THE story of how the Patriotic Front plunged Zambia into a debt crisis is one which has been told repeatedly. Using borrowed money, with no repayment plan, they went on a spending spree, commissioning projects and using them for successive campaigns. A lot of our people are not analytical, so they applauded the PF and Mr Edgar Lungu for scoring high on infrastructure development, without even taking the resulting corruption into consideration. But as time went by, reality started to reflect on the country’s external debt figures. The result of this runaway debt was that government budgets were increasingly diverted towards debt service. By 2019, debt service became the largest spending category, accounting for more than 30% of expenditure. This...