Minutes of the Board

In Chikumanino of Kasama, in a year the historians have wisely declined to name, all matters of the heart were governed by a body known officially as The Board. And unofficially as The Board. This is because no one had ever been brave enough to call it anything else to its face. Or behind its back.

It was not registered with PACRA. This was deliberate. Registration would have made it accountable, and accountability was for institutions that intended to be fair.

A young man named Mwaba learned this in the commonest way most men learn everything: too late, embarrassingly and in public.

Mwaba was 27, employed as a shop attendant and in possession of two working shoes and a bicycle whose only reliable braking system required him to drag one foot along the ground and hope for cooperation from both the road and providence. The most conspicuous problem, however, was its severely worn-out tyres. Mwaba rented a small room and sent part of his salary home each month to support his sibling’s education. Having such qualities in that economy made him what the aunties called “Marriage Material.” 

He had fallen, catastrophically and against all professional advice, for a woman named Beatrice.

Beatrice worked at a mobile money booth. She remembered which customers sent money, received money or did both. She appeared to wear her heart on her sleeve, although the most important parts of it remained carefully folded away. She also possessed the rare gift of rejecting a man so decisively that he briefly reconsidered the institution of romance itself.

Mwaba had always noticed her because her booth was right in front of his shop. Beatrice first noticed him when he returned the extra 50 kwacha she had mistakenly given him after processing his withdrawal.

Neither admitted these things.

Instead, Mwaba began unnecessarily withdrawing and depositing money. His mother, receiving unusually frequent transfers, briefly believed her son had received a promotion.

Eventually, after three months of unnecessary mobile money transactions and increasingly weak excuses, Mwaba told Beatrice that he loved her.

He had rehearsed the speech for a week. In rehearsal, it was dignified and persuasive. In reality, his voice broke and he forgot most of what he had meant to say, and all of how he had meant to say it.

Beatrice looked at him for a long moment. She liked him. This complicated matters.

Mwaba may have spoken directly to Beatrice, but in reality, one did not propose to Beatrice alone. In that place and time, every proposal first had to survive the scrutiny of the woman’s circle of friends. Mwaba had submitted an application to Beatrice, and she forwarded it, as was procedure, to The Board

The Board convened, as it always did, on a Saturday, in a hair salon that smelled of burnt hair, hair oil and a lot of judgment.

The Board comprised four women.

There was Bwalya, the de facto Chairwoman, who had personally terminated eleven relationships and regretted none of them. At least that is what she told everyone.

There was Mwansa, Head of Due Diligence. Mwansa could trace a man’s entire romantic history using nothing but a stare, an unnamed source and the phrase, “I am not saying anything, but…”

There was Esther, Head of Compliance. Esther’s responsibility was to ensure that every approved suitor met the minimum standards. These standards had never been written down, because writing them down would have exposed their contradictions.

And there was Ntombi, the Secretary. Ntombi was small in stature, so her friends called her Auntie Small Small. Her enemies called her Little Ntombi. Ntombi took the minutes and, more importantly, took every disagreement as an attempt to dominate her on account of her height.

Beatrice sat outside while they deliberated. From behind the thin wall, she could hear her future being discussed between the hum of hair clippers and the occasional shout of another customer objecting to the price of braids.

The dossier on Mwaba was read aloud.

“Employment: confirmed,” said Mwansa. “Bicycle: confirmed. Tyres: partial.”

“Note the tyres,” said Compliance.

“Noted,” said the Secretary, noting the tyres.

“Character,” continued Due Diligence, consulting her findings. “He was once observed purchasing a plastic bag full of mangoes and eating them greedily as he walked along the street, without offering a single one to anyone.”

A silence fell over the room of the kind usually reserved for news of a death.

“How old was he,” asked the Chairwoman, “at the time of the Mango-gate scandal?”

“He must have been 17. We were both in Grade 12," Mwansa responded.

“The heart does not age,” said Compliance darkly, “and neither do bad manners.”

At the far end, Beatrice lowered her head to hide a smile. She wondered how an ordinary act of adolescent selfishness, committed years earlier, could be admitted as evidence against the man he had become. She considered mentioning this, but The Board regarded recent evidence of kindness as a common tactic among applicants.

The investigation continued.

“He does not own a house.”

“He is only twenty-seven,” Beatrice called through the wall.

“The applicant will not address The Board through management,” replied the Chairwoman.

“He wears the same blue shirt every Sunday,” said Mwansa.

“Blue is his favourite colour and he has many shirts,” said Beatrice.

“Or his only one,” said Compliance.

Little Ntombi recorded both possibilities.

The rejection arrived by WhatsApp the following afternoon, while Mwaba was attending the church youth meeting held every Sunday. It had been carefully composed by the Secretary, and Mwaba preserved a screenshot of it for the rest of his life, just in case Ntombi had activated disappearing messages on WhatsApp.

Dear Applicant,

Following review of your submission, The Board regrets to inform you that your proposal has not been successful at this time.

Reasons cannot be disclosed, as reasons are the property of The Board.

You are welcome to reapply after a period of self-improvement, the length and nature of which will not be specified.

We wish you the very best in your future endeavours, elsewhere.

Yours in governance,

The Board

He read it five times.

The first time, he thought it was a joke. The second time, he searched for a sentence that might contain hope. The third time, he became angry. By the fourth, the anger had gone, leaving behind the quieter pain of feeling that strangers had measured his life and found it insufficient.

The fifth time, he copied the message into an AI chatbot and asked what it meant, hoping the machine might discover some possibility his readings had missed.

He went, as generations of rejected men before him had gone, to the quiet place behind the church. By then, it had a bench, installed by a council that understood demand.

He sat among the other wounded and shed the customary two tears, blaming the dust, as was tradition.

But what hurt him most was not the rejection. It was the possibility that The Board might be right. Perhaps love belonged to men with houses, matching furniture and bicycles capable of stopping on command. Perhaps a person had to finish becoming worthy before asking anyone to share the unfinished life.

And here the story would have ended: filed, stamped and forgotten, another proposal declined by a properly functioning committee.

Except that The Board had made one error.

It had forgotten the single flaw in all systems of governance, the loophole no bylaw can close:

Management can overrule the Board.

While the committee deliberated over mangoes, shirts and tyres, Beatrice was the actual and only decision-maker, the woman whose life this all concerned. She had been conducting an assessment of her own.

She knew Mwaba was not ready. Neither was she.

She knew he might disappoint her. She also knew that caution could disappoint her just as thoroughly, only more slowly.

She understood something The Board did not: the remedy is in the poison. The very uncertainty that made love dangerous was what made it capable of changing a life. Remove the risk completely and one did not obtain perfect love. One obtained a transaction, properly documented and emotionally vacant.

