Online Reporter
COMMUNION with Bishop Lazarus
There is a silence that falls over a nation when the earth swallows its own, and yet, there is a deeper, more wrenching hush when the water refuses to give them back.
Last week, Lake Kariba — that great man-made inland sea, a jewel of our national pride and a lifeblood for our communities — became a vast tomb.
By the last official count, fatalities from the capsized Rural Infrastructure Development Agency (RIDA) vessel had risen to 73.
Seventy-three souls. Seventy-three stories. Seventy-three futures extinguished in a single, catastrophic moment.
And as the numbers climb, so, too, does the grief and weight upon our hearts.
For this is no ledger of statistics; it is a catalogue of mothers, of daughters, of children whose laughter once echoed along the shoreline.
Many families will undoubtedly carry the indelible scars of loved ones whose lives were snatched by these indifferent waters for as long as they live. Bishop Lazi commiserates with them for their immeasurable loss.
This tragedy is equally a scar on our collective conscience. Yet, even in the valley of the shadow, we are not a people who surrender to despair. We are Zimbabweans, hewn from granite and resilience.
As history has proved again and again, we are a people made of sterner stuff.
And so, while our tears are fresh, our resolve must be forged. Obviously there will be an inquiry — thorough, unflinching and transparent. From its findings, we must demand more than blame; we must demand reformation.
Our maritime safety protocols, long overlooked in the shadow of our terrestrial concerns, must be scrutinised and strengthened.
The licensing of vessels, the enforcement of capacity limits, the availability of life-saving equipment, the training of crew — all of this must, and will, be placed under a fierce and unforgiving lens.
We owe it to the 73.
We owe it to their families.
We owe it to the generation that will one day sail these waters after us.
Let this be the moment Zimbabwe turns grief into governance, sorrow into safety.
We will not bring back the lost, but we will ensure that their departure is not in vain.
From the depths of Lake Kariba, let us rise with a new covenant: that no mother will ever again wait for a child who will not come home.
Until the last body is recovered and the last name is released, we hold our breath.
But when we exhale, let it be with a commitment to do better.
That is how we honour the dead.
That is how we heal the living.
The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians, reminds us: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9)
May the God of all comfort, who binds up the broken-hearted and proclaims liberty to the captives, hold every grieving mother, every orphaned child, every widowed spouse in the palm of His hand.
And may He grant us the wisdom to turn this valley of death into a mountain of renewal.
Amen!
Breaking the curse
And yet, even as our hearts remain anchored to the shores of Kariba, the business of nationhood — and regionhood — must press forward.
For grief and governance are not mutually exclusive; they are, in fact, inextricably linked.
The former gives moral weight to the latter.
As Bishop Lazarus writes this, leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) — representing more than 360 million souls across our sprawling region — are presently in Durban, South Africa, for the 46th Summit of Heads of State and Government.
Their agenda, as befits a bloc that has long dreamed of emancipation from the colonial extractive model, remains steadfastly fixed on industrialisation-centred development.
For the better part of the past decade, their main preoccupation has been stopping our mineral-rich countries from being the world’s quarry and turning them into reputable manufacturers.
This transformative idea was first mooted at the Victoria Falls Summit in 2014 and subsequently crystallised into the SADC Industrialisation Strategy and Road Map (2015-2063) at an extraordinary summit in Harare in April 2015.
The logic is unassailable: We cannot develop by exporting our wealth in its rawest form, only to import it back as finished goods at exorbitant cost.
We cannot achieve a higher quality of life for our people while our minerals fuel factories in Beijing, Berlin, London and yonder.
Overall, that is why industrialisation is not a luxury for Africa.
It is the singular, most powerful antidote to the centuries-old crises that have stalked our continent since the first ship left our shores laden with gold and slaves, leaving behind only poverty and underdevelopment.
Industrialisation creates jobs — millions of them — for our teeming youth, who now comprise the largest and most restless generation in our history.
It transforms raw materials into finished goods, capturing value that has for too long flowed out of our borders and into the coffers of distant empires.
