𝗖𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗦𝗘 𝗟𝗢𝗢𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗦𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗡 𝗪𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗡 𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗡𝗜𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗦𝗠 𝗜𝗙 𝗪𝗘 𝗗𝗢𝗡’𝗧 𝗖𝗨𝗥𝗕 𝗜𝗧.

U.S. versus China in African investment.

I have just read George Charamba’s exegesis on why China is supposedly better than America and the West — arguing that, unlike the West, which steals our minerals to store in their vaults, China has opened its markets duty-free to African goods.

What worries me, however, is he does not mention that our government is aware that some individual Chinese companies in the country, are allegedly smuggling up to US$30 million EACH worth of gold every month out of Zimbabwe, after using a destructive process known as heap leaching, which extracts gold more efficiently, while devastating our mountains. This gold is reportedly smuggled out of Zimbabwe through the Zambezi and into Zambia without paying tax or royalties.

Even those few companies processing minerals locally are merely crushing rocks into powder, extracting the pure minerals, removing impurities, and exporting the refined material without manufacturing anything locally. Moreover, the companies servicing these Chinese operations — logistics, spare parts, repairs, and inputs — are also Chinese, and both extractor and servicer often have no local ownership. It is the same colonial blueprint; the only difference is that the Chinese loot faster and more crudely without leaving anything for locals than the Europeans.

They pay our people less, depressing living standards, they fail to transfer skills, and destroy local transport companies and service providers by awarding contracts exclusively to their own firms.

At least European exploitation left behind many, if not all, of the cities we have in Zimbabwe today. South Africa’s Johannesburg, the East Rand, and Springs are mining cities that form one of the top ten biggest conurbations in the world. They were left by Western gold mining and processing.

Which world-class city have the Chinese built in Africa? More concerning is that most of their factories are clumsily cobbled makeshift corrugated sheet-metal shacks designed to extract and move once resource is depleted. This is unlike the permanent high-quality factories and economic hubs with down steam industries built by Anglo America, Unilever, Nestlé, and Lonrho that often became the centers of development for multi-nuclei business hubs or towns.

Numerous towns in Zimbabwe, too, were built by Western mining companies, agricultural estates, and factories that developed infrastructure, raised living standards by paying better wages, and left enough excess in the economy to drive micro-economies into towns like Chiredzi, Chipinge, and Mazowe.

However, this is something that Chinese firms have failed to do because they siphon all excess wealth out of the periphery (third world economy) back to China, as all high-paying technical jobs are done by Chinese nationals. Contracts to transport, repair machinery, or supply parts go only to Chinese service providers, leaving nothing to develop similar ecosystems like the Western colonizer left.

This is why the Chinese have not built a single world-class town or city that mirrors what they have at home or like the colonizers did with Joburg, Harare, Middelburg, Rustenburg, or Hwange.

The most troubling issue is that Chinese entities now dominate most mineral value chains across Africa. As a result, when we mine and process our own minerals — particularly under the “Look East” policy — we often have nowhere to sell those minerals except to Chinese resource brokers, who often pay peanuts after we eliminated competitive bids from the West.

This is why it’s absurd for the President’s spokesperson to gaslight us by saying exporting a few agricultural products to China, while Chinese companies loot and deplete our non-renewable minerals, is somehow better than the West, which built entire towns and cities that created jobs and vibrant ecosystems.

We will never achieve a better mutual relationship with China if we cannot honestly tell them that they are currently worse than the former colonizer who they helped us defeat.

Written by Rutendo Matinyarare, Chairman of ZASM.