William Fulton

The Mango Tree Orphan Support Programme, Kyela Polytechnic College, The Britain-Tanzania Society & Prohibited Immigrant

[Larry Madowo @LarryMadowo]

Sabastian Sawe didn't break the 2-hour marathon barrier just because of the Adidas "supershoe." He's a damn good athlete. These East Africans all are.

I had to tell the whole world on CNN. Everyone be guided. Thanks for your attention to this matter!

[Hopewell Chin’ono @daddyhope]

The outgoing American ambassador to Zambia, Michael C. Gonzales, has accused President Hakainde Hichilema’s government of corruption and dishonesty, stating that Hichilema’s fight against corruption is bogus and is selectively used to arrest and persecute political opponents. He made these remarks while delivering his farewell speech.

He said Zambia loses over US$4 billion annually through illicit or dirty financial flows, money leaving the country and not benefiting the Zambian people.

Full speech below

Remarks by Amb. Michael Gonzales
Farewell Reception – April 30, 2026

Good evening.

For decades, the U.S. relationship with Zambia was one centered around aid. The United States has provided billions of dollars of assistance to Zambia, helping the country reach HIV epidemic control, contributing to a 20-year increase in life expectancy, slashing malaria deaths, and truly impacting the lives of every Zambian alive today.

When we paused funding to review our assistance programs last year, so much of Zambia’s health system began to crumble almost overnight. Despite over $7 billion in U.S. health assistance since 2000 and the hard work of many Zambians alongside us, that crumbling system revealed that while we thought we were building capacity, successive Zambian governments had not built systems. Too often, Zambian officials and leaders abdicated their responsibilities, letting the United States pay for healthcare while officials diverted government funds to their own pockets.

Last year I shed tears before the world when I announced a $50 million cut in US health assistance. After years of pleading, I could no longer stand by while the Zambian government refused to stop or take action to hold people accountable for the systematic and nationwide theft of U.S. provided medicines while the Zambian citizens for whom those were intended went without.

One year later, not a single notable person has been arrested since last February. Not a single notable prosecution has even begun.

After last year’s pause, we resumed almost all of our health assistance, over $400 million including over $75 million in medication. We continue to pay the salaries for over 23,000 healthcare workers, as we have for decades. Such is the legacy of America’s support to the Zambian people.

Now, I know there have been alarmist allegations recently. But let me be clear, any suggestion that the United States would withhold critical life-saving healthcare support from those Zambians whose lives and health depend on it unless we get critical minerals is disgusting and patently false!

In reality, since October, my government has offered over $2 billion in additional health and economic assistance to Zambia. But we can no longer accept empty promises. The future must look different. The Zambian government must also increase Zambian funding, staffing, and genuine ownership of its systems. This is not to impose our will, it is the only way we know for Zambia to truly own a sustainable healthcare system and to enable robust growth. It is the only way we know to ensure that system serves the people while finally breaking the cycle of foreign aid dependency.

Since January, however, like with so many of our other overtures to the Zambian government, we have had effectively zero substantive engagement from Zambian officials to move these efforts forward. Our calls go ignored, questions unanswered, meetings cancelled, leaving us without even opportunities to speak, much less engage in substantive deliberations. Instead of continuing to languish without engagement, the actual funding under our Health MOU should have started this month. Instead, we have reached April 30 still cobbling together funds for mismatched projects without an implementation plan to guide us forward under Zambian leadership, much less a finalized MOU that guides our strategic approach.

We know that the Zambian budget cannot even afford to pay for public services today, not to mention the increased healthcare funding or the myriad other huge budget commitments that seem to get pledged daily. So, something has to change if Zambia will ever meet its full potential or be able to sustainably provide services to its own people.

At the same time, the Zambian government’s own reports reveal that every year Zambia loses over $4 billion in dirty money flows to East Asia. That is Zambian money that does not benefit the Zambian people or contribute to the budget. If taxed, that would bring an additional $1 billion for the government to fund healthcare, education, social services, and development.

Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars of government funds are lost to the Zambian people through corruption. Certainly, it is not just U.S. taxpayers’ support that is stolen. Every year, the country loses out on hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment and growth because they are hijacked by unmitigated petty corruption, blocked because law-abiding investors refuse to pay kickbacks to Zambian bureaucrats or leaders who are never held accountable.

The narrative of the U.S.-Zambia relationship is adorned with flowery words of “partnership,” “collaboration,” “strategic,” or “mutual.” Regrettably, the reality of our unrequited relationship for decades has been starkly different.

