Zambia’s No Is a Test Washington Should Not Want to Fail

The dangerous part of a bargain is often the part that sounds administrative. A health memorandum. A data-sharing annex. A minerals framework negotiated in parallel. Nobody announces a new dependency relationship with a brass band. It arrives as paperwork.

That is why Zambia’s standoff with Washington matters beyond Lusaka. On May 4, Zambia’s foreign minister, Mulambo Haimbe, said the United States had offered up to $2 billion over five years in health support, but that some of the proposed data-sharing terms would violate Zambians’ right to privacy and that the health deal should be uncoupled from a critical-minerals agreement, according to Reuters¹. He also objected to preferential treatment for U.S. companies in the minerals arrangement, the same report said. A few days earlier, Washington had publicly criticized Zambia for failing to engage on a health agreement covering more than $1 billion in U.S. funding, with an April 30 deadline having passed without a deal, according to another Reuters report².

I think Zambia is right to say no to the bundle. Not because U.S. money is unimportant. It is very important. Not because Lusaka has endless leverage. It does not. Zambia is right because health financing, mineral access, and sensitive health data are three different things, and letting one powerful donor price all three in a single transaction would create exactly the kind of dependency Washington says it wants African countries to outgrow.

The core issue is not anti-Americanism. It is separability. A legitimate health agreement can require audits, co-financing, procurement controls, and measurable outcomes. A legitimate minerals agreement can set terms for investment, transport corridors, local processing, tax stability, and environmental safeguards. A legitimate data agreement can define what information is shared, who can see it, how it is anonymized, where it is stored, and whether Zambia gets reciprocal access to resulting tools, diagnostics, or early-warning systems. Those are hard negotiations. They are also normal negotiations.

The problem begins when they are fused. If a health ministry needs HIV, malaria, maternal-health, child-health, and outbreak-preparedness money, it should not have to bargain away mineral preferences or accept sweeping health-data access as the hidden price of keeping clinics funded. Reuters reported that the stalled agreement covered those core health areas and would require roughly $340 million in Zambian co-financing over five years, based on a draft it reviewed in its May 1 story². That is precisely why the leverage is so uncomfortable. The more vital the health program, the cleaner the conditions should be.

Washington has a strong counterclaim, and it deserves to be taken seriously: Zambia has given donors reason to distrust its health supply chain. In May 2025, the United States said it would cut $50 million a year in medical aid to Zambia because of what U.S. Ambassador Michael Gonzales called systematic theft of donated medicines and medical supplies, according to the Associated Press³. AP reported that a U.S. investigation of about 2,000 pharmacies from 2021 to 2023 found nearly half selling medicines and products paid for by U.S. aid funds. That is not a minor compliance problem. It is a direct threat to patients and to public trust.

But this evidence supports narrower conditionality, not broader geopolitical packaging. If the concern is stolen antiretroviral drugs, malaria treatments, or donated medical supplies, the fix is pharmacy inspections, digital stock tracking, end-use verification, criminal prosecutions, clawbacks, and staged disbursement. The fix is not preferential access to copper projects. It is not vague access to national health-data systems. When anti-corruption rules are tied to strategic-resource demands, even good rules start to look like cover for extraction.

Zambia also has less room for error than nationalist rhetoric might suggest. The country remains financially constrained. In January, the International Monetary Fund said Zambia’s public debt was assessed as sustainable but that the country remained at high risk of overall and external debt distress, after completing the sixth and final review under its Extended Credit Facility arrangement, according to the IMF⁴. That matters because punishment rarely comes as a televised sanction. It comes as slower disbursement, cooler embassy calls, higher political-risk assumptions, deferred investment committees, and more cautious lenders.

Zimbabwe shows the danger. In February, the United States said it would wind down health assistance to Zimbabwe after talks collapsed over a proposed funding deal rejected partly because of requirements to share sensitive health data, according to AP⁵. Ghana has now rejected a proposed U.S. health deal over data-privacy concerns as well; Ghana’s Data Protection Commission said the proposal would have allowed U.S. entities access to sensitive health data without adequate safeguards, according to AP⁶. AP also reported that Washington has struck similar health deals with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa. In other words, Zambia is not imagining the pattern, but it also cannot assume a continent-wide revolt will force Washington to retreat.

That is the strongest argument against Lusaka’s posture: if many governments accept the U.S. framework and only a few hold out, Washington can reallocate attention and money. Zambia could end up with less health funding, slower mining investment, and no better privacy terms. This is not a fantasy. It is a plausible cost.

I still think the refusal is justified because the alternative is worse. Once a country accepts the principle that health vulnerability can be converted into strategic concessions, the price of future aid becomes open-ended. Today the ask is data access and minerals preference. Tomorrow it may be procurement rules, cloud-hosting requirements, security cooperation, or exclusive logistics commitments. The issue is not whether the United States is uniquely predatory. China, Gulf investors, European lenders, and private mining houses all seek advantage where they can. The issue is whether Zambia can force partners to put each bargain in its proper box.

Zambia has some leverage because copper has moved from old-economy metal to strategic infrastructure metal. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation said in December that financing for the Lobito Atlantic Railway was meant to strengthen supply chains and expand access to mineral-rich regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo; DFC said the project was expected to increase transport capacity tenfold to 4.6 million metric tons and reduce critical-mineral transport costs by up to 30 percent in its announcement⁷. Zambia is also attracting U.S.-linked private mining capital: President Hakainde Hichilema’s office said last week that KoBold’s Mingomba project is expected to produce about 300,000 tonnes of copper annually and that KoBold would have invested $600 million in Zambia by the end of 2026, according to State House Zambia⁸.

That does not make Lusaka a superpower. The Lobito Corridor is regional, running through Angola and connecting toward the DRC as well as Zambia. Investors have choices. Washington has alternatives. Still, leverage does not require dominance. It requires enough value to make better terms worth negotiating. Zambia has that.

The right strategy is calibrated refusal: keep the health talks alive, publish data-governance red lines, invite independent health-supply audits, prosecute medicine diversion aggressively, reject mineral exclusivity, and offer U.S. firms transparent commercial access on the same terms as serious competitors. If Zambia turns this into theatrical anti-Washington politics, it will lose. If it turns it into a rules-based demand for unbundled agreements, it can win something larger than a better MOU.

My prediction is that Washington will not fully abandon Zambia, because the Copperbelt is too important to the supply-chain strategy the United States is already financing. The indicator to watch is whether, by the end of 2026, Zambia signs three separate instruments rather than one bundled settlement: a health agreement with audited disbursement rules, a data agreement with prior-approval and privacy safeguards, and a minerals framework without U.S. exclusivity. If those pieces stay fused, Zambia’s “no” will have failed. If they are split, Lusaka will have shown that sovereignty can be more than a slogan; it can be a negotiating method.