How China's Bank Lending Pushed Zambia's Power Utility, and Its Farmers, to the Edge of Collapse

In October 2025, Kanangwa Newlove walked the rows of her 10-acre farm outside Lusaka and pulled up what was left. The spinach, lettuce and mustard had wilted in the heat, and the tomatoes had shriveled on the vine. She fed whole rows of organic vegetables, once prized by demanding customers, to her pigs. Her pumps needed nearly 8,000 gallons of borehole water every few days, and since March 2024 the electricity to run them had come only in fragments. Some days she had four hours of power.

The cuts were load shedding, scheduled outages meant to reduce demand on the grid. ZESCO, the state-owned utility that supplies almost all of Zambia's electricity, published schedules, but Newlove told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists they kept changing without notice. A plan built around morning-to-midday power could be overturned within a week. Without refrigeration she could not store what she harvested. She stopped breeding and slaughtering animals, lost regular customers such as small neighborhood shops, cut back her planting and could no longer hire seasonal workers. For the first time in more than a decade of farming, she began to wonder whether she would have to close.

The immediate trigger was a severe drought in 2024, the worst in decades, which emptied the dams that Zambia depends on for hydropower. But ICIJ's reporting argues that ZESCO was unusually vulnerable because of its finances. Among its heaviest burdens was a long-term loan of nearly $285 million from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, signed in 2011 on tough repayment terms. In the years after, ZESCO borrowed more from ICBC and other Chinese lenders. As Zambia's largest state-owned company, it was a significant contributor to a national debt that made Zambia the first African country to default on its sovereign debt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Roughly 60 percent of Zambians live in poverty.

The account rests on China Capital, an ICIJ-led collaboration with 23 media partners built on 4.8 million documents: client dossiers, due diligence reports, loan agreements, meeting minutes and internal emails in English and Chinese. They expose the workings of ICBC's U.K. subsidiary and London branch. According to the documents, Chinese lenders working alongside Chinese contractors piled loans onto Zambia and its struggling state enterprises, and when ZESCO had to repay, ICBC took what analysts describe as a hardball stance. The Chinese Embassy in Zambia denied the claims, saying China follows market rules, respects partner countries and never forces borrowing, presses for repayment, attaches political conditions or seeks political interests.

In 2011 the outlook looked bright. Zambia had emerged from debt relief programs involving the World Bank and the IMF, and it turned to new roads, power lines, stadiums and airports. Between 2012 and 2015 it issued three international bonds worth $3 billion. China, meanwhile, was expanding in Africa; in 2013 Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing presented itself to poor, landlocked countries as an alternative to Western funders, with fewer policy conditions. Barbara Dutzler, an economist with Germany's development agency, told ICIJ that China offered an alignment between state and industry that let it fund projects that would fail on purely commercial terms. ICBC is majority state-owned, and the documents show its bankers routinely weighed strategic policies like the Belt and Road when considering loans.

At a July 2012 groundbreaking for the ZESCO electrification project the loan was meant to fund, China's Ambassador Zhou Yuxiao referred to several Chinese loans to Zambia that were in effect or being sought. These were boom years for Africa's second-largest copper producer: GDP growth averaged 7.4 percent from 2004 to 2014, 1.6 points above the sub-Saharan average. Newlove began farming commercially in 2012 and soon quit her job to supply supermarkets and an in-flight caterer at Lusaka's airport. Gerald Soko opened a butchery in 2011 in Mtendere Compound, where, he said, everything sold.

The growth did not reach the poorest, and Parliament acknowledged it favored cities and mining. Chinese-funded projects were often awarded without competitive bids and were criticized as wasteful and overpriced. Analyst Trevor Hambayi pointed to two questionable airport expansions, at Lusaka and Ndola. A former Finance Ministry official said some officials tried to slow borrowing, but the finance minister called that fiscal conservatism. A World Bank report found ZESCO's management was swayed by political decisions on investments. After Edgar Lungu became president in 2015, Deborah Brautigam of Johns Hopkins wrote, borrowing from China ratcheted up further.

What to watch is how Zambia's debt restructuring and power-sector reforms proceed, and whether the China Capital documents bring new scrutiny to Chinese lending.