obligations to subjects, conflict-of-interest rules, disclosures, and removal standards—justiciable in civil courts. This shifts from “power by custom” to “authority bound by duties,” preserving custodianship while protecting citizens against arbitrary action. The Constitutional Court’s 2019 decision striking down presidential “recognition” of chiefs as unconstitutional shows the system already gropes toward clearer, non-executive foundations for traditional authority; statute should finish the job.
2) Connect the forums (map native courts into appeals and registries). Create native courts with defined jurisdiction over allocation, intra-lineage disputes, servitudes, grazing and water rights, and low-value land conflicts. Crucially, map an appellate route into the civil hierarchy and require native-court records to be digitized and admissible. Sabah/Sarawak’s model—native courts recognized by statute, producing records that civil courts can review—offers a clear template for plumbing, not pageantry.
3) Turn communal rights into bankable instruments without alienating the base. Legislate Customary Land Trusts (CLTs) for each chiefdom: surveyed communal parcels held by a trust whose co-trustees are the chief and elected community representatives. Absolute alienation out of the trust is barred (or requires stringent supermajorities); long leases, usufructs, and servitudes are standardized and registrable; revenues flow through escrow with audited, public accounts. This is the Bafokeng governance stack translated to Zambian law—juristic personhood, professional boards, and civil-court recourse—so patrimony becomes investable while staying communal.
4) Harmonize the cadastre (custom that the civil system can see). Build a dual-entry land book: one ledger for communal parcels (the CLT as holder), another for derivative private rights (long leases, mortgages, easements). Survey, digitize, and make both searchable and admissible in court. FAO and USAID’s tenure profiles underscore how the colonial dualism still produces blind spots; the fix is not blanket privatization but a clean interface that converts custom into interoperable data.
5) Guard against extractive conversion (rules that bite). Codify free, prior, and informed consent with real quorums; require community benefit agreements with floors (royalty minima, local procurement, grievance mechanisms); escrow community proceeds; and publish audited reports. When conflicts arise, native courts handle first instance; civil courts enforce money judgments, injunctions, and compensation. Malaysian jurisprudence on native rights shows how civil courts can discipline executives when the interface exists; Brookings’ work on tenure in Africa explains why secure, transparent rules are the hinge between peace and predation.
Two cross-cutting design principles turn the hybrid from paper to practice. Price time in law: statutory clocks for filings, surveys, registrations, appeals, and compensation, backed by public dashboards and automatic fee reductions when the state blows deadlines. The Economist has been blunt: justice that is slow is, functionally, a denial of justice—and a tax on investment. Publishability of timelines is as important as the timelines themselves; it is what lets households and firms plan.
Then, protect women’s rights within custom by aligning the hybrid with constitutional supremacy and clarifying the “repugnancy” tests that too often leave discriminatory practices intact. Zambian legal scholarship has documented how gaps here perpetuate inequities; a hybrid worth building codifies equal inheritance and marital property rules that bind both forums.
The choice before Zambia is not “customary or civil.” It is drift or design. A Malay-style hybrid would keep ancestral patrimony out of political auction, professionalize custodianship, and give citizens and firms a court-mapped path to security. The GCC shows that custom can be woven into statute without killing deal-speed. The Royal Bafokeng show how communal patrimony can be turned into audited, investable capital for local development. Specify the interface—chiefs as fiduciary custodians with civil standing; native courts with mapped appeals; communal trusts with registrable parcels and bankable derivative rights—and the country’s two legal brains will finally talk to each other. Then land stops being a battleground for conversion and becomes a platform for compounding—the thing Zambia at sixty-one needs most.
A state that cannot say, in law, what its culture is for will struggle to say, in policy, what its economy is for. Zambia’s unresolved split between civil law and customary authority isn’t a technical quirk; it is a symptom of civilizational confusion. Custom governs the lived reality of land and belonging across much of the country, yet it floats outside the civil hierarchy that confers title, collateral, remedies, and investment-grade certainty. We have, in effect, two constitutions in practice and one in print—and time, trust, and capital leak through the gap.
