Today, as I am traveling along the highway from my hometown of Redcliff toward Harare, a single, overwhelming phenomenon dominates the landscape.
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The road is swallowed whole by a relentless procession of heavy haulage trucks.
They rumble north and south, carrying everything from raw mineral ores and fuel to agricultural produce and bulk construction materials.
To an untrained observer, this spectacle might resemble economic vitality—a country in motion, moving its goods across borders and towns.
But to anyone paying attention, it is a deeply disturbing indicator of systemic failure.
Our highways were never built to endure the merciless battering of millions of metric tons of daily freight.
As tar turns to rubble and deep ruts carve open the tarmac, the unavoidable question surfaces: where is the rail system?
Bulk freight belongs on tracks, not roads.
Yet the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), which once anchored the nation’s supply chains, lies in ruins.
At its peak in the 1990s, the state-owned carrier moved over 12 million tonnes of cargo annually.
Today, hobbled by decades of systemic corruption, looted assets, severe underinvestment, and gross mismanagement, that capacity has withered to a fraction of its former self.
Periodically, officialdom announces grandiose schemes to rebuild the railway.
We have seen high-profile memorandums of understanding signed with foreign suitors, from the aborted $400 million deal with the Diaspora Infrastructure Development Group to prospective partnerships with Turkish firms like Yapı Merkezi and multi-million-dollar supply contracts.
Yet year after year, the tracks remain quiet, and the promises yield no tangible fruit.
This persistent inertia is not an accident of administrative incompetence; it is an economic incentive.
When NRZ collapsed, a massive logistical void opened.
That void was quickly filled by private haulage companies—a staggering number of which are owned by politically connected elites, high-ranking officials, or their proxies.
A functioning railway is a direct commercial threat to these lucrative trucking fleets.
Why would those who hold the levers of public policy revive a public utility if doing so would dismantle their private monopolies?
The destruction of the rail network created a lucrative, captive market for road transport, turning national infrastructure decay into private wealth.
This pattern extends far beyond transport logistics.
Consider Ziscosteel, once the beating heart of Zimbabwean industry in my home district.
During its prime, the integrated steelworks employed thousands and anchored downstream manufacturing across the region.
Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an endless succession of failed revival attempts.
Billion-dollar deals with suitors like Global Steel Holdings, Essar Africa, and R&F collapsed under questionable circumstances, and the company now sits parked under the opaque Mutapa Investment Fund.
Reports consistently pointed to political gatekeepers demanding exorbitant kickbacks, unviable concessions, or opaque equity splits that sent serious investors running.
Meanwhile, as Ziscosteel remains a silent monument of rusted iron, massive private alternatives emerge, such as the Chinese-owned Dinson Iron and Steel plant in Manhize.
While investment in manufacturing is vital, the contrast reveals a painful truth: state assets are left to rot because key figures benefit far more from facilitating private concessions and importing raw materials than from restoring a public industrial pillar.
The exact same profit-driven sabotage has crippled Zimbabwe’s fuel procurement and distribution infrastructure.
A sector that once relied on efficient, centralized bulk-import mechanisms and pipeline logistics has been deliberately fragmented into a lucrative playground for a well-connected few.
By engineering artificial bottlenecks, monopolizing importation rights, and imposing an intricate web of opaque middleman levies and mandatory blending markups, these cartels have driven domestic petrol and diesel prices to some of the highest levels on the African continent.
Zimbabwean motorists and businesses pay extortionate premiums at the pump—not because of unavoidable global market forces, but to fund the lavish margins of political elites and their corporate proxies.
When an entire ruling class derives immense, uninterrupted wealth from maintaining a broken supply chain, any government pledges to audit procurement, streamline pipeline logistics, or lower tax-and-levy burdens remain completely hollow.
The system is not broken by accident; it is kept broken because its repair would immediately choke off the golden pipeline enriching its custodians.
When dysfunction becomes profitable, corruption ceases to be a bug in the system; it becomes the system itself.
Entire economic ecosystems adapt to serve the interests of those who profit from failure.
Potholes spawn endless road-rehabilitation contracts that yield minimal work; water supply failures drive thriving private water-tanker cartels; power grid collapses enrich fuel importers and generator suppliers.
An economy that has reorganized its business models around institutional collapse cannot simply be resuscitated through policy speeches, press releases, or superficial reforms.
The very actors tasked with engineering the recovery are often the primary beneficiaries of the ruin.
Until we dismantle the incentives that reward economic sabotage, nothing will change.
The highway back to national productivity stays blocked by the very people profiting from the wreck.
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