Zimbabwe

Your own name for Victoria Falls is Mosi-oa-Tunya — the Smoke That Thunders — and it is a better description of your last twenty years than most economic histories manage. Water becoming vapor becoming spray becoming, from far enough away, something that looks like fire. Force converting from one form to another, none of it ever quite disappearing.

I want to write to you about currency, because you have earned the right to be taken seriously on the subject in a way almost no other nation has. In November 2008, monthly inflation was calculated at 79.6 billion percent — a number so large it stops functioning as information and starts functioning as a warning. What followed was a decade and a half of resets: dollarization in 2009, bond notes in 2016, the RTGS dollar in 2019, redenomination after redenomination. In April 2024 you tried again, launching ZiG — Zimbabwe Gold — backed by a reserve basket of roughly $285 million in gold and foreign currency, later grown past $370 million. It devalued 43% by September of that year, and the Reserve Bank called that a one-off. It may not be. But building a currency people trust, after zeros no one can count, was never going to be a single clean launch — it is a slow, auditable habit, repeated until it holds.

“A currency's trust, once spent by zeros no citizen could count, is rebuilt the same slow way twice over —

in grams of gold, and in reviews any lender can verify.”

Your land reform of the 2000s reshaped who owns Zimbabwe's farmland and cost the export economy years it has only recently clawed back — that is simply what happened, without needing a verdict attached to it. What is worth noticing now is who is farming the recovery: tobacco exports hit an all-time high near $1.3 billion in 2024, earned increasingly by the smallholders that reform created, not by the commercial estates it replaced. Meanwhile a newer story is unfolding underground. You hold Africa's largest known lithium reserves, and Chinese capital has moved in fast — over a billion dollars combined into Arcadia, Bikita, Sabi Star and Zulu since 2021. That money can repeat the disruption of the land-reform years, extracted and gone, or it can be the resource land reform never quite was: broadly financed, broadly shared, processed at home instead of shipped away raw.

Joaquim Chissano now sits across the table from your creditors as High-Level Facilitator of the arrears-clearance process, carrying roughly $21 billion in old debt toward a resolution the IMF and World Bank have been waiting on for decades. It is the same project as the currency, run at a different scale: trust, once spent, has to be earned back in units a stranger can verify — grams of gold, audited reserves, a debt review completed on schedule — not promises.