Fred M’membe and the Socialist Party reject the current administration’s economic philosophy of “You Can’t Share Poverty,” characterising it as repackaged trickle-down economics that promotes corporate exploitation, and IMF-enforced austerity. They advocate for national sovereignty, food security, and democratic Zambian control of strategic resources to combat structural inequality. You can read more about their economic critique.
THE ILLUSION OF UNBRIDLED GROWTH: A CRITIQUE OF ‘YOU CAN’T SHARE POVERTY’ ECONOMICS
By Fred M’membe,
President of the Socialist Party
Comrades, workers, peasant farmers, and the working intellectuals of Zambia,
The intellectual landscape of our nation is currently being held captive to a dangerous myth masquerading as pragmatic economics. Under the banner of the phrase “You Can’t Share Poverty,” the current administration of Zambia attempts to elevate a shallow truism into a grand economic philosophy. They look into the eyes of our hungry children, our unemployed youth, and our struggling mothers, and they tell them that before we can discuss equity, fairness, or social welfare, we must first “grow the pie.”
They argue that the focus of governance must strictly be on wealth creation, deregulation, and attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). They dismiss any demand for immediate economic relief, affordable food, or state intervention as a mere attempt to “distribute scarcity.”
We must pierce through this rhetorical fog. We must expose the philosophical, ideological, and political foundations of this outlook for what they truly are: a cruel repackaging of trickle-down economics, a justification for neo-colonial exploitation, and an absolute surrender to global financial forces. You can not solve the misery of our people by expanding an economic system that is fundamentally structured to keep them at the margins.
- The Philosophical Error: Scarcity vs. Systemic Injustice
The philosophical foundation of “You Can’t Share Poverty” economics rests on an idealised view of production. It views poverty as an abstract, naturally occurring state of lack—a mere mathematical deficit of capital and goods. To the current economic designers, Zambia is poor simply because we do not produce enough or because our resources were “mismanaged” by bad individuals in the past.
We reject this ahistorical view. Poverty is not a natural condition; it is a created relation. It is the direct material consequence of a system that separates working people from the wealth they generate. In a country as rich as Zambia—endowed with vast tracts of fertile land, immense water bodies, and world-class reserves of copper, cobalt, gold, lithium, emeralds, and manganese—poverty is an absurdity. It is a political crime.
When the proponents of this philosophy claim we can not “share poverty,” they deliberately confuse the distribution of scarcity with the reclaiming of stolen wealth. We do not seek to divide a meagre, impoverished pie among the working class, peasantry, and the working intellectuals. We seek to reclaim the vast value that our miners, farmers, and labourers produce daily—wealth that is currently being expropriated by transnational corporations and local elite brokers. The problem in Zambia has never been a lack of wealth creation; it has always been the systemic, foreign siphon of that wealth away from our people.
- The Ideological Mirage: The Transnational Mining Trap
Ideologically, “You Can’t Share Poverty” is rooted in the dogmas of Western financial centres, updated for the modern era through the current administration’s mining policies. The ruling elite tells us that to grow the pie, we must surrender our copper to foreign corporate giants under the guise of “Public-Private Partnerships” and tax incentives.
Look at what is happening today in the Copperbelt and North Western provinces. They talk about “Unlocking Africa’s Mineral Wealth” and hosting grand international investment conferences. They introduce “Local Content Regulations,” offering small crumbs—a 25% or 40% procurement threshold—to a few local businessmen to appease them. But who owns the actual mines? Who controls the copper, the cobalt, and the modern gold rush of critical minerals? Foreign corporations.
This philosophy suggests that wealth creation is a neutral, non-class process. But under the current global arrangement, wealth and poverty are two sides of the same coin. The accumulation of wealth by offshore corporate boardrooms is simultaneously the accumulation of misery, agony of toil, and exploitation at the opposite pole. If our copper production rises under tax-exempt, foreign-owned mining conglomerates, the national GDP may rise on paper, but the material conditions of the miner in Kitwe, Mufulira, or Solwezi remain broken. The profits are expatriated to Wall Street, London, and Johannesburg, while our people are left with degraded environments, precarious contract jobs, and a skyrocketing cost of living. You can not grow your way out of poverty when the structural architecture of your economy is built to extract wealth, not to retain it.
