Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote, recently announced in Harare that he would invest up to $1 billion in Zimbabwe in the next few years, focusing on cement manufacturing, power production and fuel transportation. This private order, which is regarded as "not seen for many years", is not only expected to reshape Zimbabwe's industrial map, but also seen as a vote of confidence in the economic reform of the Mnangagwa government.
As early as October this year, the African edition of Business Insider of the United States disclosed that Dangote Group (Dangote) was planning a "heavyweight" landing, intending to build a large-scale comprehensive industrial park in Tianjin, which integrates cement, coal and energy. Now, the Nigerian billionaire personally led a team to Harare, and after closed-door talks with President Mnangagwa, he finally pushed the blueprint that had been brewing for many years to the front stage of implementation. People familiar with the matter described it as a "transformative cooperation" that, once launched, would directly leverage Zimbabwe's long-sleeping production capacity and form a new industrial pole in southern Africa.
In fact, Dangote's affinity with Zimbabwe can be traced back to 2015. In that year, its Dangote Cement had planned to spend $400 million to build a cement plant with an annual output of 1.5 million tons in Tianjin, but it ran aground in the latter part of Mugabe's administration due to repeated policies and foreign investment barriers. Nearly a decade later, the same project has been put back on the negotiating table, doubling its scale and lengthening its chain-in addition to cement, new thermal power generation, oil pipelines and fertilizer plants have been added, with an estimated total investment of "hundreds of millions of dollars, and the pipeline part alone may push the amount to the billion level". "President Mnangagwa put the economy back on track, which convinced us that now is the best time to come in," Dangote said bluntly after the meeting.
For Zimbabwe, which is still short of foreign exchange and in the process of debt restructuring, the symbolic significance of this investment is far greater than number itself. Paul Tungwala, the president's special investment adviser, defined it as a "defining moment": it proved that the "open, transparent, investor-friendly" policy promoted by Harare over the past three years was not a slogan, but an institutional environment that could attract Africa's leading private capital. Mnangagwa also announced on the social platform X for the first time that the two sides had signed a package of memorandums of understanding on cooperation, covering energy, cement, fertilizer and infrastructure, to "inject strong momentum into the 2030 vision".
If the project lands successfully, Zimbabwe will not only have a transnational vertically integrated cement-energy-logistics industry chain for the first time, but also expect to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year in import expenditure and directly create thousands of skilled jobs. More importantly, in today's increasingly fierce competition in Southern Africa, Dangote's "gold-lettered signboard" may have a demonstration effect, driving more African capital to turn its attention from traditional destinations to Harare. As Mr Dangote puts it: "The president has passed the test, and now it is up to us to endorse Zimbabwe's next growth step with real money."
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