Brighter days in the copperbelt

STARING into the Nchanga open-cast copper mine can make you dizzy. It is one giant hole: 500 metres deep and almost five kilometres (three miles) long. But it is not as big as the hole that Zambia's state-run copper industry used to leave in the national accounts. By the late 1990s, the mines, once the motor of the country's economy, were losing millions of dollars each month. This was not simply because of low copper prices: production plummeted from over 700,000 tonnes a year in the 1970s, shortly after nationalisation, to about a third of that in 2000. Mismanagement was largely to blame. But last year the mines were privatised. Recovery began.