Online Reporter
Kuda Bwititi-Politics, Foreign Affairs and Opinions Editor
A few weeks ago, Vice President Kembo Mohadi met Mr Tawanda Dozva, the African representative of the Asia-Africa Cooperation Centre, in a meeting that was not merely another diplomatic courtesy call.
VP Mohadi was the Acting President, as President Mnangagwa was on his annual leave.
The meeting was a significant affirmation that Zimbabwe has found, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the reliable partnership it has long sought to realise President Mnangagwa’s Vision 2030.
What exactly is this Asia-Africa Cooperation Centre entity, and why does its visit to the Vice President matter?
Unlike the alphabet soup of international NGOs that have come and gone from Harare, offering little more than seminars and sympathy, the Asia-Africa Centre represents something Zimbabwe has desperately needed: a precise, functional mechanism for matching genuine national needs with tangible resources.
Mr Dozva’s presentation to Vice President Mohadi was not filled with abstract promises or politically conditional blandishments. It was granular, specific and detailed. The presentation explained exactly how Chinese technology, capital, products and developmental experience can be calibrated to meet Zimbabwe’s priority objectives under Vision 2030.
This is the operational logic that sets the Asia-Africa Centre apart. It does not merely “bridge” initiatives in the rhetorical sense but actively curates, matches and facilitates. When Zimbabwe identifies a pressing need in agriculture, the Centre does not respond with a glossy brochure. It identifies the precise Chinese agricultural technology that has worked in comparable climates and soil conditions. It connects Zimbabwean agronomists with their Chinese counterparts. It structures financing that does not drown future generations in unpayable debt.
When Zimbabwe seeks to develop its vast lithium reserves, which are among the largest in Africa, and critical to the global green energy transition, the centre does not simply facilitate the extraction of raw materials. It enables the transfer of processing technology, the development of local value addition and the creation of sustainable employment for Zimbabwean youth.
This is cooperation with dignity. This is partnership without predation.
The long shadow of sanctions
To understand why Vice President Mohadi’s warm reception of the Asia-Africa Centre matters, one must appreciate the depth of the hole from which Zimbabwe continues to climb.
It is now almost 25 years since the United States enacted the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. In this period, the architecture of sanctions was constructed, ostensibly targeting specific individuals but effectively strangling an entire nation. During this time, Zimbabwe has been denied access to international financial institutions, whilst Western companies feared commercial engagement, as even routine banking transactions have been fraught with suspicion and delay.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur has documented what Zimbabweans have always known: these sanctions have cost the economy over US$40 billion.
To put that figure in perspective, it represents about two full years of Zimbabwe’s entire GDP.
Two years of schools that could have been built, hospitals that could have been equipped, roads that could have been paved, jobs that could have been created.
The Chinese difference
China never suspended diplomatic relations with Zimbabwe. Chinese banks did not freeze Zimbabwean transactions. Chinese companies did not flee the market. Chinese investors did not demand political concessions as the price of commercial engagement.
This is neither charity nor altruism, but a fundamentally different philosophy of international relations.
When China looks at Zimbabwe, it does not see a country to be punished for its land reform programme or its sovereign policy choices. It sees a nation rich in resources, abundant in human capital and earnest in its developmental aspirations. It sees a partner, not a project.
The West has long accused China of creating “debt traps” in Africa. But Zimbabwe’s experience offers a powerful rebuttal: if cooperation with China is a trap, then two decades of Western sanctions have been a carefully constructed hell.
Consider the contrast. Under sanctions, Zimbabwe could not secure financing to patch its cratered roads or expand its inadequate power grid. Through Belt and Road cooperation, Zimbabwe has produced one of the largest steel manufacturing plants in Africa, the Dinson Iron and Steel Company in Manhize.
Also, the country has upgraded Victoria Falls Airport, expanded Hwange and Kariba power stations and is now pursuing transformative infrastructure development. Under sanctions, Zimbabwe’s agricultural potential remained stifled, its farmers lacking access to modern techniques and inputs.
Through cooperation with China, Zimbabwe is gaining access to numerous agricultural technologies, including hybrid rice and high-density maize cultivation methods that can increase yields by 30 to 60 percent.
The West offered Zimbabwe lectures on governance and human rights. China offers Zimbabwe manufacturing plants, hybrid seeds, solar panels and geological surveys.
One approach has left Zimbabwe isolated and impoverished. The other is helping Zimbabwe reclaim its destiny.
Vice President Mohadi identified five specific areas for deepened cooperation: trade, culture, tourism, agriculture, and infrastructure. These are not arbitrary selections. They represent the precise points of intersection between Zimbabwe’s urgent needs and China’s demonstrable strengths.
This is not colonial economics. This is a developmental partnership reimagined for the 21st century.
Global South rising
Zimbabwe’s embrace of the Asia-Africa Centre and the broader Belt and Road Framework is a statement about the emerging architecture of international relations.
For decades, the Global South was told that development followed a single, linear path. Liberalise markets, privatise state enterprises, integrate into Western financial systems, accept political conditionality and prosperity will follow.
The prescription was administered across continents, with remarkably consistent results which are deindustrialisation, debt dependency and deepened inequality. The promised prosperity never arrived.
What did arrive, inconveniently for Western development theorists, was China’s alternative model. This model includes State-guided strategic investment, gradual, sequenced market opening, massive infrastructure development and persistent poverty reduction, with national sovereignty preserved throughout.
Zimbabwe’s leadership understands that Vision 2030 cannot be achieved through adherence to failed orthodoxies. It requires fresh thinking, new partnerships and the pragmatic application of what actually works.
President Mnangagwa’s “engagement and re-engagement” policy represents precisely this pragmatism. It acknowledges that two decades of confrontation with the West produced only stagnation. It recognises that Zimbabwe’s developmental aspirations require friends who bring tangible resources, not rhetorical condemnations.
The road ahead
The Asia-Africa Centre’s mission to Harare was not a grand summit producing theatrical declarations. It was quiet, professional, and focused on implementation modalities. Who will train Zimbabwean engineers in Chinese construction standards? How will payment mechanisms be structured to protect both parties? What timelines are realistic for agricultural technology transfer?
These are the questions that actual development cooperation addresses. They lack the drama of sanctions debates or the catharsis of anti-colonial rhetoric. But they are the questions that, answered correctly, transform national trajectories.
Vice President Mohadi’s full support for the centre’s work signals that Zimbabwe understands this distinction. The era of treating international relations as primarily symbolic has passed.
What remains is the painstaking work of building roads, training technicians, processing minerals, welcoming tourists and educating students.
The Asia-Africa Centre, operating in the space between Chinese supply and Zimbabwean demand, between Beijing’s strategic vision and Harare’s implementation reality, performs the unglamorous but indispensable function of making cooperation actually work.
True friends need not reside in proximity. Shared aspirations bridge any distance.
The ship of Zimbabwe-China friendship has long since departed harbour. With the Asia-Africa Centre providing navigational guidance, it now charts a course toward the shores of shared prosperity that Vision 2030 envisions.
The journey will require patience, persistence, and continued pragmatic partnership. But the destination is visible on the horizon. And it is worth sailing toward.
