Industrial Development Corporation (IDC)

The Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) Zambia Limited is a state-owned investment holding company that manages the Government of Zambia’s commercial investment portfolio. IDC enters the State Media Monitor as the parent of two of Zambia’s principal newspaper publishers, Times Printpak Zambia Limited, publisher of the Times of Zambia and Sunday Times of Zambia, and Zambia Daily Mail Limited, publisher of the Zambia Daily Mail and Sunday Mail, both of which sit alongside IDC’s holdings in mining, energy, telecommunications, financial services, agriculture, and transport.

Media assets

Publishing: Zambia Daily Mail, Times of Zambia

Ownership and governance

IDC was incorporated in January 2014 and is wholly owned by the Government of the Republic of Zambia through the Ministry of Finance and National Planning. The corporation functions as an investment holding company for state-owned enterprises (SOEs); the Auditor General’s Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 2022 placed IDC’s portfolio at thirty SOEs within a wider portfolio of thirty-nine investments, with IDC shareholdings ranging from 62.28% to 100%. Beyond its two newspaper subsidiaries, the IDC portfolio includes ZCCM Investments Holdings PLC, Zambia Railways, Infratel, ZESCO, Zamtel, Zambia Airways, Indeni Petroleum, Superior Milling, ZAFFICO, the Zambia International Trade Fair, the Zambia Printing Company, the Zambia Educational Publishing House, the Zambia China Mulungushi Joint Venture, ZSIC Group, ZANACO PLC, Mukuba Hotel, Mulungushi Village Complex, Mpulungu Harbour, and Nitrogen Chemicals of Zambia, among others.

The IDC Board has been chaired by the President of the Republic of Zambia, currently Hakainde Hichilema, placing the corporation at the apex of executive oversight. Cornwell Muleya, formerly Chief Executive Officer of Uganda National Airlines Company Limited, was appointed Chief Executive Officer of IDC effective 11 October 2023, succeeding former substantive CEO Mateyo Kaluba and Acting CEO Leya Mtonga-Ngoma (the IDC Chief Legal Officer who served in the acting role from August 2023). Muleya is a Chartered Accountant and Chemical Engineer who holds a BSc (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Bath; his earlier career included roles at Deloitte & Touche, DHL, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and CEO appointments at Air Botswana, in Zambia and Kenya, and at Uganda National Airlines.

For the two newspaper subsidiaries, IDC’s authority over subsidiary boards and managing directors gives it decisive corporate leverage over the newspapers; any direct IDC appointment of senior editors would require separate sourcing. In a significant December 2019 restructuring, IDC dissolved the Times Printpak Board of Directors and directed the Zambia Daily Mail Limited Board to oversee both companies; Nebat Mbewe, then Managing Director of Zambia Daily Mail, was appointed Acting Managing Director of Times Printpak in addition to his Daily Mail responsibilities, and the finance, legal, human-resources, production, and marketing functions of the two companies were consolidated under a single management team. IDC’s formal statement at the time noted that the editorial teams would remain separate so as to maintain the editorial independence of both newspapers. IDC also indicated that the medium-term objective of the restructuring was the creation of a consolidated media and newspaper publishing company under the IDC Group. Subsequent reporting in January 2022 referenced renewed merger plans, although no substantive public update on a formal merger has been released since.

The Ministry of Information and Media, headed since 25 September 2023 by Hon. Cornelius Mweetwa, MP, is the policy lead for state and public media, while IDC retains corporate ownership and governance authority over the two newspaper companies.

Source of funding and budget

Times Printpak Zambia Limited and Zambia Daily Mail Limited operate as commercial enterprises, generating revenue from advertising, print circulation sales, government and corporate procurement contracts, and printing services. According to figures cited in earlier State Media Monitor reporting drawing on IDC annual report data, Zambia Daily Mail generated revenues of approximately ZMW 84.6 million (US$3.8 million) and the Times of Zambia approximately ZMW 45.7 million (US$2 million) in 2016; both figures would benefit from direct citation to the underlying IDC annual report before final publication.

The financial position of the two newspapers has deteriorated markedly. The December 2019 restructuring of Times Printpak was triggered by the company’s accumulation of outstanding statutory liabilities, an operating loss of ZMW 41.7 million during the first nine months of 2019, a return on assets of -49%, and salary arrears to staff that in some cases extended to eleven months. The Office of the Auditor General’s Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 2022 reported that thirteen IDC subsidiaries — including Times Printpak — recorded cumulative losses across the 2021 and 2022 financial years, with annual loss figures of ZMW 746.084 million in 2021 and ZMW 1.8549 billion in 2022. Only five of the thirty SOEs declared dividends in 2021 and 2022. The Auditor General reported a serious audit backlog as of September 2023, when IDC had not produced audited Consolidated Financial Statements for the financial years 2018 to 2022; IDC has since posted audited financial statements for 2018 through 2024 on its corporate website. Six SOEs were also reported in the 2022 cycle to have operated without functioning Boards of Directors for periods ranging from six to eleven months.

The 2026 national budget envelope of ZMW 253.1 billion does not publicly itemise a dedicated subvention line for Times Printpak Zambia Limited or Zambia Daily Mail Limited; in 2026, both companies continued to rely on a combination of commercial revenue, government and parastatal procurement, and capital injections from IDC. In April 2026, Indo-Zambia Bank, in which IDC holds a 40% shareholding, declared a ZMW 160 million dividend following its 2025 performance, of which IDC’s share amounted to ZMW 64 million, illustrating the cross-subsidisation patterns through which IDC’s stronger commercial subsidiaries support the corporation’s broader portfolio.

Editorial independence

Neither Times Printpak Zambia Limited nor Zambia Daily Mail Limited operates under an explicit statutory obligation to carry pro-government content. In practice, however, the IDC Board’s authority to appoint and dismiss the boards and managing directors of both companies has given successive administrations effective corporate leverage over the two newspapers. Media-policy literature and public commentary in Zambia have long treated the country’s state-owned newspapers as vulnerable to ruling-party influence under successive administrations, including the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) prior to 2011, the Patriotic Front (PF) between 2011 and 2021, and the United Party for National Development (UPND) since the August 2021 transition. IDC has periodically dismissed the boards of the two newspapers, a pattern that has reinforced perceptions of the newspapers’ vulnerability to political pressure; any specific SMM-commissioned content analysis findings should be cited separately as internal research output.

There is no public-facing internal editorial charter at either Times Printpak or Zambia Daily Mail that materially constrains the proprietor’s ability to shape coverage, and no independent oversight mechanism with authority over the two publications’ editorial output was identified in this review. The September 2021 transition from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services to the Ministry of Information and Media under the UPND administration did not alter the IDC-anchored corporate governance architecture of either newspaper. Under Minister Cornelius Mweetwa, the broader Zambian media-regulatory environment has seen two reforms over the past three years: the repeal of the law criminalising defamation of the President, enacted through the Penal Code amendment assented to by President Hichilema on 23 December 2022, and the Access to Information Act, enacted in December 2023, commenced in June 2024, and supported by implementation regulations approved in July 2025. Neither reform directly affects the corporate ownership structure that gives IDC governance leverage over the two titles.

AI and digital policy

Times of Zambia and Zambia Daily Mail maintain digital news portals at times.co.zm and daily-mail.co.zm, respectively, with e-paper editions and social-media distribution across Facebook, X/Twitter, and YouTube. No publicly available evidence of a formal AI policy, synthetic-media disclosure framework, or C2PA/content-provenance standard was identified at IDC, Times Printpak Zambia Limited, or Zambia Daily Mail Limited in this review.

May 2026