During that week, Beatrice noticed Mwaba’s absence from her booth and began to question whether she had outsourced her own choice. The Board’s standards might protect her from embarrassment, she realised, but they could not protect her from loneliness.

By Wednesday, Beatrice found herself looking up whenever a bicycle passed.

By Saturday evening, Beatrice had reached her own decision. The following Sunday, she summoned Mwaba.

She found him behind the church, sitting upright and insisting to anyone who would hear that the dust had become unusually aggressive with his eyes.

She sat beside him.

“The Board rejected you,” she said.

“I received the minutes.”

“They were not minutes.”

“They felt very long.”

For a while, they watched a chicken cross the churchyard with the confidence of a creature answerable to no committee.

Then Beatrice informed him, kindly, that The Board’s decision had been reviewed at the executive level and reversed with immediate effect. She added that he should stop the week-long pity party because people had begun to notice his sadness.

Mwaba looked at her.

“Why?” he asked.

Beatrice could have mentioned his honesty, his gentleness or the way he listened without waiting for his turn to speak. She could have produced evidence and indicators. But none of those things fully explained it.

“For no sensible reason,” she said. “I simply choose you.”

Mwaba laughed then, not because it was funny, but because relief sometimes escapes the body wearing the wrong clothes.

The Board was furious.

The Board convened an emergency session. It issued a statement warning of procedural collapse, institutional overreach and the dangerous precedent of allowing the woman whose life was under discussion to make the final decision herself.

The statement was ignored, which is the fate of all statements.

Mwaba and Beatrice married.

Their life together was not the glowing road people imagine when they look back at a choice from a distance. It was a real road in Chikumanino: uneven, crowded and occasionally flooded with sewage, even during the dry season. There were arguments about money, forgotten errands and relatives who arrived without warning and stayed as if protected by international law.

Mwaba sometimes wondered whether he had married too early. Beatrice sometimes imagined a quieter life with a man who owned a car and never required anyone to push-start it. These were thoughts they kept to themselves for fear that society would treat them as pariahs for admitting that love had not eliminated every doubt.

Even so, they built a home in which laughter survived bad months. They raised children. They buried people they loved. They forgave each other for ordinary failures and a few extraordinary ones. The bicycle was eventually replaced, although Mwaba kept it for sentimental value.

Three years later, Esther who had once treated another woman’s heart as a compliance matter discovered that her own was no easier to govern. She was assembling a Board to review a man who had applied to occupy the vacancy in her heart.

When Beatrice told Mwaba about it, he approved immediately.

Then he heard that the young man owned very little that The Board would consider worth recording.

He demanded a full investigation.

Beatrice, listening from the kitchen, laughed so loudly that he remembered himself.

That evening, Beatrice called Esther to impart the only wisdom she had ever earned.

The Board would advise caution, she said. Boards always did. No one ever blamed caution for a broken heart, Beatrice said, although it could quietly cause one.

"Patience is valuable," she said. "But sometimes fear disguises itself as patience."

"That is comforting," Esther said.

"I am not finished. Whatever you choose, you will regret it. Not because you chose wrongly, but because the road you did not take stays paved and lit forever. No potholes, no unpaid bills, no difficult mornings. And walking along it, a better version of you: younger, certain, never once tested by anything real."

Esther was quiet for a moment. "So there is no right choice."

"There is only which regret you can live with."

"That is not very comforting either."

"No," Beatrice admitted. "But it is honest."

"You being right means I owe you an apology," Esther said, and began to laugh.

"Go ahead. I am listening."

"I said I owe you an apology," Esther replied. "That means you will receive it at some future, unscheduled date. Perhaps as a present on your next birthday."

They both burst out laughing, said their goodbyes and ended the call.

Esther considered Beatrice’s words.

The following morning, she informed The Board that its services were no longer required. For the first time, Compliance had failed to comply with itself.

She did not marry the man immediately. Choosing one’s regret, she had learned, did not require abandoning common sense. It required accepting that common sense could advise her but could not live her life on her behalf.

In time, Esther married the man The Board would never have approved, and they were reasonably happy. Not perfectly. Because perfect happiness is usually the invention of people observing from outside, but in the specific and hard-won way of those who take responsibility for the lives they choose.

There were days when Esther wondered whether The Board had seen something she had refused to see. There were also days when she imagined that some untrodden path might have led her to a larger house, an easier marriage or a version of herself who never doubted anything.

Then she remembered that the unlived road appeared smooth only because no one had ever forced it to carry the weight of an actual life. Ing'anda ushikalamo baikumbwa umutenge, as the old adage goes.

She returned to the difficult, ordinary life before her and refused, ever after, to blame it on the dust in Chikumanino.

Men's Language of Grief

Mwamuna sama lila (a man doesn’t cry). We all have heard this in life. Right??

There is a particular kind of loneliness that many men carry, one that hides in plain sight. It shows up at the office, at the dinner table, in the group chat full of jokes. It is the loneliness of a man who has learned, from boyhood, that his pain is his own private business — something to be managed quietly, out of view, like a debt he is ashamed of. A lot of men simply do not know how to ask for help. Not because they are incapable of feeling, but because somewhere along the way, they were taught that feeling out loud is a luxury they cannot afford. So they learn instead to act okay, even while drowning inside.

Two Languages of Grief

Women and men often grieve in different dialects. When a woman is hurting, she is more likely to say so — to a friend, a sister, a counsellor. Her tears are permitted, even expected, and this permission is a lifeline. It connects her pain to other people who can help carry it.

Men, by contrast, tend to cry in silence. In the car after a hard phone call. In the shower, where water disguises tears. At a desk late at night, staring at a screen long after the work is done. Anywhere no one will notice. Sometimes no tears fall at all — just a heavy, private silence, the kind that drowns a man slowly while he continues to show up, provide, and perform. The strongest man you know may be breaking right now, and you would never guess it, because he has become fluent in the language of “I’m good.”

The Weight of Expectation

Why do men hide? Much of it comes down to what society asks of them. A man is expected to provide and to lead. He is the one others look to when things fall apart. And who wants to see their leader crying? A father who breaks down worries he will frighten his children. A husband who admits he is struggling fears his wife will see him as less of a man. An employee who confesses burnout fears being passed over. So he smiles. He cracks jokes all day, pays the bills, keeps the machine running — and then spends the night staring at the ceiling while everyone else sleeps.

There is also the burden of time itself. While others are thinking about today or tomorrow, many men are quietly calculating next month and next year: school fees, rent, the aging parents, the what-ifs. This constant forward-planning is an act of love — a way of protecting the people who depend on him — but it is also a weight that never comes off. Some men carry it for so long that surviving becomes their default routine. They forget what peace even feels like. They no longer recognize their own exhaustion as pain, because it has simply become the temperature of their lives.

