Zambia is starting to look like Zimbabwe, the failure next door

IN HIS STUDIOPF Fumba Chama gets ready to play his new song. Unlike in most Zambian workplaces there is no photograph on the wall of Edgar Lungu, the president since 2015. Looking down instead is a young Kenneth Kaunda, who led Zambia for 27 years after independence from Britain in 1964.If that is a silent protest, then out of the speakers comes a louder one. In “Coward of the County” Mr Chama raps laconically about Mr Lungu’s failings over—why not?—a sample of the song of the same name by the late Kenny Rogers, a bearded American country star. It is his latest track about how the ruling Patriotic Front () has crushed civic freedoms and crashed the economy. As if to prove his point, the authorities have repeatedly arrested and intimidated Mr Chama, whose stage name is PilAto. “People say I have no fear,” he says, “but I’m scared.”