This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers. Names and identifying details have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
I grew up in Mufulira, in a neighbourhood where the copper smelter's chimney was visible from every house. The smell of sulphur was the smell of home. My father worked at Mopani mine — first under ZCCM, then after privatisation. He was proud to be a miner. The whole Copperbelt was proud. Copper was our identity.
But the pride came with a cost that we are only now understanding. Studies have found elevated lead and copper levels in the soil and water around Mufulira. Children in our neighbourhood had higher rates of respiratory illness. The sulphur dioxide from the smelter caused acid rain that damaged roofs and killed gardens. These were the side effects of prosperity that nobody talked about because the mine was the economy. Criticising the mine was criticising the only employer in town.
When Glencore operated Mopani, there were promises of environmental improvement. Some improvements were made — a new smelter technology reduced visible emissions. But the legacy contamination remains in the soil, in the water, in the bodies of people who grew up breathing copper dust for decades. Glencore's sale of Mopani to ZCCM-IH transferred the asset — and the environmental liability — back to the Zambian state.
The Lobito Corridor promises to make Zambian copper more profitable by reducing transport costs. But profitability means nothing to communities like ours if it comes with continued environmental degradation. What we need is not more mining. We need cleaner mining, enforced environmental standards, and remediation of the contamination that decades of inadequately regulated operations left behind. The corridor's investors talk about ESG. We want to see ESG in our drinking water.
What the Mines Took
My grandfather worked in the mines when they were still owned by the government. He had a house, a pension, medical care. When the mines were privatised, he lost everything except the stories. He tells me about the days when Mufulira was a proud town — the sports clubs, the hospital that worked, the schools with proper teachers. Now I walk past the mine every morning on my way to school and I see the trucks carrying ore to the railway, and I wonder where the money goes.
The corridor they are building will pass near our house. My mother says it will bring jobs. My father says it will bring dust and noise. My grandmother says she has heard promises before. I am fifteen years old and I am already cynical about development promises, which is not how a teenager should feel about the future. But when you grow up in a place where the ground is worth billions and the people are worth nothing, cynicism is not pessimism — it is observation.
In school, we learn about copper — how it conducts electricity, how it is essential for modern life, how the Copperbelt produces millions of tonnes that go to factories in China and Europe. What we don't learn is why our school has no electricity. The copper that powers the world passes through our town, but our classrooms have no lights, no computers, no connection to the world that our minerals make possible. The irony is not lost on us, even at fifteen.
I want to study engineering. I want to understand how railways work, how ports operate, how minerals become the things people use. I want to come back to Mufulira and make sure the next generation of children does not grow up watching wealth leave their community. The corridor could make this possible — if it creates scholarships, if it builds proper schools, if it gives young people from the Copperbelt a path to professional careers rather than artisanal mining. That is what I would tell the investors: invest in us, not just in the ground beneath us.
More Voices
A Life Along the Corridor
The corridor passes through my world but it does not stop to ask how I am. Every day I watch the changes — the surveyors with their equipment, the construction workers arriving in trucks, the officials in their vehicles with tinted windows who come and go without speaking to us. They are building something enormous, something that will change everything, and we are spectators at a transformation that will determine our future.
My community has seen change before. We have survived changes we did not choose — the colonial period, independence, the decline of the mines, the privatisation that emptied our hospitals and schools. Each change came with promises. Each change left us with less than we had before. So when the corridor people come with their presentations and their projections and their promises of jobs and development, we listen politely and believe cautiously.
What we want is simple. We want to be asked, not told. We want to be consulted before decisions are made, not informed after they are finalised. We want the wealth that flows through our community to leave some trace of its passage — a school that functions, a clinic with medicine, roads that don't become rivers when it rains. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for the minimum that justice requires when billions of dollars flow through the land where our grandparents are buried.
I tell my story not because it is unique but because it is common. Every community along the corridor has stories like mine — stories of hope and disappointment, of promises made and broken, of wealth extracted and poverty left behind. If the corridor is truly different from what came before, let it begin by listening to these stories. Not because listening is polite, but because listening is how you learn what communities actually need rather than what outsiders assume they want.
Names changed for protection. Interview preserved with source verification.