The facts are awkward and clarifying. Rigorous spatial work puts roughly half of Zambia’s territory—about 51–54%—under customary tenure, far below the oft-repeated “90%+” claim but still decisive for national development. In that terrain, chiefs allocate, families invest, and disputes arise; in the parallel terrain of registries, banks, and courts, enforceable rights are determined. Because the interface is fuzzy, conversion fights proliferate and transactions slow, turning land—the platform that should power growth—into a maze that households and firms cannot reliably navigate or collateralize. FAO and allied profiles trace how this dualism was baked in by statute; Zambian field research has shown how documentation gaps and ambiguous jurisdiction depress adoption of higher-return uses. The result is not just legal pluralism; it is a structural tax on compounding.
This fuzziness signals an identity problem. As Brookings argued long ago—and reiterated in more recent governance work—modern African states were largely assembled on imported institutional scaffolds, often without reconciling them to indigenous authority and norms. Where that reconciliation is ducked, legitimacy is borrowed downward from custom in daily life, while enforceability is borrowed upward from statute in commerce; neither fully owns the other, so neither compounds. Trust frays, compliance falls, and “policy” skates on thin cultural ice. Culture is upstream of policy; if the polity cannot say what it is, it cannot know what success looks like, and it will rent foreign metrics to tell it.
The Congo’s long tragedy is instructive for a different reason. Scholars of state failure in the DRC have documented how the bureaucratic state repeatedly collapsed as an instrument of collective action while local identities, customary orders, and economic life persisted—sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively, but unmistakably resilient. The lesson is not to romanticize custom; it is to recognize that cultural orders often outlast formal states, and ignoring that hierarchy of durability is a category error. Consolidating identity is therefore not sentimentality; it is statecraft’s first job.
Other jurisdictions that faced their own pluralisms chose coherence. Malaysia constitutionally recognizes indigenous and personal-law jurisdictions and—crucially—maps their decisions into a single civil appellate and registries system. In Sabah and Sarawak, native courts and native customary rights are statutory, produce records, and have justiciable bite in civil forums. That plumbing does not eliminate contestation, but it converts custom from a parallel universe into enforceable rights, compensation, and appeal. The point is not to copy Malaysia’s politics; it is to copy its interface discipline.
The Gulf offers a different interface: customary legitimacy plus statutory teeth. The UAE’s hybrid legal order—rooted in tribal norms, Islamic law, and civil-law codes—channels traditional standing into state outcomes through recognized procedures, producing predictable forums that markets can price. Again, the lesson is not to import monarchies; it is to acknowledge that when custom is procedurally linked to state enforcement, deal-speed and legitimacy can coexist.
Africa already has a homegrown proof of concept for turning patrimony into capital without dissolving identity: the Royal Bafokeng Nation. Over decades the Bafokeng converted historical rights into royalties, then into equity and a professional investment vehicle, all inside South Africa’s civil courts and companies law. Whatever one thinks of particular deals, the governance stack is the lesson: a juristic community with audited accounts and recourse in civil forums can protect ancestral wealth and deploy it productively.
If culture really is upstream of policy, then Zambia’s dualism is existential. It forces everyday life to answer to custom and capital formation to answer to statute, with no designed handshake between them. That is why justice delays and administrative slippage do more than irritate investors; they deny a society the chance to compound its own norms into enforceable rules. The Economist has been blunt about slow justice functioning as a tax on the poor and on investment alike; the IMF’s governance diagnostics for Zambia make the same point in macro-speak: credibility plus execution crowds in capital, but it requires rules that bite and clocks that are kept.
The cure is not aesthetic; it is architectural. A 21st-century African state should specify, in law, how culture flows into policy:
• Civil standing for custodianship. Recognize chiefs (and their councils) as fiduciary public trustees over communal land—authority with duties—so citizens and firms can hold them to account in civil courts.
• Mapped forums. Create native courts with defined jurisdiction and a clear appellate route; make their records digital and admissible; sync their outcomes to cadastre and compensation regimes.
• Juristic patrimony. Translate communal rights into trust/company forms that can contract, borrow, and report with audited transparency—protecting ancestral ownership while enabling bankable long leases and servitudes.
• One land book, two ledgers. Survey and digitize communal parcels and derivative private rights in a dual-entry cadastre that both forums can see and enforce.
• Time discipline. Put statutory clocks on filings, surveys, registrations, appeals, and payments; publish performance dashboards; make missed deadlines lower fees and raise consequences.