For years, the United States funded programs and sent technical advisors to help achieve Zambia’s development objectives. As we have for these past four months, we have often struggled to get successive governments to even bother answering the phone. It takes months to get a meeting that yields nothing. Officials draft policies they have no intention of implementing, invoking them only in speeches to sound like they are taking action. MOUs decay on the shelf among the others before the signing ceremony even ends, never to be implemented because the ministry will not even meet to discuss implementation. Why? Because generations of Zambian officials and leaders gain from the dysfunction.

The non-responsiveness on our availed funding and efforts to truly build a Zambian-owned health system that serves the Zambian people is sadly the norm. The theatre of commissioning a report to get a scandal out of the news cycle but taking no substantive action on accountability is all too common. Of course, the systematic theft of public resources is not unique to American-provided medicines. Attacking the messenger who dares to name these dynamics out loud is not limited to targeting the U.S. ambassador and asking Washington for his removal.

Today, 10% of my diplomats have family members who still have not received basic residency permits from the Zambian government. Several have received court summonses as a result. Like Zambians themselves experience, ZRA staff shake down my departing diplomats for fees that do not apply to them too. When elevated, their supervisors double down on the demand.

Zambia’s institutionalised and refined corruption does not only dissuade transparent and law-abiding investors from the United States. The inaction, corruption, and intimidation of opponents also harms American citizens, it undermines American organisations, NGOs, companies, and philanthropies. Zambians and so many other global friends of Zambia are also hampered by these very same dynamics, often bearing far more of the brunt of their effects.

America’s support to Zambia is long-standing. Our goodwill runs through the veins, the hearts, and the dreams of millions of Zambians. Our hands remain open, outstretched in a genuine, transparent offer of true, tangible, and meaningful collaboration for mutual benefit. But there must be change.

Going forward, the benefits of our relationship must be mutual. Empty promises must be replaced with tangible action. Commitments must be honoured, laws must be implemented and enforced consistently and equally. The decades of paying for healthcare while national resources are pocketed must give way to ownership and systematic improvements that enable growth, development, and accountability.

Since President Hichilema and I committed to reset the U.S.-Zambia relationship last July, America has redoubled our efforts to support robust Zambian agency. We have availed billions of dollars to support tangible investments and reforms to catalyse Zambia’s success. We have offered expert support to inform reforms that would systematically benefit both the Zambian people and their many friends from around the world, without bias or favour.

Sadly, so many of our overtures and goodwill have been met with, to use the most persistent and notorious of the Zambian government’s responses, “Noted. With thanks.”

But appointing a Director General of the Anti-Corruption Commission who was actively under investigation by the ACC, and her admonishment to her intentionally under-resourced agency not to investigate senior government officials, only cripples hopes that clean business can be done.

Last May, multiple senior government officials shared with me and have confirmed that the government has a 500-page expert report detailing the irreversible harm and risk of generations of birth defects, cancers, heart and liver disease caused by carcinogenic heavy metals unleashed into the Kafue River ecosystem by last year’s Sino Metals tailings dam disaster. But my heart broke when on July 29 last year, one of the country’s senior-most leaders vehemently denied that the government even had the report, much less would act on it until the polluter themselves provided it. I pleaded with her to take action to protect the Zambian people and I again offered U.S. assistance, which the Foreign Ministry had already formally declined.

While so many American prospective investors leave, put off by bureaucratic drudgery, inaction, and corruption, the Zambian government recently approved Sino Metals to expand its operations. Did this happen in the face of Zambia’s myriad impediments, or because of them? Today, Sino Metals is scarring game management areas abutting the Kafue National Park. When that tailings dam breaks, I will not be alone shedding tears.

Punctuating this, apart from the truly exceptional cases, too many American companies cannot get licences, approvals, or action on basic administrative matters without being shaken down to give brown envelopes of cash. The Zambian people suffer the consequences of these dual offences, exploitation and foregone opportunity.

When Parliament ignores the Constitutional Court’s ruling that the process used to ram through a constitutional amendment was itself unconstitutional, investors rightly ask, “If they can do that to the constitution, what does that mean for the sanctity of my contract?” They rightly wonder if the next constitutional amendment which the Attorney General has already announced is really just a guise for resetting term limits.

Even the Chinese government convicted AVIC’s Chairman to death for corruption. AVIC’s Chingola-Chililabombwe Road was washed out last month, its negligence disrupting Zambia’s trade with the region. AVIC’s fraud in a $320 million police housing tender in 2014 is well documented. Despite that, this government ignored the competitive bid by renowned Zambian investors only to award AVIC the $650 million Lusaka-Ndola Dual Carriageway project, subsidising this notoriously fraudulent and corrupt company with $300 million from the public pension scheme. How does this happen? Can law-abiding investors do clean business here? Will donors be asked to backfill the loss when the pension money too is wiped out?

