Online Reporter
Timothy Pemba
I have tried, in my own way, to participate in Zimbabwe’s industrialisation story.
As an SME player, I sought to import a single piece of capital machinery, nothing extravagant, that would immediately create five or more jobs.
The idea was simple: invest, produce locally, employ people and grow gradually.
What I encountered instead was not developmental finance, but a banking system that does not speak to ordinary people unless they already belong to an inner circle of “existing partners”. From the outset, the conditions were clear — not explicitly stated, but structurally enforced.
Without an established relationship, large balances or a long trading history, meaningful engagement was impossible. The conversation was never about potential jobs, productivity or value addition; it was about collateral, risk avoidance and prior standing.
In short, it was about exclusion.
This experience is not unique. It is emblematic of a deeper structural problem within Zimbabwe’s banking system, one that directly undermines industrialisation and entrenches youth unemployment.
Our banks do not finance beginnings; they finance continuity.
The irony is that industrialisation, by definition, depends on new firms, new production capacity, experimentation and calculated risk. Yet Zimbabwe’s banking system is built to support businesses that already exist, already have assets and already generate predictable cash flows. For SMEs and young entrepreneurs, the message is simple: return once you no longer need us. This logic is not accidental; it is inherited. The banking architecture we operate today is a direct descendant of the system designed in Rhodesia, a system created to serve a narrow, asset-owning elite rather than a mass, indigenous, industrial economy.
That system prioritised capital preservation, not enterprise creation.
Independence did not dismantle this logic; it merely expanded access to the same conservative framework. As a result, we have a post-colonial economy attempting to transform itself with colonial financial instruments. What makes this even more troubling is how banks now sustain themselves. If salaries in Zimbabwe were suddenly paid in cash, many banks would struggle to survive. This is not hyperbole.
A significant portion of bank revenue is no longer driven by developmental lending or productive investment, but by charges for viewing balances, moving money, or simply existing within the system.
Customers are not partners in development; they are revenue streams. Banks have become extractive.
This has devastating implications for youth unemployment. Young people must innovate, start businesses and be entrepreneurial, yet the financial system systematically denies them the tools required to do so.
There is no patient capital, no venture-style financing and no risk-sharing instruments, just short-term loans with punitive conditions, if any funding is offered at all.
In other countries, banks and bank-linked funds take minority equity stakes in SMEs, share the upside and exit over time. This allows entrepreneurs to build, fail, learn and grow. In Zimbabwe, failure is criminalised by finance and success must be pre-proven before support is considered.
This is anti-industrial and anti-youth by design. The deeper issue is how risk is defined. Zimbabwean banks treat SMEs, informal businesses and youth-led enterprises as inherently risky. But risk is not neutral; it is historically constructed.
Our banks still operate within a colonial imagination that views informality as disorder, experimentation as recklessness and indigenous enterprise as temporary.
Yet the truth is that SMEs are the backbone of the economy; they are the source of employment, innovation and resilience. To dismiss them as unbankable is to ignore Zimbabwe’s future. Industrialisation cannot be achieved through policy documents alone.
It requires a financial system aligned with transformation, one that understands that development is not tidy, that jobs are created before balance sheets are perfected, and that growth often precedes stability, not the other way around. This is where the decolonial critique becomes unavoidable. Decolonising finance does not mean rejecting banks; it means reimagining their role.
It means moving from extractive charges to productive investment, from collateral obsession to partnership and from risk avoidance to risk management.
Until that shift occurs, Zimbabwe will remain trapped in a painful paradox: a youthful population desperate to work and build and a banking sector with capital, but no developmental imagination.
My attempt to import a machine should not have been an anomaly; it should have been routine. That it was not tells us everything we need to know.
Timothy Pemba is a student of the Decolonisation of Africa with a deep interest in the continent’s socio-economic transformation and its role in the global landscape. He can be contacted via email at [email protected].
Zimbabweans have the ideas and ambition to industrialise, but the financial system still does not recognise ordinary people as agents of development.
Timothy Pemba is a student of the decolonisation of Africa with a deep interest in the continent’s socio-economic transformation and its role in the global landscape. He can be contacted via email at: [email protected]