Do that, and identity stops being a fog around the state; it becomes the state’s first principle. Culture gives the polity a durable “why”; the designed interface gives it a bankable “how.” Countries that reconcile those two can compound. Those that don’t will keep renting other people’s purposes—and wondering why their own progress won’t add up.
Sixty-one years after independence, it is maddening how much of this still needs to be said.
We live with a split brain and pretend it’s coherence. Civil law runs the economy, registries, banks, and courts; customary law governs how land is actually lived, allocated, and fought over. Everyone knows this. Everyone works around it. Everyone pays for it—mostly in time, trust, and foregone compounding. We have two constitutions in practice and one on paper, and we keep calling that “heritage” instead of what it is: confusion elevated into a system.
What does it mean to be a 21st-century African state if we treat our longest memory as a smudge on the page? Customary authority carries deeper legitimacy than the modern state in much of the country; it outlasted colonial administration and will outlast this bureaucracy too. Congo is a brutal case study: the state failed repeatedly, culture did not. Local orders—good, bad, and everything in between—endured. That is the hierarchy of durability we refuse to admit. We borrow legitimacy downward from custom and enforceability upward from statute, and then we act surprised when neither compounds with the other.
Look around: after six decades we still quarrel about what chiefs are, what land means, what “ownership” is supposed to protect. We talk in slogans about “development” while our legal architecture can’t even tell a young family, an investor, or a community—with speed and finality—what their rights amount to. We oscillate between nostalgia for the state that bankrupted us and a 1990s playbook that sold the commanding heights abroad, and we call that debate. Meanwhile, the world has moved. The frontier is no longer “cheap labour + openness.” It is electrons, compute, chips, standards—the hard inputs of an AI age that will not wait for us to find ourselves. Time, which should have been our ally, has been leaking out of every seam.
The worst part is how obvious this is. Anyone who has tried to register land outside a city, to collateralise a customary allocation, to resolve a dispute that straddles two jurisdictions, already knows the truth: the system demands patience we can’t afford. The cost is not just irritation. It is lost years. It is a generation learning that nothing moves unless you push it uphill, by hand, for months. It is a country measuring success with borrowed metrics because it has never finished the first sentence about who it is.
People point to places that faced their pluralisms and chose coherence. Malaysia wrote custom into the plumbing of the state so that cultural rights weren’t theatre but law with teeth. The Gulf fused traditional standing with statute so decisions landed fast enough to matter. The Royal Bafokeng translated patrimony into juristic form and audited capital without dissolving identity. These are not blueprints for us; they are mirrors. They show the exact thing we keep dodging: decide what we are, and then say it in law.
After sixty-one years, the evasions are insulting. We shouldn’t need another commission, another “dialogue,” another glossy strategy to admit the obvious. Culture is upstream of policy. Identity is upstream of planning. If we won’t name who we are—and how our oldest authorities and our modern courts see and bind one another—then we have chosen drift. And drift is not neutral. It bleeds trust, it taxes the poor, it gifts away the future one delayed approval, one unreadable title, one stalled judgment at a time.
This is not a plea for nostalgia and not a technocrat’s shopping list. It is an observation we are long past due to make out loud: we have treated our deepest inheritance like fog, and we are surprised the state cannot see. Until we stop pretending that fuzziness is wisdom, we will keep renting other people’s purposes, other people’s measures, other people’s futures. Sixty-one years. How much longer do we intend to practice confusion and dignify it as heritage?
Sixty-one years in, the contradictions are obscene.
How do you build a civilization when the pipes that carry savings to investment are owned somewhere else? When almost every major bank answers to a boardroom abroad, what compounding exactly are we doing at home—other than compounding fees that leave? We call it “financial deepening,” but whose balance sheet is deepening? If credit creation, risk appetite, and the pricing of time are decided offshore, then sovereignty is a flag without a treasury. We keep telling households to save, firms to invest, farmers to mechanise—then route the lifeblood of that effort through institutions whose first duty is not to this soil. After sixty-one years, how is that still an argument and not a settled embarrassment?