When Pain Finds Other Exits

Here is the tragedy: pain that is denied a voice does not disappear. It finds other exits. Some men channel it into anger, snapping at the people they love most. Some bury themselves in work, mistaking exhaustion for purpose. Some reach for the bottle, medicating a wound they cannot name. And some simply disappear emotionally — present in body, absent in spirit, a ghost at their own dinner table.

This is where the statistics stop being abstract and become devastating. Across nearly every country in the world, men die by suicide at significantly higher rates than women — in many nations, three to four times higher — even though women report depression and attempt suicide more often. Researchers call this the “gender paradox of suicide,” and its explanations map almost perfectly onto everything described above. Men are far less likely to seek professional help or confide in anyone before a crisis, so their distress goes undetected until it is too late. Men tend to use more lethal means, turning a moment of despair into a permanent decision. And men are more likely to mask depression with alcohol, which deepens hopelessness and weakens restraint. A woman in crisis often leaves a trail of signals — conversations, tears, calls for help. A man in crisis often leaves nothing but a shocked community saying, “But he seemed fine.”

The same suppressed pain that turns inward as suicide can also turn outward as violence. Globally, roughly nine out of ten homicides are committed by men, and most of the victims are men too. This is not because men are born more cruel; it is partly because anger is the one emotion many men were ever allowed to express. A boy who is mocked for crying but tolerated for fighting learns a dangerous lesson: sadness is weakness, but rage is strength. Fast-forward twenty years, and the man who never learned to say “I am hurting” instead says it with his fists, or worse. Add to this the way masculine culture ties respect to dominance — where an insult in a bar or a dispute over money becomes a test of manhood that cannot be walked away from — and the pattern becomes tragically legible. Suicide and violence are, in many ways, two faces of the same coin: unspoken pain seeking an exit.

What Men Actually Need

It would be easy to conclude that men need to “open up,” and leave it there. But most men are not asking for sympathy. In fact, sympathy can feel disempowering — like being pitied, like confirmation that he has failed at the one job he was given. What many men want is something quieter and more dignified: peace. Understanding. One moment where they do not have to act strong. A friend who asks “how are you, really?” and waits for the true answer. A culture that lets a leader be human without stripping him of his authority.

Change begins in small places. It begins with fathers telling their sons that tears are not treason. It begins with friends who check on the man who “seems fine,” because seeming fine is precisely how men hide. It begins with workplaces, churches, and communities treating a man’s mental health with the same seriousness as his salary. And it begins with men themselves recognizing that carrying weight silently is not strength — it is slow erosion — and that asking for help is not surrender but strategy. No general fights a war alone.

Conclusion

Men cry differently. They cry in silence, in work, in anger, in absence. They cry in ceilings stared at through sleepless nights and in jokes told a little too loudly. The numbers — the suicides, the violence — are simply that hidden crying made visible, too late. If we want fewer men dying quietly and fewer men exploding loudly, we must build a world where a man’s pain is allowed to speak before it is forced to scream. Because behind every man who “seems fine” may be someone fighting the hardest battle of his life — and all he needs is one safe moment to put the weight down.

The cliff has not moved

Something extraordinary and deeply unsettling happened in 2005 in the Turkish village of Gevas. One sheep walked off a cliff, and then 1,499 others followed. The shepherds had stepped away for breakfast. In their brief absence, a single animal moved toward danger, and the rest instinctively followed. By the time the movement became visible, it was already too late. More than 450 sheep died, while those behind survived only because the growing pile of bodies broke their fall.

At first glance, it sounds like the kind of story so absurd that it belongs in folklore. Yet biologists and animal behaviourists were not surprised. Sheep are wired to follow the movement of those nearest to them rather than independently assess the terrain ahead. In most circumstances, this instinct is highly effective. It keeps the flock together and protects individuals from external threats. The tragedy is that the very behaviour that had ensured survival for generations became fatal in the wrong environment.

It is tempting to laugh at the sheep.

But many organisations operate in exactly the same way.

The Gevas incident is not merely a story about animal behaviour. It is a powerful lesson about leadership, management, organisational culture, and the risks of collective decision-making when critical thinking disappears.

Most organisational decisions are not made in isolation. Employees watch managers. Managers watch executives. Executives watch competitors, consultants, donors, industry trends, and peer organisations. Learning from others is often sensible and efficient. The danger emerges when organisations stop asking whether the direction is right and focus only on whether everyone else is moving in the same direction.

How many organisations adopt new management frameworks because they are fashionable rather than effective? How many strategic plans are copied from competitors? How many initiatives are launched because they are popular in boardrooms rather than because they solve a genuine organisational problem?

When conformity replaces critical thinking, organisations begin to mistake consensus for wisdom. The sheep did not evaluate the cliff. They evaluated the movement of the flock. Many organisations do the same.

The most important detail in the Gevas story is not that the sheep followed one another. It is that the shepherds were absent.

Leadership is often misunderstood as authority. In reality, leadership is the continuous process of observing, guiding, correcting, and anticipating risk. When leadership becomes distracted, disengaged, or complacent, organisations create a vacuum.

Vacuums rarely remain empty for long. In the absence of active leadership, the loudest voice often becomes the dominant voice. The most confident opinion becomes the accepted opinion. Assumptions go unchallenged. Weak decisions gain momentum simply because nobody intervenes early enough.

Many organisational failures do not begin with bad intentions. As the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." More often, however, they begin with absent attention. The challenge for leaders is not simply to set direction. It is to remain sufficiently engaged to recognise when the organisation is drifting toward danger.

 

One consequence of disengaged leadership is the emergence of groupthink, one of the greatest threats to organisational performance. In many organisations, people quickly learn that challenging prevailing opinions carries risk. They remain silent in meetings. They suppress concerns. They nod in agreement despite privately recognising flaws in a proposal. Over time, this creates an illusion of consensus.

Healthy organisations understand that disagreement is not a threat to unity; it is often a prerequisite for sound decision-making.

As one of my former lecturers used to say, if two people agree on everything, only one of them is doing the thinking.

Strong leaders deliberately create environments where dissent is welcomed, assumptions are tested, and uncomfortable questions are encouraged. They understand that constructive disagreement improves decisions long before problems become crises.

The first sheep paid the highest price. In organisations, the equivalent individuals are often whistle-blowers, innovators, risk officers, auditors, and employees who raise concerns before others recognise a problem.

These people rarely receive immediate praise. Instead, they are frequently viewed as difficult, disruptive, or pessimistic. Yet organisational history repeatedly demonstrates that many major failures were preceded by warnings that leaders chose to ignore.

