ZIMBABWE JUST GAVE FOREIGN BUSINESSES THREE YEARS TO HAND OVER 75 PERCENT OWNERSHIP AND THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
ZIMBABWE JUST GAVE FOREIGN BUSINESSES THREE YEARS TO HAND OVER 75 PERCENT OWNERSHIP AND THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS🚨🚨🚨
President Mnangagwa signed a law that reserves salons, bakeries, transport, small manufacturing, and artisanal mining for Zimbabweans only. Foreign businesses in other sectors must hand over 75 percent ownership to locals within three years or shut down. To stay, you must invest at least 20 million dollars and employ over 200 locals.
On natural resources, this makes immediate sense. For decades, foreign capital extracted Zimbabwe’s minerals, took the profits offshore, and left holes in the ground. Reserving mining for citizens who actually live with the consequences of extraction is not radical. It is long overdue. Any serious Pan-Africanist will tell you that sovereignty over resources is the bare minimum, not the ceiling.
The problem sits on the other side of the ledger.
Not every foreign business is a multinational mining conglomerate. A Pakistani family running a small bakery in Bulawayo did not colonize anyone. A Chinese entrepreneur who started a transport company with personal savings and employs ten locals is not an agent of neocolonial extraction. The law sweeps them into the same three-year deadline as it sweeps the mining giants.
Where exactly will ordinary Zimbabweans find the capital to buy 75 percent of these businesses? Three years is not enough time to raise that kind of money when the economy is already squeezing everyone. The risk is not that foreign exploiters will leave. The risk is that small businesses employing Zimbabweans will collapse before the transfer even happens, and the jobs they created will disappear with them.
This is the tension at the heart of economic nationalism. Protect local ownership, and you may kill the very enterprises that feed families. Leave the door wide open, and foreign capital extracts everything and leaves nothing behind. Zimbabwe has chosen the first path. Whether it leads to genuine economic liberation or simply fewer businesses for ordinary people to work in is now the only question that matters.
Lumumba, Sankara, and Nkrumah wanted African resources in African hands. They also understood that independence without economic viability is just a flag and an empty treasury. This law will be judged not by its intention but by whether Zimbabweans are better off three years from now than they are today.
