AFP, Johannesburg :
Newly-elected President Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared Zimbabwe “open for business” – but analysts say that reversing the disastrous investor exodus of the Mugabe years will require more than words of encouragement.
Considered one of southern Africa’s most promising economies when Robert Mugabe took over in 1980, it was one of the most isolated economies in the world by the time his 37-year rule ended last year.
Agricultural output plummeted after his regime started seizing white-owned farms in 2000, and he presided over hyperinflation so drastic it prompted the printing of a 100-trillion-dollar note. But Mnangagwa, the former Mugabe ally who replaced him with army backing in November, has made Zimbabwe’s biggest overtures towards the West in years.
“We want to leapfrog and catch up with other developing countries,” he said Friday after winning an election marred by deadly violence and opposition claims of fraud.
Despite the havoc Mugabe wreaked on the economy – overseeing the sharpest peacetime contraction of GDP in world history – some investors see rich potential.
“Zimbabwe’s has had such a tarnished reputation over the past few generations that very few people have looked at it, but the interest has always been there,” said Robert Besseling, executive director of risk consultancy EXX Africa.
Some are eyeing its bounteous natural resources – the second-biggest
platinum reserves in the world, as well as other minerals, coal and diamonds.
Others are hunting for opportunities in the recovering agriculture
sector, notably tobacco, or predicting a consumer boom in its 16 million-
strong population.
Hafez Ghanem, the World Bank’s vice-president for Africa, told Bloomberg
last week that Zimbabwe could become “an upper middle-income country” in a
decade.
