Zambia faces debt crisis

Most immediate concern focuses on Zambia, whose commodities- based economy had attracted eurobond, Chinese and other investors, but which has got into major problems on President Edgar Lungu’s watch. These pressures have been significantly exacerbated by liabilities that were not until recently included in the Ministry of Finance’s official debt data – many of them linked to Lungu’s favoured infrastructure and other projects. Finance minister Bwalya Ng’andu has admitted that unrecorded “project loans” amount to $7bn, in addition to the previously accepted $11bn-$12.6bn of official sovereign debt his ministry controls.