Chronicle Editor
Amb Chris Mutsvangwa
FOR starters, here is an iconic ode to a match making adventure made in the heavens above.
We are living in the Age of Capital. Its avatar is the intrepid businessmen. Taking risk, he churns out products which society votes for by dint of the market place of a coalescing global village.
I grew up in the halcyon days of the 1960-70s. Technological breakthroughs unleashed human talent to torrential implosion. There was Chuck Berry, the epitome of a cultural jump that gave back the global stage to none other than children of ex-slave owners to wow audience with a new musical genre Rock ‘n Roll. It would soon fill auditorium all the way to sports arenas.
Even disenfranchised colonials marginalised by pernicious racist ideologues found avenues to relate. The white world was overawed and mesmerised as it embraced and internalised the new cultural phenomena. Billions of dollars would be minted as the world was swept off its entertainment feet by Elvis Presley as well as the British Invasion of the Beatles and then Rolling Stones.
Bob Dylan, a maestro musical poet emerged. “THE TIMES, THEY ARE CHANGING…the line is drawn…the curse it is cast…the slow one now…will later be fast…as the present now…will later be past…the order is rapidly fadin’…and the first one now…will later be the last…”
The musical aside is a homage and template to the epochal economic events that are now being wrought by President ED Mnangagwa (EDM) and his Second Republic. Last Friday he toured the steel Sphinx emerging out of the age old Manhize Iron Deposits. This is a phenomenal geological outcrop of iron rich rock. It has been pivotal to the iron age technological attainments of the millennial old Great Zimbabwe Civilisation.
Delving back to the future, Manhize is about to spawn yet a new era in the epic march to wholesome and rewarding prosperity for our people. The astute and visionary message of business enterprise championed by President EDM is reaching into boardrooms of the most venerated of global business enterprise.
Our mouthwatering world class resource endowment is resonating in into the ear drums of competent world class entrepreneurial flair. Who would have envisaged that Tsingshan Holdings Group, would have painstakingly and methodically expanded its portfolio of local investment to the apex of carbon steel value chain.
Most of this vivid business drama being witnessed in a short four-year span. Clearly taking full advantage of the mantra Zimbabwe Is Open for Business as espoused by President EDM. This may actually be the opportune time to unpack the sharp sense of entrepreneurial judgment, persistent courtship and beguiling business charm that lurks inside our President.
Chairman Xiang Guangda of Tsingshan Holdings paid his first visit to Zimbabwe in September 2013. He was attracted by out venerated ferro-chrome reserves to build furnaces in Selous on the Great Dyke. Foolishly our ham-fisted business approach canceled the apex government appointment. Luckily. Vice President was alert and quick. He read his tea leaves of business and offered his lower office as default fall back on the cancelled apex encounter. Serendipity kicked in and a bond of trust and confidence was struck.
Four years of desultory mutual engagement ensued in repeated frustration. The baneful Indigenization Act was there to scupper all. G40s and Gamatox political cyphers were busy at work serving inimical foreign masters.
ZDERA was passed in 2002 to burden Foreign Direct Investment with a negative premium. The Indigenization Act aggravated that already unsavory business atmosphere. It added a new and loathsome layer of negative investment premium to enterprising capital.
The nation was thus consigned to a bucolic pathway of putrid economic decay through sheer and crass political ignorance underpinning a villagist political doctrine of myopic self-reliance. It took no cognizance of the razor thin paucity of the local pool of capital. It never recognised the inverse mismatch of our national capital resources to the outsized bonanza of riches nature had endowed.
Operation Restore Legacy became the only political hatchway to escape the manacles of national suicidal impoverishment. The pincer grip of kleptocratic local compradors and their mendacious foreign handlers would have inexorably taken us to the fate of the Aborigines of Australia and Native Americans.
President EDM got his window during the State Visit to P.R. China in 2018. He made sure he left Beijing for Hangzhou, that capital of newly spawned global class Chinese billionaires. The mutual business friendship with Chairman Xiang Guangda of Tsingshan Holdings Group was rekindled.
Last week President EDM had the opportunity to savoir the grandiose construction of a global class Steel and Metals Value Addition Industrial Park. Where Tsingshan goes, companies like Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen and other motor vehicle brands follow. They all like the high quality of carbon steel burned out by Tsingshan blast furnaces. A similar page is being wrought with lithium in Prospect Goromonzi, MaxMind Sabi in Buhera and Bikita Lithium.
The revolution on technology took the subterranean African rhythms and transformed rhyme to the forefront of global music in the 1960-70s. The EDM Second Republic is replicating a similar feat. Geological endowments that pushed Africa to the forefront of nascent humanoid civilization are being accorded new vistas.
The EDM Second Republic is leaving no stone unturned as it seeks vantage pedestal in attracting competent and capable global capital to ‘sweat’ our resource base. That way we leapfrog and vault Zimbabwe to developmental achievements of the likes of Singapore and beyond.
EDM watiza nechitanda. Handei tese. Hapana chekumirira apa.
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