The organisations that thrive are not those that eliminate criticism. They are those that listen to it. An employee who identifies a risk early is not undermining the organisation. They are helping to protect it. Effective leaders recognise this distinction.

The sheep's instinct to stay together was not a flaw. It was a strength operating in the wrong environment. The same principle applies to organisations. Processes, cultures, and management practices that deliver success under one set of conditions may become liabilities when circumstances change. A culture built on loyalty can become resistant to accountability. A culture built on stability can become hostile to innovation. A culture built on efficiency can become incapable of adaptation.

The challenge of leadership is not simply preserving organisational strengths. It is recognising when those strengths are becoming obstacles to future success. Effective leaders continually ask a difficult question: what worked yesterday, but may not work tomorrow?

Organisations often become vulnerable when they rely too heavily on systems, routines, and established ways of thinking. Systems are valuable because they create consistency and efficiency. Yet no system can anticipate every change in its environment. There are moments when circumstances shift faster than procedures can adapt. In those moments, success depends on individuals who are willing to question assumptions, recognise emerging risks, and act before the rest of the organisation catches up. The ability to think independently is not a threat to organisational cohesion. It is one of the conditions that makes long-term resilience possible.

Once the sheep began falling, intervention was almost impossible. The opportunity to prevent disaster existed before the first movement occurred. This is perhaps the most important leadership lesson of all. Management is often associated with solving problems. Leadership is about preventing problems from becoming crises.

The best leaders spend less time reacting and more time anticipating. They monitor emerging risks, encourage difficult conversations, challenge assumptions, and build systems that detect weak signals before those signals become emergencies.

Most organisational disasters do not occur without warning. The warnings are usually present. They are simply ignored until the consequences become impossible to overlook.

The sheep of Gevas were not stupid. They were operating within a system that rewarded following, lacked active oversight, and failed to recognise danger early enough.

Many organisations face the same risk. Talented employees can still make poor collective decisions. Capable teams can still drift into failure. Strong institutions can still walk over cliffs if leadership is absent, dissent is discouraged, and risks are ignored.

The lesson is not that organisations should avoid collaboration or consensus. The lesson is that leaders must actively read the terrain ahead. Because by the time everyone agrees on the direction, it may already be too late.

The cliff rarely appears without warning.

The real question is whether anyone is watching for it.

As the Climate Changes, Zambia Must Redefine Sanitation

Every rainy season, cholera claims lives in Zambia, lives that could be saved by something as simple as a toilet. As the world marks World Toilet Day for 2025, Zambia finds itself confronting a crisis that is as familiar as it is urgent. The annual event, established by the United Nations to inspire action toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 (clean water and sanitation for all by 2030), reminds us that sanitation is not merely an issue of comfort; it is about public health, human dignity and climate resilience.

This year’s theme, “Sanitation in a Changing World”, carries the tagline “We’ll Always Need the Toilet.” It highlights the unchanging importance of sanitation even as the world around us transforms under the pressures of climate change, ageing infrastructure and underinvestment. To meet the global sanitation goal, the world must move five times faster than it is doing today. That statistic alone should jolt us into action.

For Zambia, the message could not be timelier. Each rainy season brings with it the spectre of cholera outbreaks and other waterborne diseases, particularly in densely populated urban settlements where toilets are inadequate, waste management is poor, and drainage systems fail under heavy rains. The situation reflects not only infrastructural gaps but also deep-seated inequalities in access to basic services. The link between sanitation and health could not be clearer: without safe toilets and clean water, cholera will continue to resurface, undermining decades of public health progress.

Yet the sanitation challenge is no longer just about hygiene, it is also about climate change. Floods, unpredictable rainfall, and prolonged droughts are making it harder to maintain safe and sustainable sanitation systems. Floodwaters can contaminate wells and pit latrines, spreading disease, while droughts reduce the water available for hygiene. Climate variability is also compromising the durability and quality of sanitation infrastructure, particularly in resource-limited settings where systems are already fragile. In short, climate change is making it harder to keep toilets functional and safe.

As global leaders gather for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Zambia and other developing nations must ensure that sanitation is not sidelined in climate negotiations. Sanitation and climate change are intimately linked in two directions. On one hand, poor sanitation contributes to climate change: the unsafe disposal of faecal matter produces greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, adding to global emissions. On the other hand, climate variability: floods, rising temperatures and extreme weather, erodes the very sanitation systems needed to contain those emissions and protect human health.

Therefore, the outcomes of COP30 should include stronger recognition of sanitation as part of the climate–health–resilience agenda. Climate adaptation frameworks must support countries like Zambia to build resilient, low-emission, and future-ready toilets that can withstand floods, droughts and population pressures. These solutions are not just technical, they are moral imperatives that address both environmental integrity and human dignity.

Encouragingly, there are funding mechanisms that can help. The Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Adaptation Fund, and emerging loss and damage finance instruments offer opportunities to channel resources towards water and sanitation projects that are both climate-smart and community-driven. Zambia’s policymakers should seize these opportunities to develop proposals that integrate sanitation into climate action plans, ensuring that access to safe toilets becomes part of the broader narrative on resilience and sustainable development.

Globally, momentum is building. As of early November 2025, about 64 countries have submitted their nationally determined contributions (NDC) 3.0, the “2035-aligned” NDCs under the Paris Agreement, demonstrating growing ambition to address climate change. Zambia can follow suit by embedding sanitation and hygiene priorities within its own climate commitments, recognising that a clean toilet is also a climate solution.

World Toilet Day is a call to rethink how we approach one of humanity’s oldest and most basic needs. Toilets symbolise civilisation, dignity, and progress, but in a changing climate, they also represent resilience and adaptation. For Zambia, the path forward demands more than commemorations; it requires investment, innovation, and political will.

As the climate changes, we must redefine sanitation, not as a peripheral concern, but as a central pillar of sustainable development. Because, indeed, we’ll always need the toilet.

Silhouette of a Woman

The rain fell in steady iron sheets, turning the familiar streets into mirrors of gray. She stood at the threshold of the Chilenje house she had called home for the last three years of her marriage, a suitcase in one hand and the weight of a thousand unsaid words in the other. She didn’t slam the door. She simply pulled it shut with a quiet click that felt louder than any argument she had ever had.

Her mother named her Towera, the shiny and beautiful one! 

Inside the house and after what felt like 40 days and 40 nights, Andrew would wake eventually to an empty bed and a note she hadn’t bothered to write. 

"What new things were left to say?" she thought. "Every road that we knew doesn’t lead me home anymore."

She had tried. God, how she had tried. Late-night talks that dissolved into gaslighting and blackmailing or promises whispered in the dark that evaporated by morning. The relationship which had started with a barrage of love bombings, had quickly become controlling. 

