When the President says Slow Actions “Piss Him Off”.

By Savior Mwambwa

I was intrigued by a recent News Diggers headline that almost wrote itself. “President Hichilema says slow actions piss him off”.

The article received various kinds of reactions across the political sphere in Zambia. I want to make a different argument. Not to defend the President from political criticism, which is legitimate and necessary in any democracy. But to defend the quality of our public conversation about what is actually wrong with the Zambian state and what it will take to fix it.

Because when President Hichilema says his government is too slow in getting things done, he is not having a bad day. He is naming something structurally true. And the correct response from citizens, analysts, and yes, political opponents, is not ridicule. It is to take the diagnosis seriously and demand the treatment.

The claim that the President is the architect of his own slowness is superficially satisfying but substantively empty. It assumes that a head of state in a centralised, under-resourced, post-colonial bureaucracy can simply will the machinery of government into motion through personal energy and political resolve.

History across Africa from Ghana to Kenya to Mozambique tells a different story. Presidents with stronger majorities, larger administrations, and far longer track records have broken themselves against exactly this problem.

The question is never whether the President wants things to move faster. Every president does. The question is whether the structural conditions exist for things to actually move. And in Zambia, many of those conditions do not yet exist.

Blaming the President for bureaucratic inertia without offering any account of what creates that inertia is not political analysis. It is political point-scoring. Zambians headed into an election year deserve better from their opposition.

What Is Actually Causing the Slowness?

Three structural pathologies explain most of what President Hichilema is frustrated by, and none of them began in August 2021.

The incentive problem : In the Zambian civil service, doing something wrong can end your career. Doing nothing slowly, almost never does.

When the system punishes commission but not omission, rational officials choose delay. Every directive that circles for weeks, every procurement that stalls at approval, every Cabinet decision that fails to translate into action at provincial level this is not malice. It is the system working exactly as its incentive architecture was designed to work.

Fix the incentives and you change the behaviour. Do nothing about incentives and no amount of presidential frustration will shift the needle.

The authority problem : Zambia’s public procurement and financial management frameworks are heavily centralised. This was a deliberate design choice after years of fiscal indiscipline and corruption. But centralisation has a direct cost: it creates bottlenecks.

Significant decisions require multiple layers of sign-off. Competent mid-level officials who could act are waiting for approval from Permanent Secretaries who are waiting for Minister sign-off. The architecture produces exactly the delays the President is complaining about.
*The talent problem* : The civil service promotion system is seniority-heavy. Time in grade is treated as a proxy for capability. Technically strong officers are locked below people who accumulated years rather than results.

This is not a new problem. It predates UPND, PF, MMD and, frankly, independence. But it will not fix itself.

What the President’s Government Can Actually Do

Here is where I want to move the conversation, because criticism without a constructive alternative is its own form of laziness. The tools for fixing this are known.

The developmental state literature, and the practical track record of countries like Rwanda, Botswana, and Malaysia, offer a clear enough playbook.

Give the Presidential Delivery Unit the teeth it needs . Zambia already has a PDU. President Hichilema established it in March 2023, it sits in State House, it answers directly to him, and it is headed by the capable Ms. Kusobile Kamwambi, who has done serious work standing up nine priority interventions spanning maternal health, CDF utilisation, essential medicines, digital inclusion, and copper production. Credit where it is due. The question is whether it has the institutional muscle to do what the moment requires. Three things would sharpen its effectiveness considerably.
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1. Public accountability_ :_ the PDU should publish quarterly scorecards against its nine priority interventions, with traffic-light ratings visible to citizens, not just to State House. Transparency is the cheapest accountability mechanism available.

2.Blockage escalation authority_ : Ms. Kamwambi and her team need an explicit, documented mandate to formally flag ministries and Permanent Secretaries that are creating delivery bottlenecks, with a direct line to the President that cannot be intercepted by Cabinet Office protocol.

3.Budget visibility: the PDU’s priority programmes should have ring-fenced budget lines that cannot be raided mid-year through supplementary estimates.

The mandate maybe there. Now it needs the power to match it.

Convert presidential frustration into structured internal accountability . The instinct to express frustration publicly is understandable. But the more powerful move is to make accountability unavoidable inside the system.

