President Hichilema Urges Great Lakes Region To Stop Fighting Fires, Start Preventing Them

Twenty years after the Great Lakes region set up its own organisation to deal with conflict, President Hakainde Hichilema has a blunt message for its members: it is time to stop only putting out fires and start preventing them.

Speaking at the 20th anniversary meeting of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), the President said the reasons the body was created are "still valid today, perhaps even more valid" than before. He urged members to "transition from conflict resolution to conflict prevention."

His argument was simple. Some of the causes of conflict, he said, are economic. When citizens are shut out of their own economies, or feel they are, they move, and the pressure lands on their neighbours. "If we are underperforming in Zambia, the stress extends to you," he told the room, adding that Zambia's growth plans and the region's go "hand in glove."

That is why, he said, member countries should look to each other first. Too often, he argued, the region assumes investors and buyers will come from Europe, the Americas or Asia, while neighbours who share history and family ties across borders drawn long ago sit next door. He wants countries to "buy within the Great Lakes region first, before we buy elsewhere."

Food is part of that. The President said Zambia is aiming for 10 million tonnes of maize, 3 million tonnes of soybeans, 1 million tonnes of wheat and 1 million tonnes of sugar a year, much of it for the region and not only for Zambians. "When people have eaten, they behave differently than when they are hungry," he said.

Mining, which he said sometimes fuels conflict, got four rules: every operation must be legal, safe, formal, and must not breed insecurity. He said he refused calls from party colleagues to ease off on illegal mining before the August elections because of the cost in votes, saying no parent wants a son to leave home for a pit and never return. He also warned against using mercury to clean gold, which pollutes water. "If we in Zambia say we will not export insecurity arising from mining to our sister countries, and the other countries in the Great Lakes region do the same, we move towards solving the problems for which we created this body 20 years ago," he said.

On the economy, the President said inflation was 24 per cent when his government took over in 2021 and is now 6.1 per cent, though higher fuel prices linked to the Middle East remain a threat. He also voiced frustration at the long wait for the Zambia-Tanzania power interconnector, saying he is "actually angry about it."

He ended with a challenge to the organisation itself: turn talk into deadlines. He asked the chair and secretariat to deliver "specific deliverables" through their action matrix. If the region gets it right, he said, the United Nations and the African Union will have less to do here.