Mnangagwa says Zimbabwe has confounded its detractors who had already written its obituary

Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa today said Zimbabwe had done fairly well over the past four years confounding its detractors who had written colourful obituaries about the nation.

Writing in his weekly column in the Sunday Mail, Mnangagwa said the country was poised for growth and mining would leapfrog it to an upper middle income economy by 2030.

He said to achieve this, the country would be concentrating on the three Es: Exploration, Extraction and Expansion of all minerals and mines.

“To the three Es must be coupled greater Processing and Beneficiation/Value Addition. When all the five elements are pursued in equal measure and with greater intensity, we should be able to see our mining sector gallop past the US$12 billion mark,” the President said.

“It can be done; it will be done, thus creating more jobs especially for our youths. This must be our focus, as we take full advantage of the unstable global situation to maximise our opportunities and earnings. Alongside Agriculture, Manufacturing and Tourism, we should be able to beat all odds, whether local or global.”

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Last week, the 25th Edition of our premier mining event, Mine Entra Exhibition, was held in Bulawayo, the City of Kings and Queens.

I was invited to officially open the exhibition after a two-year hiatus related to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

What was remarkable was that the exhibition resumed at all, and did so on a magnitude which belied the two-year disruption it had suffered. Both these bear testimony to the sheer resilience of our mining sector and those at the helm of it. We thank them all as a Nation.

From 2017 when the Second Republic was inaugurated, until now, the global situation has been remarkably unstable.

Barely two years into the Second Republic, we were struck by the global Covid-19 pandemic. It turned our lives upside down. Even though we have made significant strides in defeating the pandemic, we are yet to return to normalcy, both nationally and globally.

At the beginning of 2022 when we thought we were set to shrug off Covid-19, conflict broke out in Eastern Europe, triggering worldwide tremors.

That conflict rages on, challenging the world order as we have known it since the end of the Second World War.

The past four years have thus been seismic, putting a premium on change and adaptation as key watchwords to national survival.

Amidst these dramatic changes, we have had to keep reshuffling our goals, our plans and our programmes as an Economy, and as a Nation.

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