Online Reporter
Bulawayo was largely built and developed as an industrial city, headquarters of the railways with their demand for rolling stock providing an early heavy industry base, and then considered the obvious place to build a factory if you wanted to manufacture almost anything.
So for many decades Bulawayo was the largest city in Zimbabwe, and while Harare had the Government, civil service, tobacco and other agro-industrial processing, the heavy duty heart of the economy was Bulawayo.
This is why the forerunner of the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair, the Central African Trade Fair, was automatically sited in Bulawayo.
It was not a political decision to spread events, but a solid commercial decision to have the trade fair where the bulk of the industrialists in the old Federation that also included Zambia and Malawi were based.
Along with the factories, a culture grew up that the path to economic success lay with making things that lots of people wanted, preferably from raw materials sourced within Zimbabwe, rather than sitting in the upper floors of skyscrapers trying to make a profit dealing in shares or arbitraging bank rates or the other financial manipulations that grew up.
The city was easily the most advanced socially. The industrialists insisted that sensible and practical people had to be employed to make sure the growing workforce was properly housed and not just housed decently, but also housed within a walk or bicycle ride of their factory.
That is why, to this day, Bulawayo’s high density housing was built close to the city centre and the industrial areas, rather than following the colonial policy in Harare of keeping indigenous Zimbabweans as far as possible from the settlers and the commercial hubs.
Bulawayo was considered far more desirable place to live for many, as a result.
The collapse of Ziscosteel early this century, the running down of the railways in favour of road traffic, and what amounted to the deindustrialisation of much of Zimbabwe as a result of economic reforms letting in imports for almost everything hammered Bulawayo very hard, and the city suffered more than most as factories closed and new businesses were reluctant to move in.
The Second Republic has seen the potential.
This starts with the culture, that you should be making money by making quality products in modern factories that people want to buy at competitive and affordable prices.
Final assembly of consumer goods from imported parts ever really caught on among Bulawayo industrialists, who always reckoned that the way forward was to use Zimbabwean raw materials and build an industrial base that used local value chains.
A lot of time and trouble was taken to train workforces for such an industrial complex, as well as instilling those desirable characteristics of hard work, advancement through merit and the idea that a “normal” job was one in a factory, not messing around so much in commerce.
Many Bulawayo people after the industrial collapse had to escape into commerce, but even here the city council and community organised the informal sector far better than other cities and towns and managed to retain a lot of rational town planning and zoning. Even in disaster Bulawayo tended to pull together.
Now Zimbabwe is once again a major steelmaker, with the new steelmills at Manhize, and the Government has made it clear that it sees value addition of local raw materials as the only sustainable way forward, to ensure the country gets full value of these raw materials.
Being a commodity exporter is all very well, but the serious money comes from being regional and continental manufacturers, rather than relying on the farmers and miners producing the raw materials and then seeing them shipped off to factories in other countries.
Resuscitating Bulawayo’s industry is not impossible and is probably one of the most cost-effective ways of accelerating industrial growth, considering that even after being made redundant many in Bulawayo have the needed skills and attitudes.
There is need for additions and repair of infrastructure.
Gwayi-Shangani Dam needs to be finished, which will probably happen next year with the Government increasing the resources available, and then that century-old dream of a pipeline needs to be completed so the city has enough water for its factories and their workers.
The old rail infrastructure within the city needs to be cleaned up, as one thing heavy industry really requires is those sidings at the back of factories and the far more economical rail transport rather than expensive big trucks.
Delivery vans are fine for some products, but the heavy industrialist wants door to door rail wagons.
The idea of a special fund to fix the infrastructure is a good one, and the Government and private sector need to respond, and then loan funds at rational interest rates need to be created.
The sort of mess that occurs when loans are used to finance speculative behaviour on a stock exchange is unlikely to happen when the same money is invested in modern production machinery, so different rules can apply.
