Hakainde Hichilema won a second term as Zambia's president on 13 August with 60.49% of the vote, sworn in for what is constitutionally his final five-year term. Copper decided the election as much as any candidate did: mining contributes roughly 9% of GDP, 72% of export earnings, and refined copper alone earned about 63% of the country's export income this year. The government now has to decide, again, how much of that windfall the state actually captures.
The government's answer since 2021 has been consistency, not redistribution. Zambia removed its windfall tax in 2009 and did not subsequently restore it, instead relying on other parts of the mining tax regime to capture additional revenue when profits rise. Since 2021 the government has gone further, cutting the property transfer tax on exploration rights from 10% to 7.5% and making mineral royalties deductible against taxable income, reforms the Zambia Chamber of Mines credits with pulling in more than $10 billion in investment. The explicit pitch to capital: tax-rate stability is itself the incentive, more valuable to a mining investor than a marginally lower headline rate paired with policy unpredictability.
Today is the more immediate test of that bargain. Zambia’s 10% export duty on copper concentrates is due to return on 30 September, after the government suspended it to allow miners to clear accumulated stocks while major smelters underwent extended maintenance and repairs. The latest suspension covers roughly 272,000 tonnes of concentrate. The underlying policy is intended to encourage more processing inside Zambia rather than exporting concentrate, but the practical problem is obvious: the country cannot force miners to process material domestically if there is not enough functioning smelting capacity to take it.
That makes the repeated suspension more revealing than the duty itself. The government can impose an export tax immediately. It cannot create additional smelting capacity at the same speed. The gap between those two things is where resource policy becomes industrial policy, and Zambia is having to navigate that distinction in real time.
The unresolved political question is whether Copperbelt communities are actually seeing this money. Civil society groups have pushed back on the tax-stability strategy directly, arguing that record investment and record prices haven't translated into visible local benefit, and that opacity in mining company reporting makes the claim hard to verify either way. That tension sharpened considerably after a 2025 dam disaster at a Chinese-owned mine sent acidic waste into a local river; roughly 176 farmers are now suing multiple Chinese-linked mining firms for $80 billion in agricultural damages, a live reminder that foreign capital inflow and local trust are not the same metric, and a government betting its whole model on investor confidence has to manage both simultaneously.
What this means in practice
- For mining companies and investors, Zambia’s tax-stability signal is real, but it is not the whole story. The government has spent much of Hichilema’s first term trying to make the fiscal regime more predictable. The pressure now will be whether that approach can survive rising expectations for a larger state share of copper revenues.
- Watch what happens to the concentrate export duty after 30 September. Its repeated suspension is a useful test of how much flexibility the government actually has when an industrial policy runs up against physical constraints. Zambia wants more domestic processing, but that requires functioning smelters as well as the right tax incentives.
- The environmental litigation matters beyond the individual case. The $80 billion figure is a claim by the affected residents, not an established liability. But the case illustrates how quickly a mining accident can become a broader question about the social licence of foreign investment and whether the economic benefits of the sector are being shared locally.
- Hichilema’s final term changes the political timetable, but not necessarily the policy outcome. He cannot seek another presidential term, which gives his government a different set of political constraints. It remains to be seen whether that creates more room for a larger state take, continued emphasis on investment stability, or some attempt to reconcile the two.