01/05/2026
PRESIDENT HICHILEMA'S FULL LETTER TO WORKERS:
To the workers of Zambia,
On any other morning of the year, before the dawn has risen, a trader in Kasumbalesa would be setting up her stall for the day. A miner in Kalulushi would be pulling on his boots. A teacher in Mongu would be grappling to teach a child sitting on the floor. And even today, in a ward in Petauke, a nurse is finishing the longest hours of her week because the work of caring for this country never quite stops.
Today is the one day in the year we set aside for the workers. For you.
This country is not built by speeches. It is built by hands like these. It always has been.
We come to you on this, your day, with one thing to say at the start of it. Every brick laid in this country, every harvest brought in, every road built, every patient nursed, every child taught to read. All of it has been done by a worker. And the simplest measure of any government is whether the labour you give this country is honoured by the country you give it to.
For too long, it was not. Mines closed on miners who had given them decades. Wages were paid into a currency that could not hold itself together until the end of the month. Factories that should have employed thousands stood empty while the cotton you grew rotted in the field for want of a buyer.
The people of this country were working but the government was letting that work bleed out of it.
These past four years have been about closing those wounds. Steadying the kwacha. Restructuring a debt that had been hung around the neck of every child not yet born. Restoring the standing of this country in the eyes of those who lend, those who invest, those who buy what you grow and dig and make. None of it puts food on a table on the day it is done. But it is the foundation. And on a foundation, you can build.
And now we are seeing what is starting to be possible.
A fortnight ago we walked back into Mulungushi Textiles in Kabwe. For twenty years it stood closed. Now it is alive again. Five hundred jobs on the factory floor, and two and a half thousand cotton farmers who have a buyer waiting at the end of the season. Cotton grown on Zambian soil, cut and stitched by Zambian hands, worn by our nurses, our soldiers, our teachers. That is the kind of country we want for you. One that finishes what it starts. One that pays its workers for what they have made, and does not leave the rest for someone else to finish.
At the weekend, in Kasama, we opened a new mall and a new hotel. That is how it will be reported. What it means is a young woman in Mungwi earning a wage where there was no wage before. A chef, a porter, a security officer, a driver, a cleaner. Each now part of an economy of services that did not exist six months ago. We made the same point to His Royal Highness the Mwine Lubemba that we make to you: development that does not reach the provinces is not development. A country that works only in Lusaka is not yet a country that works.
And yesterday, at Chililabombwe, we broke ground at Mingomba. There is a generation of miners on the Copperbelt who had been told their industry had no future. Today, one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world is being opened beneath the ground they walk on, in partnership with investors who came here because Zambia is once again a country worth investing in. They did not come for our copper alone. They came for the miners who would work the seam, the engineers who would build the mine, the welders and drivers and cooks and cleaners who would keep it running, the families waiting at the end of the shift for a paypacket that means something. They came because of you.
In a factory gate that opens. In a hotel that hires. In a shaft that is sunk. In a child who stays in school.
But we will not stand before you and tell you the work is done. There are workers in this country whose conditions are still too hard, whose wages are still too thin, whose dignity at work is still too easily denied. There is more to do, and we know it.
So today, on this Labour Day, we ask something of you, and we promise something in return.
If you are ready to walk this road with us — the road that has taken us from factories left for dead to factories at full shift —
If you are ready to put your trust in the work we have done together, and in the work that is still to come —
If you are ready to believe, as we believe, that a country belongs to the workers who build it —
Then we make you this vow. We have not stopped. We will not stop. Not until the worker who rises before dawn rises into a country worthy of the labour she gives it.
You who carry this country on shoulders that ache. You who have asked little and given much. This day is yours. And so is the harvest that comes next.
Yours, in the work ahead,
Hakainde Hichilema
President of the Republic of Zambia.
