In October 2025, 13-year Zambian small-scale organic farmer Kanangwa Newlove wandered the sun-scorched 10-acre plot she operates on the outskirts of Lusaka, watching her years of labor dissolve into withered, rotting produce. Crisp spinach, tender lettuce, and plump tomatoes that once commanded premium prices from discerning local clients shrivelled under unrelenting heat, leaving her no choice but to uproot entire rows of her staple crops and feed the spoiled organic yield to her herd of pigs. “The crops that kept our operation afloat were the first to die for lack of water,” she told investigators from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). “We had no way to save them, because there was no electricity to run our borehole pumps.”
Newlove’s farm required nearly 8,000 gallons of pumped water every few days to sustain its operations, but starting in March 2024, Zambia’s national load-shedding rolling blackouts delivered a crippling blow to her livelihood. For days at a time, she had access to just four hours of grid power daily, with no consistent, pre-announced schedule from state-owned energy utility ZESCO to help her plan irrigation or harvest storage. The cascading knock-on effects of the power cuts rippled through every part of her business: she could not refrigerate the small share of crops she managed to salvage, halted livestock breeding and slaughter operations, lost access to her network of neighborhood mom-and-pop retail clients, was forced to shrink her cultivated acreage dramatically, and could no longer afford to hire seasonal farmhands. For the first time since she launched the farm as a side project while working at a local social enterprise more than a decade prior, she faced the unthinkable possibility of shuttering the business she had built from scratch. “Farmers are natural optimists, until harsh reality completely erases that hope,” she explained. “It is almost impossible to wrap your head around the idea that you might have to walk away from something you poured every part of yourself into for over 10 years.”
Newlove’s crisis was not an isolated incident. A groundbreaking ICIJ-led collaborative investigation titled *China Capital*, drawing on a cache of 4.8 million internal documents including loan agreements, due diligence reports, and internal bank communications, lays bare how a toxic confluence of decades of reckless borrowing, opaque Chinese lending practices, institutional corruption, and a historic 40-year drought pushed one of Africa’s most heavily indebted nations to the brink of total economic collapse. The documents trace how state-owned Chinese banking giant ICBC, alongside a network of Chinese contractors and financiers, piled high-risk, onerous loans on Zambia starting in the early 2010s, at a time when the country was riding a copper-fueled economic boom and hungry for infrastructure investment after completing international debt relief programs.
In 2011, at the height of Zambia’s growth spurt, ZESCO signed a $285 million loan agreement with ICBC to fund rural electrification projects across the country’s Northern and Eastern Provinces, arranged by Chinese power infrastructure firm TBEA, which was awarded the construction contract without competitive bidding. This “contractor-facilitated lending” model became institutionalized across Zambia’s public sector: Chinese firms seeking lucrative construction contracts pressured Zambian government entities to take on new high-risk debt, while Chinese lenders were willing to extend financing on terms that commercial Western banks would never approve, backed by the geostrategic priorities of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Though ICBC markets itself as a purely commercial financial institution, the leaked internal documents confirm that bank executives systematically weighed Chinese state foreign policy goals alongside profit considerations when approving African lending decisions.
By the mid-2010s, Zambian political leaders, eager to fund high-visibility infrastructure projects ahead of elections and with weak oversight capacity in the Ministry of Finance, accelerated borrowing to unsustainable levels, even as global copper prices – the country’s primary export revenue stream – began to plummet. Patronage networks and rent-seeking behavior among political elites saw billions in borrowed funds funneled into overpriced, low-priority projects including redundant airport expansions and poorly constructed roads that crumbled soon after completion. By 2020, Zambia became the first African nation to default on its sovereign debt during the Covid-19 pandemic, with ZESCO itself rendered insolvent, crippled by $1.5 billion in syndicated debt for the Kafue Gorge Lower Hydropower Station and other outstanding loans to Chinese creditors.
When a historic, decades-long drought hit the country in 2023, drying up the hydroelectric dams that supplied 90% of Zambia’s grid power, the already financially fragile utility had no reserve funds to mitigate the crisis, triggering the nationwide rolling blackouts that devastated thousands of small businesses across the country. Gerald Soko, who had built a thriving neighborhood butchery in Lusaka’s high-density Mtendere Compound starting in 2011, saw his customer base collapse, his refrigerators full of rotting meat during unannounced power cuts, and burglars repeatedly target his shop during blackout hours. His current sales volume is less than half of his pre-crisis revenue, and all his business expansion plans have been indefinitely suspended.
For years, debt restructuring negotiations were stalled by widespread confidentiality clauses written into Chinese loan agreements that hid the true scale of Zambia’s outstanding liabilities – later estimated at nearly $6.6 billion owed to Chinese financiers, almost double the figure previously disclosed by the Zambian government. Though early fears of aggressive “debt trap diplomacy” leading to Chinese seizure of national assets did not materialize, Chinese lenders initially refused to accept principal write-downs, dragging out recovery talks for years. By 2026, under the administration of President Hakainde Hichilema, Zambia had finally concluded most debt restructuring agreements with its creditors, but ordinary citizens continue to bear the scars of the crisis. Public opinion polling from Afrobarometer shows that positive views of China’s influence in Zambia plummeted from 72% in 2014 to just 42% in 2022.
Newlove, who crisis-proofed her farm with off-grid solar panels to escape reliance on the unstable national grid, narrowly avoided closure and kept all 14 of her full-time employees on payroll, but the empty, overgrown failed farms on the land adjacent to her property serve as a constant reminder of how close she came to losing everything. “We were lucky enough to make it through, but so many other business owners were not that fortunate,” she said. “That near-disaster taught us that we can never again build our livelihoods on a single, fragile system that can collapse overnight.”