It builds the infrastructure — roads, railways, power grids, digital networks — that knits our fragmented economies into a cohesive whole. In essence, SADC’s industrialisation strategy rests on three unshakeable pillars: industrialisation, competitiveness and regional integration.
Each is dependent on the others.
You cannot industrialise in isolation; you must compete globally; you must integrate regionally to create the economies of scale that make industry viable.
It is a tripartite covenant that, if honoured, could finally break the cycle of poverty that has clung to our soil like a stubborn drought.
Fittingly, the theme for this year’s summit is as ambitious as it is urgent: “Resilient, sustainable and inclusive industrialisation through infrastructure development, agricultural and critical minerals transformation in pursuit of a just world”.
It essentially is a demand that the global economic order, which has for centuries extracted Africa’s bounty while leaving its people in destitution, must be recalibrated.
And Zimbabwe is clearly leading the way.
As it has so often been wont to do, ED’s administration has taken the bold, indeed historic, step of banning the export of raw and unprocessed minerals — particularly lithium, that shimmering white gold of the energy transition.
The results have been nothing short of revelatory.
Where once we shipped high volumes of low-cost lithium concentrates, watching our treasure depart in dusty containers for paltry returns, we are now exporting low volumes of high-value lithium sulphate.
The arithmetic is simple, but its implications are seismic: exponential revenue growth, not from digging more, but from thinking more.
Not surprisingly, our lithium export revenues surged dramatically, more than tripling in the first six months of this year to US$782 million, compared to $237 million during the same period in 2025, helping to grow overall mineral export revenue to US$2,5 billion in the same period.
This is the alchemy of industrialisation.
It is not about how much you extract; it is about how much you retain.
It is about jobs for our youth, about smelters humming in our industrial parks, about patents filed in Harare and Bulawayo rather than in Silicon Valley.
If Zimbabwe’s lithium policy is any indication, then mineral-rich Africa — from the copper belts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the bauxite of Guinea, from the gold of Mali to the diamonds of Botswana — can finally break the poverty curse that has been our unwanted inheritance.
But we cannot do it alone.
We need the SADC industrialisation agenda to move from strategy to execution, from road map to tarmac.
We need infrastructure that connects our factories to ports, energy that powers our furnaces and skills that turn ore into opportunity.
Looking beyond El Niño
And yet, even as our leaders chart this ambitious course towards industrial transformation, they must do so with one eye on the horizon and the other on the soil beneath their feet.
For while Durban’s halls echo with talk of critical minerals and value addition, the region faces the ever-looming spectre of another El Niño-plagued cropping season in 2026/2027.
The warnings are already upon us: The same weather patterns that brought scorching heat and failed rains to our fields just a season ago are gathering force once more, threatening to plunge millions into hunger and desperation.
We have been here before. Too many times.
The cycle is predictable, yet we continue to be caught off-guard, our farmers watching helplessly as the sky refuses to weep.
But predictability should be our greatest weapon. If we know the drought is coming, why do we not prepare as though it is already here?
The answer lies in our stubborn attachment to rain-fed agriculture, a lottery we have played for generations and lost more often than we have won. The time has come to look to science and technology not as luxuries, but as lifelines. This is precisely why we are aggressively investing in irrigation infrastructure that allows us to grow crops all year round — through the dry spell, through the heatwave, through the El Niño that knocks on our door with increasing frequency and ferocity.
Drip systems, solar-powered pumps, water harvesting technologies, drought-tolerant seeds, early warning systems powered by satellite data — these have become necessities to be adopted and adapted.
The benefits extend far beyond food security. Irrigation means predictable harvests, which means stable incomes for farmers and which means money circulating in rural economies.
It means we stop importing grain that we could grow ourselves, saving foreign currency for industrial inputs. It means agro-processing industries — our mills, our canneries, our packaging plants — humming with activity because raw materials are available year-round.
By banishing hunger, we guarantee peace.
You see, hunger and conflict are Siamese twins.
Where the belly is empty, the gun finds ready recruits.
Where young people have no productive work, they find purpose in destruction.
So, we all have a duty to build, to industrialise and create a future where our children inherit not our sorrows, but our solutions.
That is the Zimbabwean way. That is the SADC way. That is the only way forward.
Bishop out!