How do you build a civilization when locals barely show up as major shareholders in the means of production? Name the sectors—mining, energy, industry, telecoms—and count how often citizens sit in the control room, not as employees or vendors, but as owners with veto rights and upside. We have normalized the idea that the ground can be Zambian while the profits are airdropped elsewhere. And spare us the alibi that “we don’t have operators.” The world’s richest mining magnate does not run trucks—she leases rights and collects. The point is not to copy personalities; it is to notice structure. Our property law has made that sort of rights-leasing, royalty-driven ownership structurally unlikely for six decades. We keep telling ourselves this is prudence; it has mostly been abdication.
We speak piously about “local content” while designing a corporate map where “local” means payroll and procurement, not power. We celebrate ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings and never ask the only question that matters for compounding: who owns the cash flows ten years from now? If it is not us—households, pension funds, community trusts—then we are not building a civilization. We are providing scenery for someone else’s.
And the clock is not kind. The frontier is refitting around compute, electrons, and standards; the great-power game is hardening; the price of time is rising. Into that world we keep presenting the same political generation with the same mental models. The cohort that insists it must lead—largely those above fifty-five—has already shown what it can deliver. We have the evidence. It is painted across lost compounding, institutional drift, and a national habit of squinting at obvious choices as though they were novelties. Beyond 2030, if we are serious about sovereignty and civilizational self-actualisation, leadership must come from those who understand the world as it is—and as it is becoming. Not because youth is magic, but because reality is moving and someone has to keep up.
This is not a policy memo. It is an indictment of our reflex to dignify drift as prudence. A banking system owned elsewhere. A production base controlled elsewhere. A rights regime that makes citizens tenants of their own patrimony. A leadership class that confuses tenure with competence. These are not unfortunate details; they are a pattern. And patterns have consequences. They decide who compounds and who watches.
Sixty-one years. We do not lack slogans. We lack ownership—of institutions, of cash flows, of time, of the plain duty to say in law what our culture is for. Until we face that, we will continue to rent other people’s pipes, other people’s standards, other people’s futures—and call the monthly charge “development.”
After sixty-one years, the conclusion almost writes itself: leadership that cannot see what is coming will destroy what already exists.
Any person who aspires to lead a country like Zambia and does not grasp the civilizational threat and opportunity posed by artificial super-intelligence simply isn’t qualified. We are entering an age when robots will perform most labour, algorithms will decide production, and data—not copper or maize—will anchor wealth. Leaders who still believe progress means “digitalization,” “innovation hubs,” and PowerPoint optimism are already obsolete. These are the buzzwords of early-21st-century consultants, not the design vocabulary of survival. The future will not ask whether we are online; it will ask whether we can own and defend any part of the compute, the energy, and the standards that drive intelligence itself.
If a leader does not understand how a society like ours could shield itself from that disruption and at the same time profit as a supplier of inputs—energy, land, minerals, compute capacity, labour-to-knowledge transition—then that leader is a passenger, not a pilot. Governance in the AI century will be about strategic engineering: deciding what Zambia produces in a post-human economy, how we trade power and data instead of mere goods, and how we preserve dignity when work as we know it disappears.
Meanwhile, our domestic pattern loops like clockwork: fertility still high, five children per household on average; GDP growth in the 5–6 percent range—respectable in textbooks, meaningless in compounding terms. We mistake motion for momentum because we measure ourselves by the developmental orthodoxy of the last century: fiscal discipline when things are bad, populist erosion when things feel flush, an endless pendulum between technocrats and demagogues. That is not development; it is stasis with better spreadsheets.
As long as our filter for progress remains the 20th-century model of “catch-up” economics—industrialize, liberalize, digitize—we will continue to orbit the same point in space. Civilizations rise when they imagine beyond orthodoxy. Ours will stall as long as it believes fiscal prudence equals destiny.
Leadership, in this frame, cannot be about ego, résumé, or professional tribe. It is not the lawyer’s Zambia, or the businessman’s Zambia, or the economist’s Zambia. It must be the engineer’s project—not of infrastructure, but of order: the deliberate construction of a system that lifts everyone upward toward a destination that is uniquely ours. That means designing for sovereignty in a world of synthetic minds, embedding our culture in the architecture of the future, and refusing to outsource imagination.
