Jack Zimba

Boygweda Petro standing on the bank of the Zambezi River near the spot where Maina Soko is believed to have died. Mayisana Soko remembers the day Maina Soko left her father’s home the day she died. PICTURES: JACK ZIMBA     Maina Soko: Who she really was The mystery woman revealed 55 years after she was shot dead   JACK ZIMBA IN 1965, a woman called Maina Soko was shot dead by the Southern Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) soldiers on the Zambezi River, in Chiawa area. The story would have ended there, but over the years, Maina Soko’s story became a source of conspiracy theories, triggered largely by the fact that a military hospital was named after her, as well as a major road in Ndola, and two other roads in Livingstone and Chipata respectively. Maina Soko Military Hospital in Lusaka was initially a maternity annex for the University Teaching Hospital, built in the 1960s. Then in 1979, it was converted into a military hospital to take care of military casualties of the liber...

     ON MAY 29, 2020, Minister of Energy Mathew Nkhuwa announced a new sweeping law that declared all transmission lines, including those belonging to the Copperbelt Energy Corporation (CEC), as a common carrier, ending the Lusaka Securities Exchange-listed company’s reign as the sole supplier of electricity to the Copperbelt, chiefly the mines. But the move is now playing like a bitter divorce with a cut-throat row over child custody between CEC and Zesco Limited. Zesco, a public institution, has over the years been hard done by the lopsided power deal and is now seeking parity or a reversal altogether. JACK ZIMBA reports.   THE marriage between Zesco and CEC that has lasted 23 years could best be described in one word – COMPLICATED. It all started in 1997 at the height of a World Bank-induced privatisation drive. Government was selling, with some companies, including mines, priced to go. But the conglomerate Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) w...

 ·     But is anyone getting any richer? A man holding a fleck of gold.  A gram of gold sells for K500.  A woman breaking stones. Add caption The miners use rudimentary tools to extract the gold. Inside one of the old tunnels in the mountain. Men carrying the stones down the mountain. Panning for gold.   JACK ZIMBA A MAN shows me a tiny yellowish speckle in the palm of his hand. It is so tiny that I have to pull his hand to my face in order to have a good look at what he is holding. It sparkles. “That is gold,” he tells me, his own eyes sparkling with excitement. Next to him, his colleague is meticulously swirling a small bowl containing muddy water and a shiny glob of mercury dancing in the middle. I had driven 40km north of Petauke Town to the newly-created Lusangazi District, branched off onto a winding bush track deep into a lash forest and reached a dead end at the foot of a mountain. The mountain is calle...