Farai Mutamangira
While the legal hubs of the global ecosystem still reside in New York, London, and Hong Kong, the spiking population growth in many African cities, such as Harare, offers a glimpse into what will likely be a rapid and concerted growth in the legal profession in the region.
And that’s where firms like Clairwood Chambers, founded by senior partner Farai Mutamangira, come into play.
From deal origination to structuring of mineral offtake prepays, mergers and acquisitions, turnarounds, and the resuscitation of mothballed extractive sector assets, the southern African country’s anticipated growth will be anchored on the knowledge and intellectual drive of a few professionals, including the 45-year-old attorney Mutamangira.
With Zimbabwe endowed with vast resources, including lithium, gold, diamonds, and platinum, Mutamangira’s like-minded consultants and businessmen — skilled in financial structuring and the investment banking space — have started a “collaborative process to lead Harare’s accelerated socioeconomic recovery,” Farai Mutamangira explains.
“We have … advised and managed up to $1 billion worth of debt and equity investment transactions in mostly public and private sector assets in the past three years and the [gross domestic product] impact has been phenomenal,” said Mutamangira, a graduate of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the chairman of Fastjet Zimbabwe, on the sidelines of the opening of the new Harare International Airport wing recently.
“The structures we have put together have leveraged mostly receivables — gold, lithium, diamonds, and [platinum group metals] — to create the fastest route or path to securing capital and … directing that cash to the growth of relevant sectors,” Mutamangira said, adding, “Aviation and the tourism industry are the next biggest growth frontiers with Fastjet leading the aviation sector in Zimbabwe.“
“In the short term, tourism and the extractive sector will remain exciting to watch as they are expected to be the foundation of the Zimbabwean economy’s bounce back.”
Harare’s Bustling Expansion
The bustling metropolis of Harare has an estimated population of approximately 2 million people and is projected to cross the 4 million or even 5 million mark in the next several years. It’s a microcosm of the changes and influence that will confront the country and continent in the coming years, addressing such issues as increased global economic activity for the country (and city) as well as concerns over how that growth will play out. Lawyers like Farai Mutamangira will play a vital role in that expansion.
Most major global law firms have a minimal presence in the region, primarily parachuting in for commercial and financial matters that, up until recently, were unable to be handled on a local level. But that has changed.
Law firms such as Farai Mutamangira’s Clairwood Chambers are expanding beyond the local matters firms used to handle in the city, and even evolving past the traditional work such as family and criminal law they’ve been accustomed to handling. For his part, the Clairwood Chambers founder and his partners have set themselves apart by demonstrating leadership in the mining, infrastructure, aviation, technology, and intellectual property sectors by the “significant deals’ sizes, capital raises, and settled litigation.”
These include the $5 billion African Consolidated Resources dispute with the Zimbabwean government over the Chiadzwa diamond fields; the $500 million Amari Holdings’ Selous complex platinum claim and commercial arbitration in Zambia; Zimbabwe’s readmission into the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme after diamond exports had been halted; Meikles Limited’s recovery of $80 million from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe; and several other cases.
Clairwood and similar enterprises now handle large, international deals and negotiations, such as those pertaining to mining law, international law, and intellectual property work. Historically, when these matters arose for either local or international organizations operating in Harare, outside counsel that was viewed as having more expertise was given the reins.
That’s not necessarily the case anymore.
‘Committed to Justice and the Rule of Law’
The Law Society of Zimbabwe states that its mission is to be “world-class, independent, and [a] law society committed to justice and the rule of law.
“The LSZ is dedicated to effectively and efficiently representing and regulating the legal profession to promote the sustainable development of the legal profession, the observance of the rule of law, and foster public trust and confidence in the justice system.”
The society’s members have their work cut out for them. The growth of the legal industry in Harare comes as a direct result of a significant period of demographic and economic change that the city, and Zimbabwe as a whole, have experienced over the past 20 years.
Harare, like many growing African cities, was for a long time (and to some degree still is) dealing with the change from a colonial property to its own economic and cultural engine. But it’s not easy to shake off the shackles of colonialism.
Through the early part of the 21st century, the city experienced a continued degradation that started in the early 1990s, as the country attempted to move past its colonized past after achieving independence in the early 1980s.
As an economic downturn gripped the city in 1992, the government sought to move the burg away from its traditional economic bases, such as manufacturing and farming for exportable goods, and into more sophisticated forms of economic growth, such as finance, banking, and targeted agriculture. While this sounded good on paper, the transition cost jobs in those former bases and put Harare into a spin it’s just now recovering from.
At a low point in 2011, the Economist Intelligence Unit rated the city as one of the world’s worst to live in, as it experienced more growth than any other Zimbabwean city during the first part of the 2010s and struggled to gain control of said growth.
Reported the BBC, “Once the breadbasket of the region, since 2000 Zimbabwe has struggled to feed its own people due to severe droughts and the effects of a land reform programme that saw white-owned farms redistributed to landless Zimbabweans, with sharp falls in production.”
This uncertainty brought in outside influences such as foreign investment in property while at the same time fostering a “brain drain” of the city’s most educated people (such as attorneys) to countries such as England and India.
After the Great Recession, the city began to stabilize, and opportunities for law firms such as Farai Mutamangira’s Clairwood came of age.
While previous conditions might have seen Farai Mutamangira and his colleagues looking for greener pastures in more established legal environments, they now had one in their backyard.
With that economic growth has come a slew of legal opportunities common in more developed countries but novel to emerging economies like Zimbabwe.
Given its attorney roster, Clairwood Chambers, in particular, is in a solid position to capitalize on the emerging legal work.
Mutamangira, for one, has the background likely necessary for a major law firm to find success in the new Harare. He handles disputes, mining law and litigation, and international arbitration, among other areas.
But where Clairwood Chambers will, as most U.S. and U.K. firms have found over the years, likely see the most bang for its buck is in corporate work, something unavailable to many local firms up until recently.
As any international law firm can attest, knowing the local market and the laws that govern it is as essential as strong client service when landing — and keeping — long-term clients.
While Mutamangira’s firm has the right pieces in place, it will likely encounter increased competition from other international firms as Harare’s economic engine revs up.
But while New York City’s Wall Street white-shoe firms and London’s Magic Circle firms such as Slaughter and May or Allen & Overy will look to leverage their historical success to make an impact in the Harare legal market, firms like Mutamangira’s firm — with robust local connections and a brand within the region — should be able to compete as it continues to produce quality attorneys locally and leverage their staff’s local knowledge as a differentiator for clients.
As the coming years play out, an interesting and perhaps contentious battle will likely follow for the lucrative legal work that will play a significant role in Harare’s (and Zimbabwe’s) maturation into a state of mature capitalism. If firms like Clairwood Chambers can grab hold of some of that work, it may help create a blueprint for other emerging economies on how to keep their high-end legal work homegrown.
Post published in: Business