The slow erosion of trust created a chasm that even brushing past each other in the kitchen felt like colliding with a stranger. The love that once filled the rooms had thinned into echoes, hollow repetitions of old conversations that no longer reached either of them.

She had become, somewhere along the way, an outline. A shape Andrew could recognize from a distance and command without ever having to see her face. A silhouette didn't argue. A silhouette had no inside to bruise. He had loved her edges and never once asked what was inside them.

In the beginning, she thought marriage was a destination. Well, at least that's how she was socialised. Now she understood it had only ever been a path, and theirs had cracked beyond repair. 

She packed what she could: clothes, two of her favourite books that still brought her comfort and the small bundle of savings she had quietly set aside for rainy days. 

And it was raining.

She left behind what she should: the wedding photos, the shared dreams and the version of herself that had shrunk to fit inside Andrew's expectations.

The Nyati and Muramba Roads were empty as she walked, drizzles soaking through her coat. Here was the X Factor Bar at Chris Corner where they used to meet after work, laughing over bottles of Mosi. Just across the Mosi-o-tunya Road, there was the park bench where he once proposed with nervous hands and hopeful eyes. Now it all felt so cold, like mendacious tales of adventure that her grandfather used to tell. The memories played in her mind but no longer ached. They simply existed, detached, like scenes from someone else’s life.

"I don’t feel regret," she thought, pulling her collar higher. "Just a silhouette of the woman I was before all of this."

She had spent years trying to fix what was broken, believing that enough love, enough patience, enough sacrifice could mend the fractures. But some things don’t mend. They only teach you how to stop bleeding. Every word they said now just echoed instead of connecting. Andrew's little games marinated in the silences used as weapons, the promises that never materialized and the way he made her doubt her own worth. They all now held no power anymore. She didn’t need his name. She didn’t need the role she had played for so long.

Her footsteps carried her toward the bus station at the corner of Chilimbulu and Mosi-o-tunya Road, opposite Lewanika Mall. With each step, the broken track of their marriage stretched behind her. She wasn’t looking back. Something’s never last, and theirs had reached its end.

As the first bus pulled away from the curb, Towera pressed her forehead against the cool window. The street lights along the Burma Road blurred into streaks of silver as the bus started its journey towards town. 

"I’m gone without a trace," she realized. "No time to replace what we lost." 

If Andrew called her name tomorrow. Or next month. Or years from now, it wouldn’t be the same woman who would answer. That woman had already begun to unfold.

The rain continued to fall as the bus carried her into the shades of gray beyond the city limits. For the first time in years, Towera breathed deeply. The shiny and beautiful one was learning how to glint again. And today, she had chosen survival.

"Till death do us part," she sighed. It had taken her years to hear the line for what it was. A slogan. And no one should ever die or sacrifice their happiness for a slogan.

She was finally walking away from her childhood dream, terminating her membership from the 'Shipikisha Club.' She had left as a silhouette. Somewhere between Chilenje and the City Centre, she was beginning to take shape again. And for the first time in three years, restarting her life didn't feel like exile. It felt like beginning.

A socioeconomic analysis of Zambia’s contradicting realities

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. — Eagles, Hotel California

Much like the haunting Eagles lyric that inspired this piece, Zambia's economic reality is one that resists the convenience of silence or selective attention. The country's citizens inhabit it with every transaction they conduct, every queue they stand in, every nshima they deliberate over. To opt out of the conversation is not to opt out of the conditions. The weight follows one home. Zambia stands at a peculiar crossroads in 2026, a country whose aggregate economic indicators project cautious optimism while millions of its citizens remain enmeshed in poverty so structural and so deep that it has become, for many, an inheritance. It is a nation in which the trajectories visible on government spreadsheets and the lived experience of ordinary households occupy conspicuously divergent registers. Both, however, are empirically real. Both demand sustained, unflinching analytical attention. We could choose to stop talking about the economic challenges we are in any time we like but we cannot erase the fact that what is happening both affects and pains us. Much like the guests of that infamous hotel California, Zambia's citizens did not choose the terms of their arrival into these conditions. And for the millions who cannot feel the growth that the indicators announce, the corridors look no different from one year to the next. This contradiction of realities is the conversation we owe each other. This is the hotel room we all inhabit.

I. The macroeconomic recovery built on fragile foundations

On the surface, there is measurable cause for tempered optimism. GDP growth is projected at 5.8% in 2025 and 6.4% in 2026, propelled by the mining sector, an agricultural rebound following the catastrophic droughts of the 2023–2024 season, and a partial restoration of energy supply. The Zambian kwacha appreciated by 14.4% against the United States dollar in the first half of 2025, a non-trivial stabilisation signal, and headline inflation retreated to approximately 7.5% by February 2026 from its prior elevated levels. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded its Extended Credit Facility (ECF) programme with Zambia in January 2026, disbursing a final tranche of approximately $190 million and bringing cumulative programme support to $1.7 billion. This denouement to a painstaking post-default restructuring process — initiated after Zambia became the first African sovereign to default on its Eurobond obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic in November 2020 — has materially restored a measure of institutional credibility. S&P Global’s upgrade of Zambia’s sovereign credit rating from ‘SD’ (selective default) to ‘CCC+’ represents a modest but symbolically consequential restatement of market confidence. Copper exports, which remain the bedrock of Zambia’s foreign exchange earnings, contributed $700 million to the interbank market and $500 million in fiscal receipts in the first half of 2025 alone. Yet the very buoyancy of these copper revenues illuminates the structural dependency that has defined, constrained, and periodically undone Zambia’s economic trajectory across successive decades. A nation whose fortunes rise and fall with a single commodity traded on global exchanges over which it exercises no influence is a nation perpetually exposed.

II. The aggregate growth is failing the majority

Disaggregate the macroeconomic narrative and what materialises is a social landscape of stark and sobering proportions. Approximately 60% of Zambia’s population live below the national poverty line, a figure that sits in discomfiting juxtaposition against the government’s 8th National Development Plan target of 45% by 2026. At the current pace of poverty reduction, that ambition is not merely aspirational; it is arithmetically unreachable within the stated horizon. The structural drivers of poverty, low agricultural productivity, inadequate human capital investment, geographic isolation, and persistent gender inequality, are not amenable to resolution within a single 5-year political term. Over 65% of the population subsists on less than $2.15 per day. The cumulative inflation rate between 2022 and 2025 registered at 44.3%, functioning as a concealed tax upon the poor that erodes the purchasing power of wages already insufficient to ensure dignified living. As of January 2024, Zambia's minimum wage for non-unionized workers ranges from approximately $74.35 to over $230 per month depending on the sector and job category. This is the floor beneath which basic nutritional, housing, and healthcare needs cannot be met. The chasm between this benchmark and prevailing incomes requires no elaborate statistical treatment to communicate its profundity. It is a chasm that parents navigate daily in the arithmetic of household survival. Food inflation has been disproportionately punishing. For households devoting the preponderance of their income to subsistence expenditure — as the majority of poor Zambian families are compelled to do — each percentage point increase in food prices is not an abstraction on a macroeconomic dashboard. It is a recalibration of survival: a meal deferred, a child despatched to school without adequate nutrition, a medical appointment postponed. The Gini coefficient, forecast at 0.58 for 2025, positions Zambia among the most unequal societies on the African continent and, by extension, in the world. Inequality at this magnitude is not merely a distributional concern; it is a political economy constraint that limits the transformative potential of growth itself.

