In a report published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Zambian government has put in place a plan for its complex debt restructuring.
Zambia is looking to restructure its external liabilities that topped US$17bn last year. Moreover, the IMF said that Zambia wants US$8.4bn in cash debt relief from 2022 to 2025. According to some estimates, this amounts to around 90 percent of the payments Zambia should have made to external private and official creditors over this period.
Investors will be watching eagerly to see if creditors agree to cancel some of the debt or whether the debt is just rolled over a couple of years, both of which would have drastically different outcomes for Zambia. Price movements in Zambian bonds will likely be sensitive to developments on this front in the weeks ahead.