The rhetoric of “no sacred cows” is rubbish when there are not any cows except those who are deemed to be disloyal. When only opponents are arrested, but not those in office engaged in the very same practices, the hollow rhetoric of “rule of law” only further keeps investors away, preventing the creation of growth, jobs, and tax revenues to pay for public service commitments.

Zambia does not need money. It needs leaders who govern for the people with integrity. It needs the political will to put Zambia first.

But, of course, you do not need me to say this. Dambisa Moyo, herself a daughter of the soil, made these same arguments 17 years ago.

What America is trying to do here is both bolster Zambia’s sovereignty and catalyse Zambia’s growth. We are offering a transparent and open hand to join the Zambian people for mutual progress. We know that while you pursue a Zambia First agenda and we pursue America First, we are still able together to achieve something notably better for both of our countries, and we can do so without it coming at anyone’s expense, anyone’s exclusion, fully transparently, and legally.

Now, of course, the United States will absolutely continue to honour our long-standing commitment to the Zambian people to provide critical life-saving healthcare support. We will not leave Zambians without access to ARVs. We are redoubling our support to ensure that babies are not born HIV-positive.

But, against the unmitigated systematic theft of U.S. assistance, against the refusal by the Zambian government to engage and to own or enable a sustainable healthcare system that serves the people, in an environment where only the most exceptional of American investors can do clean business, and where Zambian government officials often can scarcely be bothered to take meetings with American officials or companies, not to mention capture the billion dollars of its own money secreted out of the country to East Asia or hold accountable the company that unleashes generations of cancer and birth defects onto the people, without fundamental change, as the American Ambassador to the Republic of Zambia, how can I ask American taxpayers, Congress, or President Trump to continue the massive aid budgets that have been the hallmark of our relationship for decades?

The United States remains intent to work with Zambia toward our mutual objectives, but how Washington responds to silence, inaction, aversion to accountability, and lack of ownership remains to be seen. That said, I am confident that it will depend on fundamental changes by the Zambian government to take action to do right by the Zambian people. It will depend on actions to foster and enable the Zambian people, and their partners who abide by the rule of law, to be able to tangibly contribute to a mutually beneficial future.

Washington’s hand remains open and outreached for transparent, accountable collaboration enabling tangible action to benefit both of our countries. But we can no longer own the projects more than the Zambian government. We cannot justify continuing to prioritise funding where the Zambian government also does not deploy its own resources. No longer will we lead while Zambian officials sit back unresponsively. Quite simply, America can best support Zambia’s sovereignty, agency, and success if we finally abide by the maxim and refrain from wanting development more than the Zambian government does.

That said, what happens between governments and embassies is important, but it is only a small fraction of the broader relationship between countries. The ties between Zambia and America are profound, strong, and everlasting. The connections between churches and civil society, the linkages between students, artists, and researchers, the bonds between communities, the union of our peoples, these are the essence of the U.S.-Zambia relationship, and these will never fade.

Too often people hope for change. They note what others should do. But hope is not a strategy, and we cannot control the actions of others, only our own.

So, as I prepare to leave this country that I love, I ask those of you whose country it is, is this the Zambia you want? Are you on course to achieve it? If not, what action will you take to contribute to making that become a reality?

I first stepped foot in Zambia in 1995. My daughter took her first steps in Livingstone. As I prepare to depart, I take with me beautiful memories of Zambia and the Zambian people, but I depart with a heavy heart wondering if realisation of the Zambian dream will be deferred for yet another 64 years while even more Zambians fall into poverty instead of being able to rise into the brilliant future that is possible.

But my role here is not about this little guy with a big heart for Africa. It is about America and Zambia. America will continue reaching out to the people of Zambia, offering our support, seeking as much to learn as to share, doing so openly and transparently, and eager to help enable the realisation of that Zambian dream and the creative future that benefits, and can only be discovered through, our sincere partnership.

I thank you.

[The Resonance @Partisan_12]

The Same Old Story.