III. The Debt Architecture: Governing Under Fiscal Constraint

Perhaps no dimension of Zambia’s current predicament is as structurally defining as the geometry of its public debt obligations. The 2026 national budget of K253.1 billion, representing a nominal increase of 16.6% over the prior year, allocates in excess of 36% to debt servicing and general public services. The fiscal implications of this configuration are not merely financial; they are developmental. Resources consumed by obligations incurred in the past are resources unavailable for investment in health infrastructure, teacher recruitment, road rehabilitation, or social protection programming. The opportunity cost of debt servicing at this scale is, in the most precise sense, human development forgone. Zambia’s public debt reached a peak of approximately 120% of GDP. Approximately two-thirds of this debt is held by external creditors and denominated in foreign currency, rendering the fiscal position acutely sensitive to exchange rate movements. The creditor composition: spanning multilateral institutions, bilateral partners including China and Saudi Arabia, and commercial bondholders,  introduced considerable complexity into restructuring negotiations. Discussions with certain creditors, among them Afreximbank and the Trade and Development Bank, remained unresolved into early 2026. The IMF’s characterisation of Zambia’s debt as ‘sustainable but at high risk of distress’ captures, with clinical precision, the paradox at the heart of the country’s fiscal situation: solvent in the technical sense, yet perpetually constrained in its developmental capacity.

IV. Energy, climate vulnerability and the geopolitical dimension

The 2023/24 drought was not merely a meteorological event; it was an economic shock of considerable amplitude. The contraction in water levels at Kariba Dam, the principal reservoir for Zambia’s hydroelectric generation system, precipitated severe load-shedding that cascaded through industrial, commercial, and household activity alike. Agricultural output contracted sharply. Manufacturing costs escalated. Livelihoods dependent on consistent electricity supply, from small salons and barbershops to larger processing facilities, were materially disrupted. The subsequent recovery in rainfall in the 2024/25 season has partially restored energy generation capacity, and this recovery accounts for a meaningful component of the GDP rebound projected for 2025/26. It is worth noting, however, that a recovery from crisis is not equivalent to structural progress. Recognising the strategic and developmental imperative of energy security, the government has initiated a landmark intervention through the Presidential Constituency Energy Initiative. Under this programme, a solar power plant of two megawatts generating capacity is to be installed in each of Zambia’s 156 constituencies. At full implementation, this initiative would add a combined 312 megawatts of distributed solar capacity to the national energy mix, a not insignificant supplement, particularly for rural constituencies currently marginalised from the national grid. Beyond the raw generation figures, the constituency-level distribution model carries the potential for genuinely transformative local impact: powering rural health posts, irrigation pumps, schools, and small enterprises in communities where energy poverty has long constrained economic participation. The execution risk, however, is real. The procurement, installation, maintenance, and institutional governance of 156 simultaneous solar installations demands administrative capacity and financial resources that must be carefully safeguarded against the twin pressures of fiscal austerity and political interference. Compounding the domestic energy challenge is the increasingly volatile external environment. The current instability in the Middle East, a region that supplies a disproportionate share of global petroleum output and serves as a critical node in international oil shipping lanes, carries material implications for Zambia’s import bill. Should geopolitical tensions escalate further, oil prices are likely to exceed current forecasting assumptions, increasing the cost of transportation, industrial generation, and agricultural inputs such as fuel for mechanised farming. For a landlocked country dependent on long overland freight routes, higher oil prices are not a localised inconvenience; they are an inflationary input that permeates the entire cost structure of the economy. The energy transition investments being pursued domestically will ultimately reduce this vulnerability, but the transitional period remains a window of exposure that demands both contingency planning and fiscal prudence. The broader climate trajectory adds a further layer of systemic risk. Zambia’s hydroelectric infrastructure, while nationally significant, is structurally vulnerable to the increasing variability of rainfall patterns that characterise climate change in southern Africa. The Batoka Gorge Hydropower Project on the Zambezi River represents an ambitious and strategically important investment. Similarly, the development of regional infrastructure corridors linking Zambia to coastal ports in Tanzania and Angola offers the promise of reduced logistics costs and enhanced market access. These are, without question, the right investments. Their long gestation periods, however, mean that the economy’s exposure to climatic and geopolitical shocks remains acute in the near to medium term.

V. The contraction of developmental resources

The 2026 national budget allocated K33 billion to education and K26.2 billion to health, nominally increased figures that nonetheless leave both sectors significantly underfunded relative to their obligations and the developmental needs they are called upon to address. The health allocation sustains a K21 billion financing gap against Zambia’s commitments under the Abuja Declaration, which obligates African governments to dedicate no less than 15% of public expenditure to health. Education’s proportional share of the overall budget has, in real terms, declined. The aspirational commitments to recruit additional teachers and health workers are commendable in direction but uncertain in resourcing. Into this environment of constrained domestic social sector financing comes a further and potentially underappreciated structural challenge: the contraction of donor funding to Zambia’s social sectors. For decades, international development partners: bilateral donors, multilateral agencies, and international non-governmental organisations, have been critical co-financiers of Zambia’s health, education, nutrition, and social protection programmes. The current period of global fiscal retrenchment among traditional donor nations, compounded by shifting geopolitical priorities and donor fatigue in several development assistance portfolios, is producing a measurable contraction in the external resource envelope available to Zambia’s social ministries. Programmes in HIV/AIDS treatment, maternal and child health, food assistance, and cash transfer schemes that have historically relied on donor co-financing face the prospect of resource gaps that domestic budgetary allocations are poorly positioned to fill in the short term. The implications of this contraction extend well beyond the balance sheet. The loss of donor support in health, for example, risks reversing hard-won gains in antiretroviral therapy coverage, maternal mortality reduction, and vaccination rates, progress built over years that can be unwound with disquieting rapidity under conditions of resource shortage. Social protection programmes that have extended thin but critical safety nets to the most vulnerable households may face coverage reductions at precisely the moment when elevated living costs are deepening the exposure of low-income families. Zambia must, therefore, urgently develop a credible and adequately resourced domestically funded social protection architecture that is not contingent on the continuance of external generosity. The dependency of social sector delivery on donor goodwill is itself a form of structural vulnerability that warrants policy attention commensurate with its severity. In the famous words of Adam Smith, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. The HIV/AIDS burden places a chronic and resource-intensive demand on the health system. Rural communities remain structurally disconnected from productive opportunity through inadequate infrastructure. The convergence of these challenges with contracting donor financing constitutes a human development crisis in slow motion, one that does not manifest in dramatic headlines but accumulates, quietly and devastatingly, across populations and generations.

