AS Southern Africa braces for what forecasters warn could be one of the strongest El Niño events since 1950, the regional mood is one of anxiety.
From Zambia to Malawi and Mozambique, governments are contingency-planning for crop failure, food deficits and price shocks.
Zimbabwe, by contrast, is preparing to unveil a Budget that pivots decisively towards roads, dams and irrigation.
That contrast is not accidental.
It is the product of years of deliberate investment in resilience — investment that has given the country the fiscal and strategic room to look beyond the coming season and towards the medium term.
The old Zimbabwean drought story is painfully familiar.
A failed rainy season once meant immediate food shortages and concomitant price increases for basic commodities.
It meant a soaring import bill, foreign currency shortages and a recurring narrative that local farmers were innately incapable of feeding the nation.
In the period after the Land Reform Programme, that narrative was used to deride the very producers on whom food security depended.
Drought did not merely stress households; it destabilised the macroeconomy and entrenched a vicious cycle of climate vulnerability and systemic weakness.
That cycle has been broken.
The 2026 agricultural season delivered another record wheat harvest of 670 981 tonnes, surpassing the previous record of 640 000 tonnes and consolidating self-sufficiency ahead of the anticipated El Niño-affected summer season.
Behind that harvest lies a historic expansion of irrigation capacity: 67 129 hectares (ha) brought under irrigation this year, the largest annual increase on record, lifting the national total to 305 121ha against a 2030 target of 496 000ha.
Our farmers are no longer passive victims of rainfall; they are at the centre of a food-security architecture designed to hold even when the skies do not cooperate.
This is what a virtuous circle looks like.
Because local production has scaled up, Zimbabwe no longer loses scarce foreign currency through unnecessary food imports.
Because irrigation has reduced risk, farming is finding viability and worthwhileness.
And because the Strategic Grain Reserve is being strengthened towards 600 000 tonnes under a six-pillar drought readiness strategy, the country can absorb a potential cereal deficit of up to 541 881 tonnes without the macroeconomic trauma that once followed every dry spell.
Resilience is no longer meaningless rhetoric; it is stored grain, functioning schemes and farmers who have repeatedly broken production records.
It is against this backdrop that Finance Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube will present the 2027 Budget on Thursday, with capital expenditure expected to rise from 2,3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2026 to 3,8 percent in 2027 and 8,8 percent by 2030.
The shift from consumption to creation is deliberate. Infrastructure-led growth, as Prof Ncube has put it, is the bedrock of long-term stability.
Roads lower the cost of trade and keep strategic corridors open, while dams convert water into irrigation, fisheries, hydropower and industrial activity.
The strategy is not untested.
China’s post-1978 infrastructure drive — ports, highways, power and special economic zones — underpinned decades of rapid growth and poverty reduction.
South Korea’s post-war investment in transport, energy and industrial infrastructure transformed a war-ravaged economy into a high-income industrial power.
More recently, Rwanda has used road construction, energy expansion and special economic zones to rebuild after the 1994 genocide and sustain growth in a landlocked economy.
Ethiopia, during its high-growth decade, demonstrated how railways, industrial parks and dam construction can attract manufacturing investment and lift aggregate growth.
In each case, infrastructure did not guarantee success on its own, but it lowered transaction costs, connected producers to markets and created the platform on which private investment could stand.
Zimbabwe’s circumstances are its own, but the logic is universal.
A country that has anchored its resilience can afford to think beyond the next drought. It can allocate capital to projects that raise productivity over the medium term rather than merely firefighting short-term food gaps. It can plan a Budget that treats infrastructure as the engine of growth rather than as a residual line item.
The 2027 Budget is, therefore, more than a fiscal statement.
It is a signal that Zimbabwe’s resilience has been sufficiently anchored to permit a forward-looking growth agenda.
The vicious circle of climate vulnerability and systemic weakness has been turned into a virtuous one.
The task now is to hold that line — to ensure that the infrastructure pivot is financed prudently, executed efficiently and sustained beyond a single Budget cycle. If it is, the country will have converted hard-won resilience into a durable foundation for medium- to long-term prosperity.