Anything less is maintenance, not leadership. And maintenance, sixty-one years on, is exactly what has kept us in place. Our greatest weaknesses have been a desire to be respected or accepted–when in fact we ought to have been building civilizationally (like China)--demonstrating through our productivity and earning merit why we are inherently respectable; regardless of whether acceptance came or not. 61 years on, I’m afraid that we still don’t know who we are and what we are striving for.
Lastly, if the cohort of leaders 55 and older lack the context and ability to navigate the emergent world--and have already demonstrated their ability thus far; the cohort of leaders younger than them have resigned themselves to be passengers to history and the legacies built by their elder peers. Looking at the world we see a restless GenZ rioting in Madagascar, earlier in Kenya and Nepal; and a reluctant and directionless cohort of millennials and GenXers who have resigned themselves to be on a road to nowhere. Africa may have gained independence in the 60s--but the reality is that the neo-colonial net simply evolved beyond the need for direct administration. Facebook, Netflix, Tiktko and Hollywood keep young people lobotomised, colonial supply chains and newer globalised ones keep production flowing to markets around the world--with mostly local payroll and pensions left as the residual benefit here; an educated elite then strive to become managers in this web of foreign owned productivity--with an endless cast of politicians posturing about the difference they will make--when in fact they are resigned to reality as they know it. Our intellectuals offer no new ideas, and are divorced from the reality of the civilizational game--where payoffs and costs compound. 61 years on, we haven't learned the game of civilization and everything about our society suggests we have no desire to. Everything about our political arena and economic structure speaks to unending status games. So yes, I'll remember the date because it is worthy of remembrance--but it won't be joy I celebrate--it will be somber reflection at our cluelessness.
Appendix: the math
1) The game we are actually playing.
Imagine Zambia’s power brokers—senior politicians, top civil servants, SOE heads, big business families, and traditional authorities—as players in a repeated coordination game. Each player can either back real reform (rules that price time, clean interfaces between customary and civil law, grid and site discipline) or stick with the status quo (opaque discretion, ceremonial busywork, ad-hoc deals). Reform pays off only if enough players move together: courts keep time only if ministries and registries do; investment arrives only if power and permits line up. That creates a threshold: if a critical mass is reached, the country gets a larger, compounding pie; if not, early movers bear costs alone and get punished by the old system.
2) Why drift is rational—privately.
For each player, the status quo delivers immediate rents (control over jobs, contracts, and approvals) plus social prestige for distributing those favors. Reform, by contrast, has upfront costs (you lose discretion, face retaliation, must deliver on time) and its benefits are delayed and shared. So even elites who prefer the reform world in principle will not move if they expect others to sit tight. This is the classic coordination trap: individually rational choices produce a collectively bad outcome.
3) Beliefs and updates—how expectations trap us.
No one knows how many others will truly reform, so everyone carries a belief—a mental percentage—about the share of peers who are “serious.” That belief gets updated when people observe signals. Cheap, glossy signals (launches, MoUs, workshops) are easy for the status quo to mimic, so they barely move beliefs. Hard signals (permit clocks hit, interconnections energized on schedule, native-court decisions appearing in the civil registry within days) are costly to fake and therefore push beliefs up. When enough quarters of hard evidence accumulate, expected support for reform crosses the threshold—and moving becomes the best reply.
4) Patronage as status; work as a gift.
In a high-poverty environment with weak performance metrics, the managerial layer can turn work into a gift: jobs and contracts become tokens of proximity rather than proofs of competence. That means a person’s social status is partly measured by how many favors they can dispense, not by throughput they deliver. Any reform that reduces discretion—transparent hiring, fixed timelines, standard contracts—cuts into that status currency. This is why “obvious” fixes meet quiet resistance: they devalue the coin that currently buys prestige.
5) Global outside options that freeze ambition.
Add one more piece: the global system offers domestic elites outlier incomes and prestige (UN bodies, multilaterals, big NGOs, multinationals). Those outside options act like a safety net and a magnet: even if reform could pay more later, the certain wage and reputation abroad today make staying inside the local status game—and keeping the international door open—feel safer. Practically, that raises the payoff to standing still and increases the perceived risk of betting your career on domestic throughput. The old imperial logic repeats in softer form: external principals reward local intermediaries for preserving order within their system.
6) How the equilibrium flips (incentives in sentences, not symbols).
