Zim News Blog -NEWS NETWORK

I’ve been watching something develop over the past year and a half that honestly surprised me. Whenever ZESA drops another load shedding announcement, my younger cousins don’t even flinch anymore. They just grab their phones. Last Tuesday at 7:34pm I was at my brother’s place in Borrowdale when the lights cut out. His two boys, […]

The post Why Young Zimbabweans Are Turning to Digital Entertainment During Power Cuts first appeared on My Zimbabwe News.

HARARE — Air Zimbabwe’s proposed fleet renewal has entered a more demanding phase as Zimbabwe’s aviation market expands, placing greater pressure on the national carrier to demonstrate that rising passenger numbers can translate into sustainable profits and cash generation.

The airline recorded an US$11.6 million loss before tax in 2024, widening from US$10.4 million a year earlier, while its current liabilities exceeded current assets by US$26 million. The Auditor General consequently warned of a material uncertainty over the carrier’s ability to continue as a going concern, despite issuing an unmodified opinion on its financial statements.

The financial weakness comes against a markedly improving aviation market. Passenger movements through Zimbabwean airports rose 10% to 2.53 million in 2025, from 2.29 million in 2024. International traffic reached 2.17 million, while domestic passenger movements increased 15% to 357,133.

The momentum has continued into 2026, with airports handling 1.19 million passengers in the first half of the year, a 7.1% increase from 1.11 million during the comparable period.

According to analysis published by Equity Axis, these figures fundamentally change the question facing Air Zimbabwe. The issue is no longer simply whether Zimbabwe has sufficient aviation demand, but whether the national carrier can capture that demand at commercially viable yields.

That distinction is critical because the Mutapa Investment Fund is considering a fleet programme valued at approximately US$775.5 million over three years.

The programme envisages six aircraft: two domestic aircraft costing about US$49 million each, two regional aircraft at approximately US$101 million each, and two long-haul aircraft with a combined estimated cost of US$450 million. The objective is to replace ageing equipment while rebuilding domestic, regional and international capacity.

For Equity Axis, the scale of the proposed investment raises the threshold of evidence required before additional capital is committed. Passenger growth alone, it argues, is insufficient. Air Zimbabwe must demonstrate route-level utilisation, passenger yields, cargo revenues and, ultimately, cash generation.

London route becomes an important test

The revived Harare-London service provides perhaps the clearest opportunity to test that commercial proposition.

Air Zimbabwe resumed flights to London Gatwick on July 22 using a 302-seat Airbus A330-300 supplied by Spain’s Plus Ultra under an Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance and Insurance arrangement. Plus Ultra provides the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance, while Air Zimbabwe handles ticket sales and the commercial operation.

The airline currently operates three flights a week.

The arrangement effectively allows Air Zimbabwe to test the market without immediately taking on the full balance-sheet burden associated with aircraft ownership.

The first returning flight carried 165 passengers, while the airline reported 1,479 confirmed bookings and more than 30 tonnes of cargo secured during the initial period.

Those figures are encouraging, but Equity Axis cautions that they are not yet sufficient to establish long-term route profitability. What matters will be the accumulation of data across peak and off-peak periods, including load factors, average fares, premium-cabin demand, cargo income, distribution costs and passenger acquisition expenses.

This is where The Zimbabwe Financial Mail would frame the broader investment question: an expanding market does not automatically make an individual airline profitable. The commercial test is whether Air Zimbabwe can convert market growth into recurring operating cash flows without requiring persistent shareholder support.

The London service therefore provides Mutapa with a potential capital gate. If the route performs sustainably under a leased operating model and ownership materially improves its economics, acquiring long-haul aircraft becomes easier to justify.

If the route continues to require substantial financial support before ownership costs are introduced, however, buying the aircraft could simply magnify an existing operating problem.

Domestic expansion also requires discipline

The same logic applies to Air Zimbabwe’s domestic ambitions.

Domestic passenger traffic reached 357,133 in 2025, up 15% year-on-year, demonstrating that internal aviation demand is growing. But domestic passengers remain a relatively small component of Zimbabwe’s total airport traffic.

The proposed US$98 million investment in two domestic aircraft therefore requires careful route selection.

Harare, Victoria Falls and Bulawayo offer relatively strong commercial foundations because of business activity, tourism and connections to international traffic. Thinner routes, however, may not generate comparable financial returns.

That distinction matters because a national airline can simultaneously perform two very different functions: operating commercially viable routes and providing connectivity that government considers strategically or socially necessary.

The two objectives should not be conflated.

Where government requires Air Zimbabwe to serve routes that cannot generate commercial returns, the cost of that public-service obligation should be separately identified. Commercial routes, meanwhile, should be judged against the return that Mutapa could generate by deploying the same capital elsewhere.

Liquidity remains a warning sign

The Auditor General’s findings provide another reason for caution.

Air Zimbabwe had been unable to settle statutory obligations of US$20,498 at the end of 2024, with management attributing the delays to liquidity constraints and promising measures to improve revenue inflows.

While the amount is relatively small in the context of an airline, the underlying signal is more important than the figure itself.

A carrier preparing to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars on aircraft needs sufficient operating liquidity to meet routine obligations. Persistent cash constraints therefore raise legitimate questions about how a much larger fleet would be financed, maintained and operated.

The airline’s audit record also remains incomplete. Of five previous Auditor General findings followed up, only one had been fully addressed, while three were partially addressed and one remained unresolved.

Financial reporting adds another layer of uncertainty. As of June 24, 2026, Air Zimbabwe’s 2025 financial statements had not yet been submitted for audit.

