A fiscal buffer is a quiet thing until you need it. Zambia spent recent years rebuilding one — a primary surplus, the gap between revenue and spending before interest, that signals a government living within its means and able to absorb a shock. The IMF’s latest assessment is that the buffer is thinning fast. The primary surplus is projected to fall to 1.1% of GDP, down from 3.8%. That is not a collapse, but it is a steep compression, and the reasons it is happening matter as much as the number.

The Fund attributes the squeeze to three forces arriving together: weaker tax collection, election-related spending and agricultural subsidies. Each is explicable on its own; together they describe a fiscal year in which the cushion is being spent down faster than it is being rebuilt, as set out in the IMF concluding statement.

The Three Pressures: Revenue Down, Spending Up

The arithmetic runs in both directions at once. On the revenue side, weaker tax collection drains the top line — and in Zambia, soft mining feeds directly into softer mineral-linked receipts, so a slow copper year is also a slow tax year. On the spending side, two pressures push outward. Election-related spending is the classic political-cycle bulge, the tendency for outlays to rise as a vote approaches. Agricultural subsidies, including farm-input support, add a second, structural claim on the budget that is politically difficult to trim, least of all in an election year.

Revenue falling while spending rises is the textbook recipe for a shrinking surplus. What makes this case sharper is that the revenue weakness and one of the spending pressures share a root: the same election cycle that lifts outlays sits over a year of softer growth that depresses collection.

Takeaway: the buffer is being squeezed from both ends at once, and the timing is not coincidental.

The Election Premium: A Known, Temporary Cost

Election-related spending deserves to be read honestly rather than alarmingly. It is, in principle, a temporary bulge — outlays that rise in the run-up to a vote and should recede afterward. A fiscal framework can absorb a one-off political-cycle cost without lasting damage, provided the consolidation resumes once the cycle passes.

The risk is not the bulge itself but its persistence. Election spending that proves sticky, or subsidies that ratchet up and never come back down, would turn a temporary dip in the surplus into a structural erosion of the buffer. That is the line the IMF is implicitly watching, and it is the line that determines whether 1.1% is a trough to climb back from or the start of a slide.

Takeaway: an election premium is survivable if it is temporary — the danger is when it forgets to leave.

Why the Buffer Matters: Room to Absorb the Next Shock

The deeper stake is resilience. A drought-exposed, commodity-dependent economy needs fiscal headroom precisely because its shocks are frequent and external — a bad rainy season, a copper-price dip, a fuel-supply disruption. A larger primary surplus is the room to respond to those shocks without resorting to costly borrowing or abrupt cuts. Shrinking it to 1.1% narrows that room at exactly the moment the macro picture — rising inflation, softening growth — argues for keeping it wide.

For operators and investors, the read-across is the country’s fiscal flexibility for the period ahead. A thinner buffer means less scope for counter-cyclical support and a sharper need for the consolidation to resume after the political cycle clears. None of this is a crisis signal; a positive primary surplus is still a primary surplus. But it is a reminder that the stability Zambia has built is not self-sustaining. It has to be defended each year, and this year the defence is harder.

Takeaway: Zambia can afford one election year of a thinner surplus — what it cannot afford is for the thinner surplus to become the new normal.