LUSAKA: For days on end, Mildred Mwenya has not seen so much as the shadow of a customer in her pharmacy in the Zambian capital Lusaka.
Today, her stomach was as empty as her premises. She had been unable to afford breakfast before coming to open the store.
She is one of a growing number of victims in Zambia of a double hit — a macro-economic crisis combined with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
“When we come for work, we have no customers and not even food to eat for the morning,” says Mwenya, from behind her counter.
“When you go to order goods and the following day the prices increase, business is bad,” she explains.
A landlocked country in southern Africa, and the world’s second-largest copper producer, Zambia has been lashed by a plunge in commodity prices.
Starved of income, the government announced in mid-November that the country would no longer pay creditors — and the prices of basic goods began to rise.
The nation of 17 million people has a foreign debt estimated at nearly $12 billion, half of which comes from private creditors. Much is owed to China.
In mid-October, Zambia missed the deadline to honor a payment of $42.5 million due on a bond worth $750 million, which matures in 2022.
The global rating agency Standard & Poor’s relegated the country to the “selective default” category.
Once classified as a defaulter, a country undergoes penalties that further increase the cost of servicing its debts, said economist Mambo Hamaundu.
“You won’t have money to buy medicines in hospitals, chalks for our schools, because more money would have moved away from the treasury,” Hamaundu says. “If there is no money in the treasury the ordinary citizens will suffer.”
“This will mean that sectors like health, agriculture and education will be affected,” said Nalucha Ziba, country director for the charity ActionAid.
