One plastic bottle, four cigarettes: what the 2027 Budget forgot By Dennis Tembo On Friday afternoon, as the Minister of Finance rose to read the 2027 Budget, somewhere in Lusaka a boy was on his way to write an exam paper, with a few coins in his pocket, the kind meant for a…

One plastic bottle, four cigarettes: what the 2027 Budget forgot

By Dennis Tembo

On Friday afternoon, as the Minister of Finance rose to read the 2027 Budget, somewhere in Lusaka a boy was on his way to write an exam paper, with a few coins in his pocket, the kind meant for a fritter or a freezit, the kind the older boys at the corner know he carries. “Mwaiche, give us chi coin,” they said, and he handed it over, because that is how it goes. He walked into the exam room with empty pockets, and by evening that coin had become a single cigarette, bought loose a few steps from the school gate. The Budget had nothing to say to him.

It had something to say about almost everything else. From January, a kilogram of sugar will carry an excise duty of K1, chocolates and sweets will be taxed at 20 percent, and every plastic bottle will pay 80 ngwee, because these things harm our health and our environment. VAT rises to 16.5 percent from 16 percent and the mobile money levy goes up across all bands. The cigarette, which harms health more surely than any of them, was not mentioned once.

That silence has a history. Since January 2016, under the Customs and Excise (Amendment) Act No. 18 of 2015, cigarettes made in Zambia have paid only a quarter of the full excise rate, with no conditions and no end date. Today the full rate is K750 per 1,000 sticks, K15 on a pack of 20, while a locally made pack pays K3.75. Break it down to the single stick the boy at the corner buys, and the excise is about 19 ngwee, which means that from January, one plastic bottle will carry more excise than four locally made cigarettes.

These are the cigarettes most Zambians smoke. Tracing the excise from 2008 to 2025 through Zambia’s own legislation and World Health Organization data shows that the tax on the most sold brand lost 79 percent of its real value between 2008 and 2024, and by 2024 made up just 5 percent of its price, against the 70 percent the WHO recommends. The pack stayed at about K20 for years, so the discount never reached smokers as a lower price; it stayed with the industry, and the Treasury went without.

Inflation finished what the discount started. The same 2015 Act gave the Commissioner-General power to adjust specific duties for inflation, a power that has never been used. In 2025, Parliament finally moved, adjusting the rate for inflation in January and raising it by 66 percent in August. But the adjustment was not repeated in 2026, and Friday’s Budget proposes none for 2027, even with inflation down to 6.3 percent, when adjusting the rate is easiest. Meanwhile every increase widens the gap: the August rise added K7 of excise to an imported pack and only K1.75 to a local one.

A 2024 survey of 475 retailers near schools, playgrounds and game zones in Lusaka and Chongwe found that 93 percent sold single sticks. A child does not buy a pack. A child buys one stick, with whatever coins they have, or with the coins someone took from them on the way.

Kenya chose another road, taxing all cigarettes at one rate and adjusting it for inflation, and smoking among Kenyan men fell by about a third between 2014 and 2022, while in Zambia it fell only modestly. Tax is not the whole story, but it is a large part of it.

None of this needs new money, only three decisions. End the discount for local manufacturers; at August 2025 rates, charging the most sold brand the full rate would multiply the excise collected on it by about 3.5, even after smokers cut back. Index every specific rate to inflation and income growth every year, by rule rather than by mood. And when Parliament reconsiders the Tobacco Control Bill, ban the sale of single sticks.

The Customs and Excise (Amendment) Bill that will carry Friday’s measures has not yet passed, and there is still room in it for one more line. A Government ready to tax a packet of sweets to protect our health can surely tax the cigarette sold at the school gate, before the boy with the coins becomes the man who cannot stop.

Dennis Tembo is an economics graduate of the University of Zambia, an independent tobacco control researcher and a spoken word poet based in Lusaka.

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