Lomami's boundaries have moved before. The area that is now the province was part of the Lualaba district of what became Katanga between 1908 and 1947. In 1965 it was folded into Kasaï-Oriental. In 2015 it came out again, reassembled from the Kabinda district and the independently administered city of Mwene-Ditu. The town of Kabinda was elevated to capital. The people of Lomami are drawn mostly from three large groups - the Songye, the Luba, and the Kanyok - along with the Kele in Kamiji and the Kanitshin in Luilu. All of them have watched maps and administrative boundaries be redrawn around them, usually by officials in distant capitals with their own priorities. Each redraw has promised better services. The services have tended to arrive late or not at all.

The economy is mostly agro-pastoral. In the colonial era Lomami's cotton fed Belgian mills; when that market collapsed after independence the industry did too, though a cotton research center still operates at N'Gandajika. N'Gandajika and Kamiji remain the province's agricultural engine, feeding neighboring Kasaï-Oriental and the roughly two million people of Mbuji-Mayi. Under the soil the story is mineral. Artisanal diamond mining runs in Lubao, Luputa, Kabinda, and Wikong. Artisanal gold is worked throughout the Luilu territory. There is gold around Mwene-Ditu and Luputa. And in Luilu near Luputa the ground holds coltan - the columbite-tantalite ore that goes into mobile-phone capacitors the world over. Carbonate rock deposits sit in Ngandajika. North of Kabinda stretches a forest rich in timber.

Lomami is hard to move through. Rail exists in Mwene-Ditu but is in deep disrepair. The province has one airport, at Kabinda, largely unused by national standards. There are Belgian-era airstrips at Kabinda, Gandajika, Luputa, and Mwene-Ditu - plus a Presbyterian airstrip at Kasha, seven kilometers from Luputa - all in advanced states of degradation. Ngandajika and Lubao have strips used only for humanitarian flights by NGOs. For everything else, residents depend on the Mbuji-Mayi airport in neighboring Kasaï-Oriental. On the ground, the Mbuji-Mayi road toward Mwene-Ditu is one of the province's few meaningful connections, and maintaining it is a recurring challenge. Most movement happens by bicycle and motorcycle. The province remains one of the poorest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Where public infrastructure fails, communities sometimes build their own. A potable water network in Luputa exists because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints funded it, drawing from the Kaya Lubil spring near Lusuku. The National Rural Water Service has built wells, springs, and supplies across the province, though many have stopped functioning for lack of maintenance. SNEL and SNCC provide irregular electricity to around 5,000 people in Mwene-Ditu - a city of more than half a million. Regideso offers patchy water service to a few thousand subscribers there. Education, meanwhile, has stubbornly kept growing: Kabinda hosts more than five higher-education institutions, including the University of Our Lady of Lomami (UNILO), once Catholic and now public. The University of Mwene-Ditu, with seven faculties and 14 programs, is the province's largest. Many of the province's young people still migrate to Mbuji-Mayi, Lubumbashi, or Kinshasa for better schooling - as young people from poor provinces everywhere tend to do. But the institutions remain here, waiting for those who come back.