L'umano

*Economist📊| *Investment analyst💵💴

[Liverpool FC @LFC]

Welcome to the Reds, Andoni 👋

[M 🇿🇲🇹🇿 @mutachisanga1]

1. Council still advertizes plots at as low as K10,000 inclusive of survey and recommendation fees.
2. Car Parks at Malls are still free.
3. There is alot of traditional land you can manage to title for leasehold all by yourself.

[Ousmane Dembélé @dembouz]

Back to back!

[Samuel @SamueILFC]

Gabriel missing the most decisive penalty couldn’t have happened to the biggest scumbag in football.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Laurie @LFCLaurie]

That couldn’t have happened to a better player 😭😭😭

[Harry Kent @ITFCHIBBZ]

I don’t care who they are, whenever English teams play in Europe I want them to win!

So come on Villa, palace and PSG !

[The Native Son of Bulawayo @BulawayoForever]

When you meet a Zambian shake their hand, this country carried SADC during Liberation Wars till to the end 🙏🏽🙏🏽

[Dean N Onyambu @InfinitelyDean]

Zambia's Emigration Puzzle

This is an interesting post from Dingindaba Jonah Buyoya (@BuyoyaJonah), and the conversation that followed made me dig deeper. Buyoya cites UN DESA data showing roughly 122,000 Zambians living abroad, about 0.59 per cent of the population. He also notes that Zambia has around 249,000 foreign-born residents. Emigration estimates for Zambia vary by source and methodology, and some counts are higher, but the relative picture is consistent across all of them: a thin diaspora and a low outflow rate. Buyoya attributes this to love of home. He also raises a point worth holding: Zambia's population may be too small relative to its land mass for the pressure to have built. At roughly 27 people per square kilometre, compared with Nigeria at 238 or Rwanda above 530, the domestic system has more slack. People can adjust internally before emigration becomes the rational calculation.

I want to suggest a complementary explanation.

In 2023, I conducted a study on Zambian investment behaviour. One finding cut across nearly every variable I tested: information was the binding constraint. Respondents with higher financial literacy moved toward diversified, higher-risk products. Those without it defaulted to conservative positions. They had no basis on which to evaluate alternatives, so they avoided them. The channel through which information actually travelled was personal networks. The proof point that reduced perceived risk was someone they knew who had taken the risk and come through it. The pattern presented as risk aversion. But it was better explained by information access. People who could see the terrain took risk. People who could not, avoided it.

Emigration, like investing in an unfamiliar asset class, can carry the weight of an irreversible commitment under radical uncertainty, where the cost of failure is severe and the available data cannot settle the matter. In that environment, the testimony of a trusted contact becomes the dominant decision input. I want to use the investment finding as a lens for reading Buyoya's numbers. A lens, to be clear, rather than proof.

Africa's large emigrant populations appear to be produced by two broad engines, with a third hybrid. The first I would call extinction. Ethiopians fled the Red Terror under Mengistu. Eritreans fled indefinite conscription under Isaias. Somalis fled state collapse after 1991. Sudanese have been displaced by civil wars, Darfur, and the current conflict since April 2023. Congolese and Rwandans fled war and genocide. In each case, staying was potentially lethal. People left because they had to, and those forced first waves seeded diaspora networks that lowered the information and practical cost for everyone who followed.

The second I would call choice. I am Kenyan. I know this one from the inside. Kenyans and Nigerians emigrate from functioning systems where domestic opportunity falls short of domestic need. Some go through professional and educational pipelines to London, Houston, and Toronto. Many go through labour corridors into nursing, care work, and service roles in the Gulf, the UK, and elsewhere. Colonial and post-colonial connections established early pathways, and the networks that formed made each subsequent departure easier to imagine and to execute. The routes span the full skill spectrum. The common thread is that someone went first and made the next person's calculation legible.

South Africa adds a third pattern. Successive emigration waves before and after 1994, driven by political upheaval, built dense networks in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. An estimated 520,000 South Africans emigrated between 1989 and 2003. The post-1994 wave was driven by crime, economic policy uncertainty, and professional calculation. The trigger had changed, but the infrastructure the earlier waves built carried the movement. Prior coercion seeded the networks. Subsequent choice ran through them.

Zambia experienced none of these at sufficient scale. And the 1990s are the hardest test of this argument. Zambia entered structural adjustment in 1992, simultaneously hit by severe drought. Copper revenues had been falling for two decades. The country carried an extreme debt burden. A sweeping privatisation programme began in 1992. This was genuine economic devastation.

Yet there was no mass emigration. The crisis had been building since the mid-1970s, and two decades of gradual decline had already produced deep patterns of coping. Zambia is landlocked. Regional options were constrained, with most neighbours either unstable or offering limited absorption capacity, and long-haul destinations required networks that did not exist. For much of the long crisis, exchange controls and foreign exchange scarcity raised the cost of exit, even after major remaining restrictions were eased in 1994. And during this same period, Zambia was receiving refugees from the DRC, Angola, and Rwanda. The national identity that formed was as a host. The infrastructure of departure simply did not exist.

Buyoya's demographic point and the information thesis meet here. Lower density meant lower outward pressure. Lower pressure meant fewer people crossed the emigration threshold. Fewer crossings meant fewer diaspora pioneers. Fewer pioneers meant a thinner information environment. And thin information environments produce behaviour that looks like risk aversion but is better understood as rational response to an illegible environment. When people cannot read the risk, they do not take it. That is what I found in Zambian investment portfolios. I suspect it is what Buyoya's emigration numbers are showing. The caution is real, but it is not a national trait. It is the predictable output of a historical sequence that never built the architecture through which risk becomes calculable.

Buyoya opened a good door with this data. I think the puzzle deserves a wider conversation.

[Mufuka @tallzedgirl]

People talk about Zambian independence like it was a formality. We swapped a flag, got a new national anthem, and a bunch of Britons left. Let me show you what life actually looked like for a black person in Northern Rhodesia and why freedom was worth fighting for🧵

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

@CF_Compss Please God, I hope so

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

Does this mean part of Zambia would be split too?🤔🤔

[Pubity @pubity]

Africa is slowly splitting in half and turning into two continents.

The East African Rift is already visible, with this massive valley destined to one day become an ocean.

[The Mining Guy. 👷🏾‍♂️ @TheMiningGuySA]

This could mean we will have a beach in Gauteng. I’m not complaining.

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

Yalikosa, coleslaw no bwali 😳😳😳

[uMaSimelane 🇵🇸 @sibane_s]

wednesday night supper 👩🏾‍🍳

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

@YUNG_CITY_LFC They should start from Liverpool Roy Hodgkin era mu 2010��

[Dr. God Abeg ooo @josh_uglyasf]

😆😆😆😆😆 that name tho…

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

@YUNG_CITY_LFC The excited I felt when they didn’t win 😂😂

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

@YUNG_CITY_LFC Mmmmm bushe tukatushapo?🙆🏽‍♂️

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

@YUNG_CITY_LFC 😂😂😂😂😂💀💀💀💀💀💀TF

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

@YUNG_CITY_LFC I’m waiting for that. Having watched Florian gliding on pitch yesterday was food for my soul

[L'umano @KalungaLumano]

That’s is the calmness we needed from Darwin

[PENG TONGA BULL ♐🔴⁹⁶ @YUNG_CITY_LFC]

There's a certain way this boy calms down before the scoring shot! Insanely calculative!