VI. The political economy of an election year as fiscal prudence is under pressure

Zambia approaches its 2026 general elections with a government that carries a legitimately mixed but broadly creditable macroeconomic record. President Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND administration, which assumed office in August 2021 on a mandate built substantially on the promise of economic rectification, have achieved meaningful stabilisation: the kwacha is stronger, inflation is declining, the IMF programme has been completed, and the sovereign debt restructuring has been concluded, albeit protracted and technically demanding. These are genuine achievements that deserve acknowledgement without equivocation. Elections, however, are not adjudicated in the register of macroeconomic indicators. They are determined, in significant measure, at the kitchen table: in the arithmetic of household budgets, in the price of mealie meal and cooking oil, in the perceived adequacy of the health post and the classroom. For the millions of Zambians whose material circumstances have not meaningfully improved despite aggregate stabilisation, the political dividend of macroeconomic management remains intangible. The risk in this environment is that fiscal discipline, the very discipline that secured the IMF imprimatur and the kwacha’s recovery,  is no match to the electoral logic of populist expenditure increases, subsidy expansions, and public sector wage adjustments calibrated more to political positioning than to fiscal sustainability. The fiscal implications of the electoral cycle are further amplified by a structural development of considerable consequence: the increase in the number of constituencies from 156 to 226 mandated by the Constitution of Zambia (Amendment) Bill No. 7 of 2025. Each additional constituency created generates a cascade of attendant expenditure obligations including the establishment of new constituency offices and administrative infrastructure, the recruitment and deployment of additional electoral officers, the extension of the Presidential Constituency Energy Initiative (discussed above) to accommodate the new units, the funding of bye-elections and ultimately full general election logistics across a larger number of electoral units, and the ongoing parliamentary representation costs of additional Members of Parliament. The recurrent cost implication of constituency expansion is, accordingly, not a one-time electoral expense but a permanent adjustment to the base of public sector obligation, one that must be absorbed within a fiscal envelope already under the dual pressure of debt servicing and social sector underfunding. Prudent fiscal planning requires that this structural expenditure increase be explicitly costed, transparently disclosed, and managed with the same rigour applied to other categories of public expenditure. The ZIPAR and United Nations analyses of the 2026 national budget identify with precision the governing tension: the budget must simultaneously sustain the fiscal consolidation that has been so painfully won and respond to urgent, legitimate, and politically resonant social needs. All these should be done while navigating the expenditure pressures of an election year compounded by structural expansion. This is a governance challenge of the highest order, and the manner in which it is navigated will have consequences that extend well beyond the polling cycle.

VII. The copper dependency and the imperative of structural transformation

Copper has been simultaneously Zambia’s most consequential asset and its most persistent developmental constraint. The global energy transition — driven by the accelerating deployment of electric vehicles, photovoltaic solar systems, wind turbine technology, and grid-scale energy storage — has generated sustained upward pressure on copper demand, affording Zambia a favourable medium-term positioning in the global commodity landscape. Mining sector foreign direct investment is materialising. Refined copper output is rising. The government has pursued active industrial policy to leverage this commodity moment through economic zones, smelting investments, and infrastructure development. Yet the structural vulnerability inherent in commodity dependence has been demonstrated with sufficient frequency in Zambia’s post-independence economic history to require no elaborate theoretical elaboration. When copper prices contracted between 2015 and 2017, fiscal revenues collapsed, the kwacha depreciated sharply, and poverty deepened. The causal chain from a global commodity price movement to a Zambian household’s access to healthcare or education is, in Zambia’s case, disturbingly direct and disturbingly short. Diversification of the productive base, into processed agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, information technology services, and regional logistics, is not a long-term aspiration to be deferred to a more convenient fiscal moment; it is a structural imperative whose deferral imposes a compounding cost on the country’s developmental trajectory.

VIII. Conclusion

The Eagles sang of a gilded entrapment, a mirrored corridor from which guests, however willing their initial arrival, discover that there is no mechanism of departure. Zambia’s economic conditions are neither gilded nor metaphorical. They are constituted by real debt obligations, a real climate crisis, real inequality of a magnitude that diminishes the developmental relevance of aggregate growth, and real policy decisions whose cumulative consequences have accrued across decades. But unlike the passive inhabitants of the Hotel California, Zambians are not merely occupants of their circumstances. They are farmers, miners, teachers, entrepreneurs, health workers, and citizens who carry the weight of structural disadvantage and continue, with remarkable resilience, to construct meaningful lives within it. The macroeconomic stabilisation underway is substantive, and its preservation is a non-negotiable precondition of any credible developmental trajectory. But stabilisation economic fundamentals, understood as an end rather than a foundation, is insufficient. The pace of poverty reduction, projected at approximately 1% per annum, is inadequate to the urgency of the human condition it purports to address. At that rate, the reduction of poverty to tolerable levels is a multi-generational enterprise. The contraction of donor financing, the energy insecurity compounded by global oil price volatility, the fiscal pressures generated by constituency expansion, and the recurrent social spending gaps left by the withdrawal of external partners all represent structural headwinds whose cumulative weight demands not incremental management but strategic ambition. Zambia possesses, in meaningful abundance, the foundational ingredients of transformative development: a young and growing population, substantial mineral wealth, significant agricultural potential, a relatively stable democratic tradition, and an institutional architecture that functions, however imperfect and underfunded. What it requires is a governing philosophy that subordinates short-term electoral calculus to long-term structural investment; a political economy of patience and discipline in which the Presidential Constituency Energy Initiative is rigorously executed rather than rhetorically declared; in which social sector spending is domestically anchored rather than donor-contingent; in which constituency expansion is fiscally planned rather than institutionally improvised; and in which the diversification of the productive economy is pursued with the urgency that its strategic importance demands.

