Interesting article about a documentary on the pursuit of global resources including Zambia:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/art...mentary-review

With reference to Zambia:

"The film connects their confusion to the despair of Zambian farmers displaced, via a complicated and westernized deeds system, by mercenary militias to make way for commercial farmland controlled by outside actors from various countries – China, Gulf states, the US. The scramble to obtain farmland at the expense of local residents represents “the new colonization of Africa”, says Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema, a Zambian lawyer fighting for indigenous property rights. The Grab hears from farmers with horrific tales of displacement – prolonged homelessness, the death of a toddler from the cold, bulldozed ancestral burial sites. The culprit is not one country or company but a shadowy network of mercenary interests, farms backed by “a Russian doll of LLCs and LLCs”, says Halverson in the film. “And the more we dig, the more it becomes clear – that could be owned by anybody.”
Halverson and his team did dig into it, eventually obtaining what they refer to, cautiously, as “the trove”: a year’s worth of emails within the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group, founded by Erik Prince, who also founded and was the CEO of the military contracting company Blackwater – a notorious mercenary group during the US invasion of Iraq – and the brother of former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos. The emails, from 2012, reveal a clear plan to obtain, by whatever means necessary, land in Africa to fulfill competing national interests; the CIR team eventually pieces together that one of Prince’s backers was Sheikh Tahnoon, a member of the Emirati royal family, as well as China.
They also reveal a chilling disregard for human life – “people die in the third world. It’s Darwin selection at its most pure,” reads one email."