- The Violence of the Market: Mealie-Meal and Hungry Homes
Nowhere is the failure of this “wealth-first” approach more devastatingly clear than on the dinner tables of everyday Zambians. Walk into any market, step into any compound from Chawama to Kalingalinga, and look at the price of a bag of mealie-meal. The cost of our national staple food has skyrocketed beyond the reach of ordinary civil servants, marketeers, and compound youths.
When we demand that the government step in, regulate prices, and stabilise the market to prevent our people from starving, the elite look down from their high offices and say, “You can’t share poverty.” They argue that the market must determine the price and that the state can not afford to shield the consumer.
But this is a moral and economic failure. Letting corporate millers and large-scale agricultural monopolies dictate the price of mealie-meal is not “growing the economy”—it is weaponising hunger. While corporate commercial farms report record-breaking profits and expand their mega-estates, Zambian mothers are forced to skip meals, and fathers must choose between paying school fees or buying a single bag of roller meal. The state’s refusal to manage food security and sovereignty under the guise of economic efficiency proves that this philosophy cares more about balance sheets than human survival.
- The Political Surrender: The Chains of the IMF and the Corporate Farm Trap
Politically, the “You Can’t Share Poverty” doctrine serves as a mechanism of public pacification and external submission. By framing economic progress as a technical problem of “growth margins” and “investor confidence,” it attempts to de-politicise the masses. It tells the hungry worker and the poor peasant to be patient to endure austerity today so that large corporations can invest tomorrow.
Nowhere is this political surrender clearer than in the administration’s proud celebration of its IMF debt restructuring negotiations. To satisfy the dictates of international financial institutions, this government has institutionalised what they call “fiscal consolidation” and “structural reforms.”” In plain language, this means the removal of vital subsidies on fuel, electricity, and agricultural inputs like fertiliser. They label spending on public welfare and farming support as “sharing poverty,” yet they willingly hand over our national sovereignty to Western technocrats to ensure international bondholders get paid their remaining hundreds of millions of dollars.
This same dependency is mirrored in our fields. Instead of empowering the millions of smallholder peasant farmers who are the true backbone of Zambian agriculture, the government tilts the scales toward massive corporate agricultural firms. They dismantle state-supported input programmes, forcing peasant farmers to compete against heavily subsidised multinational agro-empires. They claim that smallholder farming is merely “sharing poverty,” using this as an excuse to ignore the rural masses while dedicating national infrastructure, water rights, and land concessions to wealthy offshore corporations.
The Alternative: Reclaiming Our National Sovereignty Through Local Cooperatives
We offer a fundamental, revolutionary break from this dependent paradigm. We do not accept the false dichotomy between growth and distribution. We understand that true wealth creation for a liberated people can only happen when the working public controls the heights of the economy.
We do not want to share poverty; we want to smash it. And, poverty can only be abolished by:
- Overthrowing the Dictatorship of Foreign Capital: Reclaiming our mines, our large-scale agriculture, and our financial sectors out of the hands of offshore oligarchs and placing them under democratic planning and Zambian control.
- Rejecting Externally Imposed Austerity: Refusing to sacrifice the health, education, and nutrition of Zambian children at the altar of foreign debt restructuring and IMF-enforced fiscal discipline.
- Building People’s Agricultural Cooperatives: Transforming the rural economy by aggressively funding, training, and organising smallholder farmers into democratic, state-backed local cooperatives. We must provide subsidised inputs, guaranteed state floor prices, and cooperative-owned milling plants in every district to bypass corporate middlemen, drive down the price of mealie-meal, and achieve true food sovereignty.
- Industrialisation Through Sovereignty: Utilizing our mineral and agricultural wealth not as raw commodities for export to enrich foreign markets, but to build a self-sustaining, Zambian-led industrialised domestic economy that serves human needs, not corporate margins.
Comrades, the phrase “You Can’t Share Poverty,” is the ultimate ideological shield for a ruling class that refuses to confront the structural injustices of our current system. It is an apology for inequality. Do not look to the exploiters to grow a pie they have no intention of sharing. Organise, unite, and let us build a sovereign Zambia where the wealth of our soil belongs to those whose sweat extracts it!