To move from drift to compounding, two things must change at once. First, make hard, public, auditable signals routine—permit and court timelines with automatic penalties, interconnection queues that clear, customary-to-civil records that actually sync. These raise the probability, in everyone’s mind, that “enough others are serious,” pushing expectations past the threshold. Second, reshape private payoffs: shift status from favor-giving to on-time delivery; lower the personal risk of switching (tenure guarantees, safe exits); raise the cost of drift (finance and siting tied to verified performance); and make domestic upside competitive with global wages (bankable local assets for pensions and professionals). When evidence can’t be faked and the personal calculus favors stewardship, even cautious elites move—because reform stops being a moral gamble and becomes the individually rational choice.
The Asian Tigers provide a useful counterfactual to this game theory analysis:
Civilizational ambition changes the game because it lifts it one level up. Within a single country, reform is a coordination trap: it pays only if enough actors move at once. The Asian Tigers show what happens when ambition scales to a regional project stitched together by trade, standards, ports, and finance. Each participant’s investment raised the return to every other participant’s investment: components made in one jurisdiction, assembled in another, financed in a third, shipped through world-class ports in a fourth. The effect was superadditive. Cooperation stopped being fragile and became self-reinforcing because the system—supply chains, logistics, standards—was designed as a fabric, not a slogan.
Ambition at that level worked through club goods, not promises. Membership in the “fast lane” conferred benefits that outsiders did not get: priority access to logistics corridors; predictable customs and inspection regimes; export financing that moved on time; standards that cleared in multiple markets without renegotiation; science parks and bonded zones where permits, power, land, and labour rules were harmonised. These weren’t speeches; they were privileges gated by performance and discipline. Miss your export deadlines or fail inspections and you fell to the back of the queue. Meet them and the club amplified you—cheaper capital, quicker turns, deeper buyer relationships. The cooperative equilibrium dominated drift because the club kept score and paid out.
Global careers and contracts also behaved differently in that world. For many developing countries, international jobs and consulting prestige act as substitutes for fixing home systems. In the Tigers’ rise, they were complements: international capital and know-how were pulled in by domestic execution, not used as alibis against it. Fellowships, supplier certification, and anchor-tenant investments were explicitly tied to meeting factory clocks, inspection standards, port turn-times, and contract law that bit. The same “outside door” opened wider when the domestic machine performed, and it closed when it coasted. The message was simple: the world will pay you more because you deliver, not instead of delivering.
Common knowledge was the other hinge. It wasn’t enough to whisper “we’re reforming.” The Tigers made throughput public and comparable: export volumes, defect rates, ship-on-time percentages, customs dwell times, power reliability, court timelines for commercial cases. Because these metrics were visible to buyers, lenders, and governments across borders—and because everyone knew everyone else could see them—beliefs shifted quickly. Firms and officials stopped wondering whether others were serious; the evidence sat in the data, week after week. Expectations crossed the threshold at which moving first was no longer a gamble; it was simply rational.
Scale then did what only scale can do. Regional production networks lowered unit costs, diversified risk, and deepened learning. One jurisdiction specialised in precision components, another in assembly, another in finance and dispute resolution, another in logistics and semiconductor tooling. Science parks, export-processing zones, and port ecosystems converted thin national markets into thick regional ones; vocational systems and procurement rules turned “skills” from anecdotes into pipelines. As the bloc enlarged, the surplus available to each member rose—and the probability that large projects actually completed rose with it. The national dream of compounding, forever deferred by narrow pipes, finally had room to run.
Finally, status was repriced. Instead of prestige being minted by distributing favours, it was minted by delivering throughput to the whole: factories that shipped on schedule; ports that turned vessels in hours, not days; courts that enforced contracts fast enough for buyers to trust; agencies that hit inspection and permitting clocks. Honors, budgets, and international roles followed what could be timed and verified. Patronage lost exchange value because the club would not redeem it. Stewardship became the only durable currency. When money, recognition, and rules all pointed in the same direction, the equilibrium inverted: the very instincts that once preserved the status quo began to scale a positive-sum order. In that order, a country like Zambia would not be a petitioner in someone else’s hierarchy; it would be a deliberate node in a designed system—one whose laws, logistics, finance, and discipline allow ordinary households to keep, and compound, more of what they build.