Weekly Permanent Secretary-level delivery reviews, chaired by the Head of Civil Service, with a standing agenda: what was committed, what was delivered, what is blocking progress, who is responsible for removing that block. These meetings should be non-negotiable, its outputs circulated to Ministers, and its findings visible to the President. Public venting can supplement internal accountability. It cannot substitute for it.

Use the IMF successor programme as a reform lever. This is a point largely missed in Zambian political commentary. The government successfully completed its 38-month Extended Credit Facility arrangement in January 2026, unlocking the final US$190 million tranche and closing out US$1.7 billion in total programme support. The government has now signalled it will negotiate a new growth-oriented successor programme with the IMF rather than a simple extension. That transition is an institutional opportunity. Successor programme negotiations give the President legitimate grounds to push for structural reforms in public financial management, procurement thresholds, and civil service performance architecture that might otherwise face internal resistance. External frameworks, deployed tactically, give leaders cover to do what the internal system resists.

Go narrow and deep before going broad . The temptation in an election year is to demonstrate activity everywhere. The reform evidence says that is the wrong strategy. Pick five to eight high-visibility delivery programmes, ring-fence their resources, inject the best available talent, set non-negotiable milestones, and use those early wins to build political capital for wider reform.
E.g the agriculture input programme, ZESCO’s turnaround, the road infrastructure pipeline: exactly the kinds of high-impact areas where a focused presidential accountability push can produce visible results before August.
*The Agency Question: Who Has the Power to Change This*

Here is the argument that Zambian political discourse consistently avoids. The President has more structural power to fix the civil service than any other actor in the system. But he cannot do it by being frustrated. He can do it by building the institutions that make slowness costly and delivery rewarding.

And it is not only the President. Cabinet Ministers hold genuine constitutional authority over their line ministries. A Minister who sets clear 90-day delivery targets for their Permanent Secretary, who runs a weekly performance review, who publicly champions results and confronts failure within their portfolio, is a change agent.

Too many ministerial portfolios in too many African governments are treated as resource allocation exercises. They must be treated as delivery mandates.

The UPND’s parliamentary majority is an underutilised reform instrument. A Civil Service Reform Bill, a revised procurement threshold framework, a performance management amendment: these could move through the National Assembly with relative speed if prioritised. They have not been.

That is a choice. Choices can be changed.

The Zambian diaspora, business community, and civil society also have a role. Not just as cheerleaders or critics but as accountability partners who demand specifics: not just that things move faster, but that the systems enabling speed are built and maintained.

Reality Check
None of this is technically difficult. The frameworks exist and the reform designs are well understood.
What makes civil service reform hard in Zambia, as everywhere, is political economy.

The civil service is not only a delivery mechanism. For hundreds of thousands of families, it is a social protection system. It absorbs graduates. It distributes patronage. It manages pressures that have historically been sources of political instability. Any serious reform agenda runs directly into these realities.

The risk in an election year is that presidential frustration becomes a pressure-release valve rather than a reform catalyst. That the announcement of new accountability structures substitutes for the harder work of actually enforcing them. That Zambia in 2026 looks busier but delivers no faster than it did when President Hichilema took office.

That outcome is not inevitable. The macroeconomic gains of the past four years are real and hard-won. GDP growth at 5.2 percent in 2025, gross international reserves at US$5.5 billion, a kwacha that appreciated by over 21 percent last year, a sovereign credit rating upgrade: these are not small things. They create a platform.

The question is whether the government can convert macroeconomic stabilisation into visible, felt improvement in the pace and quality of state services.

Conclusion

The President is right to be frustrated. The Zambian state is too slow. Its incentives reward caution over results. Its authority architecture creates bottlenecks by design. Its talent management systems suppress the very competence that delivery requires.

Harry Kalaba is also right about one thing, though not in the way he intended: the President is the person most positioned to fix this. Not by venting, but by building. Not by naming the problem publicly, but by constructing the accountability systems that make the problem impossible to ignore inside the machinery of government.

The frustration is the diagnosis. What Zambia needs now is the treatment.

Savior Mwambwa is a Zambian development economist and public policy analyst . He writes on African political economy, development finance, and governance. Views expressed are person al.