[A Little Georgian Warrior🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @True_Georgian]

History will not forgive us if we don't stand where we must today.
These people won the freedom that the regime is now trying to take away.
Especially the generation born in a free Georgia has no right to stay silent or stand aside.
Day 384 of the protest! 🇬🇪
#GeorgiaProtests

[A Little Georgian Warrior🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @True_Georgian]

The Georgian people choose Europe, not Russia! 🇪🇺
Glory to Georgia! 🇬🇪
Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦
🔥One year of the Georgian people’s unwavering resistance! 🔥
28.11.2025
#GeorgiaProtests

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

Tonight marks the 365th day of uninterrupted protest by the brave people of Georgia against a tyrannical, illegitimate regime, one prompted by and subservient to Russia.

Georgia will be free!

[A Little Georgian Warrior🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @True_Georgian]

📌 The final statement of Mzia Amaghlobeli - the only Georgian winner of the Sakharov Prize and an imprisoned journalist - at her appeals hearing.
🔥Share it with the world🔥

🗨️ "When a regime wants something, it will invent any excuse - it doesn’t need a real reason to imprison you.

We must not lose faith - because if we do, the regime will arrest us again and again. It will do everything to humiliate us, insult us and even drive us out of our own country.

Prison is neither easy nor simple, but it's not what frightens me. What frightens me is what I will find outside once I am released:

Will I find a country still fighting for freedom, democracy and a European future?

Or a country conquered by Russia through propaganda and economic pressure?

I believe that love for one's homeland and a sense of dignity are innate - they can't be taken from you.
Today, our dignity is in defending the Constitution of Georgia.

I urge you all - fight, before it’s too late. We have a duty to defend the Constitution.

Fight to the end!"
#GeorgiaProtests

[A Little Georgian Warrior🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @True_Georgian]

355! 🇬🇪✊🇪🇺
Look how scared we are!
Till the end! 🔥
#GeorgiaProtests

[Rusudan Djakeli 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @rusudanjakeli]

“Here, Russian executioners once slaughtered our youth. Today, Georgian ‘militia’ kick their own people.”

Parents of political prisoners stand in a human chain along the police cordon on Rustaveli Avenue.

Day 346 of uninterrupted protest.
🎥 Netgazeti

[Mamuka Khazaradze @M_Khazaradze]

Today’s EU Commission Enlargement Report leaves no room for doubt — it clearly outlines the authoritarian system established by the Georgian Dream government and the deliberate steps taken to suppress political opposition, independent media, and civil society.

“The Commission considers Georgia a candidate country in name only.”

This statement reflects the tragic outcome of Bidzina Ivanishvili’s pro-Russian foreign policy and authoritarian domestic rule, which directly contradict the will and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Georgians who chose Europe.

The Georgian people continue to fight fearlessly for freedom, democracy, and their European future.

The European Union and our democratic partners must respond firmly — through targeted restrictive measures against Georgian Dream officials responsible for democratic backsliding and political persecution.

Our path is clear — Georgia’s future belongs in Europe, not under the shadow of Russian-style authoritarianism.

[A Little Georgian Warrior🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @True_Georgian]

One year of the Georgian people’s resistance! 🔥
The active resistance against the Russian regime began on October 26 with the complete rigging of the elections.
Exactly one year on, the Georgian people stand united to defend democracy, justice, freedom and a European future! 🇪🇺

[Rusudan Djakeli 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @rusudanjakeli]

Rustaveli Avenue now, after several days of mass arrests, threats, and disappointments.

Georgians are not giving up.

Day 328 of uninterrupted protests.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

RETWEET if you stand with President Zelenskyy!

[Canellecitadelle @Canellelabelle]

HRH the Prince of Wales announces the finalists to his Earthshot Prize. Earthshot is now 5 years old and this year Brazil is the destination😍
The Prince has confirmed his attendance in Rio de Janeiro and I cannot wait to see the absolute show they put up👌🏽
#EarthshotPrize2025
#PrinceofWales
📹Earthshot

[Marko Mihkelson 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @markomihkelson]

The Georgian people will never surrender. Long live a free, European Georgia! 🇬🇪🇪🇺

[William Fulton @fultonw]

@OlenaRohoza Yes

[Claude Taylor @TrueFactsStated]

This is Jane Goodall’s final message recorded in March that was only to be released upon her passing. What an amazing woman. It’s worth a listen.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

I stand with the freedom loving people of Georgia in their protests against russia-installed government! You are not alone and not forgotten 🇬🇪❤️🇺🇦

[тату Аня зубко 🫡 Xena @Tatou_Ania]

Dear friends,

Elon Musk continues his efforts to silence all voices supporting Ukraine and democracy, this time updating the algorithm to suppress our reach.

Let's break his stupid algorithm: Comment on this post with "Ukraine will win!"