Um, if you follow, uh, what Shashua just said, that's a bit of an indictment on, on, on, on the system and the current government, is it not?

It is, and, uh, uh, Shashua has made important points around this throughout the Hichilema presidency, and I think that there's two things going on here.

One is that, um, the, the ad- The president came to power on promises of, uh, changing that political environment.

Here was a man who had actually really suffered, um, the worst of it when he was in opposition: incarceration, um, restrictions on campaigning, um, the successive elections that he fought and challenged.

So here was a man who was seen as, okay, he understands what has been used against him.

He's now going to come into power and repeal all of that and open up the political space.

So part of this is the fact that he hasn't done that to the extent that it has been desired.

So where, where does Zambia stand in terms of its relations and that balancing act that many countries in the region have to do between the US and China?

What is different now about the delivery challenge compared to, say, five years ago?

The biggest thing that's really happened over the last two years, particularly in the critical mineral space, is large scale U.S. government intervention into the market underpinned by the requirement for materials for national defense.

What this really did was close a sort of open loop that's been running for the last sort of 10 plus years, where we started to identify that certain materials were really important for industry.

And then we started to identify, well, actually beyond industry, certain materials are going to be really important to deliver on government pledges for a just energy transition.

But these were really, particularly around energy, we were looking at sort of future drivers of demand that were very disjointed from the way in which the market currently responds to demand drivers and futures, and particularly the sort of very direct linkages with existing economic output.

So this was all sort of hypothetical.

Okay, if we're going to deliver on these pledges, then we must do this.

And Chris, would you agree with the other two speakers? Or what is your perspective? Is it a systemic problem we're dealing with here? Is that what you're seeing? Or is this a bit of a policy failure? Yeah.