FORTNIGHT ago, I attended the African Investment Forum (AIF) 2025 Market Days in Morocco — my second consecutive year at this premier investment marketplace.
I returned with a stark observation: for a country desperate to attract capital, Zimbabwe has perfected the art of being absent from the very spaces where investment decisions are made. The AIF Market Days is one of Africa’s most influential deal-making platforms, a competitive arena where countries pitch, persuade and position themselves for capital.
Yet Zimbabwe walks in quietly, sits at the back and slips out unnoticed. At a time when other nations are aggressively selling their visions, we behave like a country content with being forgotten.
This year’s forum revealed an uncomfortable truth: Zimbabwe has rendered itself irrelevant in Africa’s investment ecosystem, not because anyone excluded us, but because we have chosen not to show up meaningfully.
Having now attended two editions, the pattern is unmistakable. We simply do not feature where serious capital is being mobilised.
Out of 39 boardroom sessions this year, Zimbabwe had just one project on the agenda. Last year was no different — the same lonely, isolated presence. For three days of panel discussions, fireside chats and high-level deal-making, Zimbabwe was practically invisible.
As a journalist, I struggled to find a single investor or panellist who mentioned Zimbabwe unprompted. You have to drag the conversation there, and even then, the reaction feels strained. We are not in the minds of Africa’s dealmakers, and that silence is deafening.
Meanwhile, the financial muscle driving Africa’s growth has shifted decisively to West and East Africa. These regions are deliberate, organised and predictable in the way they court investment. They show up prepared.
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Zimbabwe, in contrast, has watched global financial institutions pack their bags. We have lost correspondent banking relationships that take decades to rebuild. We have lost institutional confidence. In finance, presence is everything.
When Southern Africa’s prospects are discussed, the names that dominate are South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi. Not Zimbabwe. Our neighbours pitch their projects, defend their policy frameworks and articulate their visions. Zimbabwe lingers in the shadows, hoping for recognition that never comes.
What makes this even more disheartening is the number of Zimbabweans working within the very multilateral institutions shaping Africa’s development agenda. Brilliant minds. Highly-trained professionals. People influencing billion-dollar decisions. Yet their expertise benefits other nations, not Zimbabwe. They attend these forums, they guide investment flows, but their own country remains absent from the table.
I attended Zimbabwe’s single boardroom session this year. Investors were impressed by the project’s potential; there was no doubt about the underlying opportunity. But potential means nothing when overshadowed by systemic risk. Their concerns were blunt: fears around repatriating funds, policy inconsistency, currency volatility and the broader perception that Zimbabwe is unpredictable.
These concerns are not political. They are factual. And serious investors do not gamble with billions.
Last year, when I asked institutions about offering investment guarantees to Zimbabwe, many said the country was too risky and its bureaucratic processes too cumbersome to justify the effort. This year, nothing had changed. The world has not moved on from Zimbabwe’s reputational scars — and why should it, when we have done little to rebuild trust?
We have a dangerous habit of downplaying our country risk. We dismiss it as exaggeration or mask it with rhetoric. But investors are informed, analytical and brutally honest. Zimbabwe’s risk is high, structural and well-documented. No glossy brochure or optimistic speech can hide that.
Yes, some investors still come - but we must be candid about who they are. The highly-compliant, long-term institutional investors who build industries and anchor economies are not coming. They cannot justify investing where exit is uncertain, the currency unstable and policy subject to sudden shifts.
Zimbabwe is not missing out by accident. We are missing out because serious investors do not take risks they cannot hedge.
The world knows our challenges. It is waiting for us to fix them. Until then, we remain spectators in Africa’s investment renaissance — a country of vast potential dimmed by self-inflicted risk.