Sources

1. World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook (October 2025)
2. International Monetary Fund, Extended Credit Facility Sixth Review
3. ZIPAR/UN Zambia 2026 Budget Analysis Report
4. Zambia Statistics Agency (ZamStats), Consumer Price Index Reports 2025–2026
5. African Development Bank, Zambia Economic Outlook 2025
6. Electoral Commission of Zambia, Constituency Delimitation Report
7. Zambia Ministry of Finance, 2026 Budget Address
8. Trading Economics, Zambia Macroeconomic Indicators
9. Statista, Zambia Gini Coefficient Series
10. ZambiaInvest, Mining Sector FDI Reports 2025.
11. The Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR), Basic Needs and Nutrition Basket (BNNB) (February 2026)

The Clock Doesn’t Wait

When I was young, we had a humongous wall clock which would strike a tune at every hour. I never heard the clock ticking. I rushed everywhere and arrived nowhere, convinced myself that there would always be more time. It never announced itself; it simply ticked while I confused movement with meaning.

Decades later, I feel the weight of years I scarcely noticed gathering quietly. The dreams that once shouted with urgency now whisper in a language I must strain to understand. I had an epiphany: the clock never sped up. I simply stopped ignoring it and started hearing every tick and tock.

In all this, I’ve watched many friends and family pass to the other side. For those still walking this earth, their dark hair has surrendered to silver. I have witnessed lovers who promised each other forever only to become strangers before the hour has fully turned. A hospital corridor clock clicked through a long night while life quietly slipped from present into memory. Memories blur and soften, but the clock remains precise and unwavering.

You see, we rage against time, but it is indifferent. We bargain, plead, or sometimes pretend not to hear it. But time does not negotiate. Unlike Dorian Gray, whose portrait absorbed the cost of time, we are doomed to carry ours in plain sight. The mirror, time’s quiet accomplice, equally grants no mercy. When you make the mistake of checking yourself in the mirror, there is no comfort there, only the quiet confirmation of clock hands that never stop moving. Each line you see on your face, and each bone that aches or cracks when you stand or stretch, is the time’s unmistakable signature.

If you are still young and are still wrapped in the illusion of invincibility, here this: the clock does not wait. It offers no extensions to the late bloomer and no grace period for hesitation. It ticks whether you resent its haste or revere its lessons. Life rarely announces its turning points; it simply moves forward while you are still deciding.

Though time is linear, the tragedy is not reaching your final hour. It is arriving there without having truly lived because you allowed fear, distraction or pride to steal the moments meant to matter. Moments of connection. Moments that ask nothing more than your presence. The clock keeps count; we decide what counts.

So, on this day, I stand in front of the mirror not in denial but in acceptance. I bow down and kiss the ring, acknowledging that the clock does not wait. It never has. It never will. Yet time’s indifference is not cruelty, it is simply the condition of life. Within its unyielding rhythm lies something extraordinary, the space to choose. Either to grieve what slips away or cherish what remains. Either to curse the ticking away of time or dance while the music still plays. However, what we cannot keep, we can still honour. Hold a hand without hurry. Notice each breath while it is still yours. Give your day to what really matters.

May your years ahead be measured not merely in time passed, but in moments deeply lived. Like the love boldly given, beauty intentionally noticed or courage quietly practiced. May you dance while the music plays and recognize the melody while it still plays.

The clock doesn’t wait.

Neither should you.

Small Shoulders. Heavy Burdens.

The first Friday the 13th of 2026 has arrived, a date long associated with bad luck among the superstitious. This year brings a rare triple occurrence, as the 13th day of the month falls on a Friday in February, March and November. While the idea that Friday the 13th is unlucky can be dismissed as mere superstition, the day remains culturally significant. Even if its power lies only in what people believe about it, that belief alone makes it noteworthy. And for many, the superstition is still very real.

While many fear a calendar date, for a young girl in Gwembe, 'bad luck' isn't a superstition, it is a permanent resident in her home. 

During my last travel, I encountered a story that still weighs heavily on my heart to this hour. It is the kind of story that stays with you long after you walk away. Like a shadow on a sunny October day. A Friday the 13th horror story.

Mary (not her real name) is a 10-year-old girl living a life no child should ever endure. She lives with her mother, let’s call her Jane, who suffers from epilepsy.

Based on available records and historical timelines, I estimate Jane to be about 27 years old. Mary was born under circumstances Jane cannot bring herself to discuss. Within the community, painful whispers persist. Whispers of abuse, superstition and cruelty. From what were able to piece together, both Mary and her baby sister were likely conceived by men who believed the myth that sleeping with a woman who has epilepsy would bring them wealth or protect them from imagined danger.

Whatever the origins of these beliefs, whether rooted in superstition or fear, their impact is tragically real. Three innocent lives are now bearing the consequences of these harmful and deeply entrenched practices. Mary is not Jane’s only child. There is also Ruth (also not her real name) who is just eight months old, still a baby and entirely dependent on her mother’s care.

When Jane suffers an epileptic episode, the world stops for this family. And in those moments, it is 10-years old Mary who carries out everything. She becomes the caregiver, the decision-maker, the protector. She watches over her mother as her body convulses and sometimes dashes to the healthcare facility to ask for help. Regardless of the hour and that healthcare facility is about 2 Km away from where they live. She soothes and carries along her crying baby sister. She manages fear, hunger, uncertainty and responsibility all at once. Mary has no childhood to remember: no space for play, no room for dreams. Her days are shaped by survival. At an age when she should be learning, laughing and being held, she is instead holding everyone else together.

And the other relatives? Surely someone should be there, after all we respect the extended family system in Zambia. Surely family should matter. Yet no one could give us a clear answer on where other family members are or live.

We documented this heartbreaking reality and reported it to the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS). We are committed to following up with the relevant authorities. Our hope is that this family will be placed on the Social Cash Transfer programme and relocated to an environment where Jane can receive proper medical care, where Ruth can grow safely and where Mary can finally experience what it means to be a child. They need a radical shift in their fortunes like yesterday.

At first glance, this may appear to be an isolated tragedy: one family, one community, one painful story. But stories like Mary’s do not exist in isolation. They ripple outward, touching our society in ways we often choose not to see. When a child is forced to grow up too soon, when superstition replaces humanity and when silence stands in for responsibility, the cost is carried by all of us.

Mary and Ruth are not just victims of circumstance; they are mirrors held up to our collective conscience. If help does not come now, what kind of future awaits them? What kind of adults are we allowing them to become: shaped by fear, neglect and survival instead of care, protection and love?

Mary shouldn't have to spend her whole life 'goodwill hunting' like scavenging for the basic kindness and safety that should be her birthright.

A society is ultimately judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. If we allow children like Mary to carry burdens meant for adults, we are not merely failing one family, we are quietly accepting a future built on abandonment. There is still time to intervene, to protect and to restore what has been taken.

But time, like childhood, does not wait.