Is Zimbabwe cursed by its mineral wealth?

Tendai Ruben Mbofana

Beneath the dry red earth lies one of the richest geological endowments on the African continent: vast reserves of platinum, gold, chrome, nickel, and the modern global economy’s prized prize, lithium. 

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Headlines boast of billion-dollar mining deals, record export earnings, and Zimbabwe’s strategic position at the heart of the global green energy transition. 

Yet, if you walk through the very communities sitting atop these treasures, the narrative of prosperity instantly disintegrates. 

You do not smell success; you swallow the choking dust of heavy haulage trucks rumbling past crumbling schools, dilapidated clinics, and dry water taps. 

This stark contradiction forces a uncomfortable question that haunts the nation: is Zimbabwe cursed by its mineral wealth?

To understand the present lithium fever, one must first look at the ghost of the Marange diamond rush. 

In the mid-2000s, the discovery of alluvial diamonds in Chiadzwa was hailed as a generational lifeline that would turn Zimbabwe’s economic fortunes around. 

Billions of dollars worth of gems were extracted from the earth. 

Yet, two decades later, what remains in Marange? 

Local communities were forcibly displaced to make way for mining operations, stripped of their ancestral farmland, and resettled in poorly constructed homes with little economic security. 

The diamonds left the country in armored vehicles and private jets, while the people of Chiadzwa were left with silted rivers, polluted water sources, deathly open pits, and deep structural poverty. 

The promised hospitals were never built, the schools remained underfunded, and the wealth vanished into a opaque web of corporate opacity and state-linked elites.

Today, history is repeating itself with terrifying precision in the lithium rush. 

From Goromonzi and Bikita to Sandawana and Kamativi, multinational corporations and foreign consortiums are carving up the countryside to supply the world’s appetite for electric vehicle batteries. 

Heavy machinery works round the clock to dig up raw lithium ore, which is promptly loaded onto fleets of trucks bound for foreign processing plants. 

Once again, local residents watch fortunes leave their backyards while receiving nothing in return except environmental degradation and noise pollution. 

Roads built for light rural traffic are pulverized under the weight of foreign mining trucks, leaving dust clouds that settle over local crops and homes. 

The promised jobs are predominantly low-wage, informal, or hazardous, while high-value technical roles and processing revenues remain offshore.

This tragic cycle persists because we have allowed the definition of mineral wealth to be fundamentally twisted. 

A nation’s resource value cannot be measured by glowing state press releases, quarterly export stats, or raw GDP figures. 

True wealth is not defined by how much value is shipped through distant ports, but by tangible, lasting improvements in the daily lives of citizens. 

True wealth looks like paved, all-weather roads connecting rural farmers to markets. 

It looks like modern, well-stocked hospitals where mothers do not have to buy their own surgical gloves. 

It looks like clean, piped water, reliable electricity, and state-of-the-art schools that give local children a real path out of poverty.

When a mining concession generates hundreds of millions in profit while the surrounding community lacks basic clean water and functioning toilets, the economic system is not merely failing—it is actively predatory. 

Extracting non-renewable resources without leaving behind durable human capital and infrastructure is simply generational theft masked as economic activity.

The “resource curse” is not a supernatural spell or an inevitable fate written in the stars. 

It is a deliberate set of human decisions, policy failures, and weak institutional guardrails that prioritize short-term revenue and private gain over long-term public interest. 

Until Zimbabwe strictly enforces local benefit-sharing agreements, mandates domestic value addition before export, and holds mining companies rigorously accountable for environmental destruction, mineral abundance will remain a national tragedy. 

A country rich in minerals should never be home to poor people. 

Until the wealth beneath the ground transforms the lives of those walking above it, Zimbabwe’s mineral bounty will remain not a blessing, but a heavy and heartbreaking burden.

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