PRETORIA (miningweekly.com) – Zimbabwe’s mining assets remain largely in the hands of foreign whites, despite various nationalisation-driven policy efforts to dismantle majority white ownership of assets in the country, President Robert Mugabe said on Thursday.
“All industrialisation [in South Africa and Zimbabwe] was done in the interest of the whites and all our mines [remain] controlled, not even by local whites, but by [those from] outside.
“The very people you fought against [stay] in control of the economy…[and] control us to this day. The black man is on his own,” he told the South Africa–Zimbabwe Business Forum, in Pretoria, on the last day of his two-day State tour to South Africa.
The elderly statesman said the country’s mining development agenda would remain focused on adding value to its raw mineral exports through intensified beneficiation efforts, but mines would first need to fall under the control of government.
“The agenda shall be a sustained agenda of adding value… but we must win the natural resources first and make them our own, so that [we are] producing from our own natural resources…hence the indigenisation plan.
“There has to be, at the base of beneficiation, ownership by the people,” Mugabe averred.
He added that independence was “only a half measure” in most African countries, as many did not control “a bit” of their natural resources.
Mining Weekly reported last year that the Zimbabwean embassy in South Africa said the “misunderstanding” of Zimbabwe’s indigenisation policy had seen foreign investors shy away from the country’s mining industry.
This after Mugabe in 2008 signed the Indigenisation and Economic Policy into law, in terms of which 51% of all foreign- and white-owned businesses needed to be ceded to indigenous Zimbabweans.