Recommendation #1: The ICS Zimbabwe should be amended to further develop the concept of Zimbabwe as a growth hub for Southern Africa.
In the Chief of Mission Priorities, the ICS Zimbabwe refers to Zimbabwe as a “potential growth hub for southern Africa,” and this is described as strategically important to the US government.
Nowhere in the ICS is it shown that Zimbabwe has the potential to become a growth hub or why this outcome would be strategically important to Washington.
Moreover, this is a perplexing observation given that Zimbabwe is a landlocked country currently ranked 160 out of 171 countries on DHL’s Global Connectedness Index 2022. This places it below all its neighbours, as well as impoverished Sub-Saharan African countries such as Sierra Leone and Gabon.
There is a clear and present need to define these terms and their relationships more fully. Fortunately, other actors have done so:
- Network theorists have defined a hub as a highly connected node in a group of interconnected nodes.
- The World Bank defines economic growth as the increase in the value of goods and services produced by an economy over time.
- The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is composed of Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, United Republic Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This collective of countries is commonly understood to be Southern Africa.
The US Embassy Harare should borrow from these concepts. This would provide a way to conceptualise the “growth hub for southern Africa” as an SADC member state that is highly interconnected with other SADC member states through linkages that drive positive change in volume of output or in the real expenditure or income of their populations.
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