Every city that redevelops fast makes the same quiet trade. Lusaka is making it now. The land that carried the regional freedom struggle, transit houses, offices and meeting places, is also prime urban ground, and the sites whose significance was never formally protected are the first to go. The tension is not between development and memory in the abstract. It is between a specific plot’s market value today and a public value that no one has priced, protected or assigned to an owner.
The Winners: Land, Speed and the Present Tense
The immediate beneficiaries are clear. Developers and landowners capture the upside of unencumbered plots; a building with no heritage listing carries no restriction and no delay. Buyers get housing and commercial space in a growing capital. The city gains rateable value and construction activity. These are real gains, not villains in a story, and pretending otherwise weakens the argument. Rapid urban development is doing exactly what an unmanaged market rewards it to do: converting the highest and quickest use, unpriced history included.
Where no one holds the deed to the past, the present wins by default.
The Excluded: Custodians Without Standing
The losers are those with an interest but no legal standing. Historians and archivists watch primary sites vanish before they are catalogued. Communities and families connected to the struggle lose the physical anchor of their account. Regional visitors, researchers and the diaspora across SADC lose destinations that were never built. A future heritage economy loses its raw material. None of these groups can outbid a developer, and none currently holds an instrument that forces the market to account for what is being erased. Their exclusion is structural, not accidental.
The asymmetry is the point. A developer arrives with a title deed, financing and a clear return; a historian arrives with a claim about public value and no mechanism to enforce it. In any contest between a priced right and an unpriced interest, the priced right prevails, not because anyone decided memory should lose, but because only one side of the table holds an instrument the market recognises. That is why appeals to significance rarely stop a demolition. Significance is not a lien.
An interest without a title is a claim the market cannot hear.
The Reforms: Pricing What the Market Ignores
The fix is not to halt development; it is to give the public value an owner and a price. That means identifying the sites, extending formal heritage designation to the ones that qualify, and funding upkeep so protection is real rather than declared, an approach the documented erasure of unprotected sites makes urgent. It also means adaptive reuse, keeping a building in commercial service while protecting its fabric and marking its history, so heritage pays rather than merely costs. Adaptive reuse is the reconciling move: it lets a plot keep earning while its history stays legible, which is the only version of protection a growing city will tolerate at scale. A blanket freeze on development is neither realistic nor desirable in a capital that needs housing and commercial space; the workable path is selective, funded and paired with a productive use. Done early, this converts a loss into an asset class. Done late, it simply records what is already gone.
Who Should Move
The question in the title has an uncomfortable answer: as things stand, the winners are those who move fastest on unprotected land, and the excluded are everyone whose stake was never written down. Reform changes the incentive by writing it down. For heritage bodies, investors and city authorities alike, the decision is not whether Lusaka develops. It is whether the liberation past is priced into that development while any of it is still standing.
