Using hard-earned remittances they regularly send home, they have acquired or developed properties in different towns and cities, as well as contributing to modernising our rural homes and mechanising our smallholder agriculture. Not too far back, former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa paid tribute to our nationals for their role in the development of indigenous agriculture in South Africa. The story is the same in Zambia, where our people have had a long history of farming there. We also see more Zimbabweans making inroads in Mozambique, where they have carved a niche for themselves in agriculture. This is as it should be.
I have had a few occasions during which I have interacted with Zimbabweans living in South Africa. That way and through other mechanisms, Government has been able to keep them plugged in on home developments, including our development programmes across sectors, and our Vision 2030. As a result, Zimbabweans in the diaspora, including South Africa, have contributed immensely to national programmes, and towards the attainment of Vision 2030. Today, their remittances exceed a billion-and-a-half United States dollars, making them a veritable source of our foreign earnings.
In my interaction with our nationals in the diaspora, including those in South Africa, I was struck by the vast skills they have been able to build on the excellent education we provided them with as a nation. The skills repertoire they now have is vast and today stands as a huge investment we have inadvertently made as a nation through them, as they stayed abroad. One example concretely illustrates the dramatic impact of this investment.
As we sought to rehabilitate our national electricity grid, we realised we were short of skills, a good many of which we had lost through brain drain. We invited Zimbabwean engineers in the diaspora to step in and assist in this endeavour. The response was overwhelming, again showing our people’s hearts are always with us and their nation here at home. When called upon, they do not hesitate to come back home to contribute.
As a matter of fact, the expiry of ZEP merely reinforced a self-repatriation trend that was already underway. Lately, and especially in the last year or so, we saw many Zimbabweans abroad already retracing their steps back home to exploit opportunities which now daily show, as our economy recovers and continues to grow. Government, thus, sees the expiry of ZEP, and the return of our citizens in the diaspora, as a boon; it is not a bane.
We thank all those countries which gave them shelter and more skills while we sorted out our affairs for recovery and growth. South Africa ranks foremost among those countries. With our economy now on an irreversible growth trajectory, the time has now come for our nation to claim back its own and to assume full responsibilities for its citizens who may wish or need to come back home. They now have opportunities to contribute here at home. This is how my Government views this latest development.
Still, Government does not underestimate weighty decisions and onerous work required to smoothly repatriate all our nationals, and to re-integrate them in the home economy and society. Alive to this challenge, I used the just-ended 36th Session of the African Union in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to touch base with my brother, President Cyril Ramaphosa of the sister Republic of South Africa, and with Professor Antonio Vitorino, the director-general of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). IOM is a United Nations agency.
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