That creates an uncomfortable information gap for an investor considering a US$775.5 million fleet programme.

Mutapa should ideally have current audited financial statements before making major additional commitments, while aircraft acquisition decisions should be informed by several months of actual 2026 operating data.

Competing demands for Mutapa capital

The issue extends beyond Air Zimbabwe.

Mutapa’s portfolio spans strategic sectors including energy, mining, transport and telecommunications, with the Fund indicating that its portfolio requires more than US$10 billion in recapitalisation. It has mobilised approximately US$1 billion while overseeing companies with a gross asset value of roughly US$16 billion.

Air Zimbabwe’s US$775.5 million fleet programme would therefore represent a substantial allocation of scarce capital.

That means the airline must compete for funding on investment merits rather than simply on the basis of national symbolism.

There is undoubtedly a strategic case for a viable national carrier. Air Zimbabwe can support tourism, trade, cargo, diaspora travel and international connectivity while providing Zimbabwe with greater control over strategically important routes.

But those benefits have an economic cost.

The central question for Mutapa is therefore whether Air Zimbabwe can deliver those strategic benefits at a cost that can be justified against alternative uses of public capital.

A market exists. The airline must prove it can monetise it.

Zimbabwe’s aviation market is providing Air Zimbabwe with something it has lacked for years: growing underlying demand.

The country’s airports handled more passengers in 2025, domestic traffic is expanding, international travel remains dominant and the restoration of the London route creates a potentially valuable long-haul market.

But the growth in passengers does not, by itself, solve Air Zimbabwe’s financial problems.

As Equity Axis argues, the carrier now has to demonstrate that it can convert passenger growth into profitable traffic, high aircraft utilisation and sustainable cash flows.

For The Zimbabwe Financial Mail, the broader investment lesson is equally important: fleet renewal should be treated as a staged capital-allocation decision rather than a single US$775.5 million commitment.

The evidence should determine the next aircraft purchase.

If Air Zimbabwe can demonstrate strong route economics, disciplined costs, reliable operations and improving cash generation, the case for progressively owning more of its fleet will strengthen.

If passenger numbers continue rising while losses and liquidity pressures persist, however, the expanding aviation market will expose an uncomfortable reality: Zimbabwe may have a growing airline market without yet having a financially viable national carrier.

The challenge for Air Zimbabwe is no longer proving that Zimbabweans want to fly.

It is proving that the airline can make money from those who do.

The post Air Zimbabwe Faces Tougher Test as Passenger Growth Raises Stakes for US$775.5 Million Fleet Plan appeared first on The Zimbabwe Mail.

Zimbabwe’s dormant copper industry is approaching a potentially important investment test: whether ageing assets such as Mangura can be converted from historical mining operations into commercially competitive projects at a time when copper is becoming strategically more important to the global economy.

The Zimbabwe Financial Mail believes the question facing Mines Minister Polite Kambamura is no longer simply whether Zimbabwe can revive its old copper mines, but whether the Government can create the technical, financial and regulatory conditions under which international investors would be prepared to redevelop them.

That distinction matters.

Mangura’s principal challenge is well understood. The mine was developed to exploit ore at considerable depth, making access, dewatering, underground development, energy requirements and ore-handling economics significantly more difficult than those of a shallow, open-pit operation. But the existence of a difficult resource does not automatically make it an uneconomic one.

The investment question is whether modern mining technology, higher copper prices, improved processing techniques and better capital structures can alter the economics sufficiently to justify the redevelopment.

And the global copper market is providing a much stronger backdrop than existed when Zimbabwe’s copper industry entered decline.

Copper is becoming strategically more valuable

Copper is increasingly regarded as one of the critical industrial metals of the electrification economy. It is fundamental to electricity transmission, renewable-energy systems, electric vehicles, data centres, industrial equipment and grid expansion.

The International Energy Agency says copper is expected to record the largest absolute demand growth among the critical minerals it tracks, with demand projected to increase by about seven million tonnes by 2040.

S&P Global’s longer-term assessment is even more striking. It projects global copper demand rising from about 28.3 million tonnes in 2025 to 42.4 million tonnes by 2040, while warning that mine supply could fail to keep pace without substantial new investment.

Recent market conditions have further underlined copper’s strategic importance. Copper prices have approached record levels amid concerns about supply, US stockpiling, tariff distortions and disruptions at major producing operations.

But analysts caution against treating every bullish copper forecast as evidence of a permanent shortage. The International Copper Study Group, for example, currently expects a refined copper surplus of about 96,000 tonnes in 2026 and 377,000 tonnes in 2027.

The more important investment thesis is therefore not that copper will necessarily remain in permanent deficit, but that the industry faces a structurally stronger demand outlook and increasingly complex supply constraints.

That is precisely the environment in which dormant, technically challenging deposits can become interesting to specialist investors.

Mangura’s problem is not simply the depth

Mangura should therefore not be assessed merely on the basis of whether its old workings can be reopened.

A modern feasibility study would have to establish the economically recoverable resource, grade distribution, mining method, depth profile, dilution, recovery rates, metallurgical characteristics, infrastructure requirements, power consumption and capital intensity.

The mine’s historical configuration should not automatically determine the configuration of a future operation.

The central question is whether a new investor could design a modern mine around the resource that remains, rather than simply attempting to recreate the operation that existed decades ago.

That may require new shafts or shaft rehabilitation, modern hoisting systems, underground crushing and conveying, extensive dewatering, ventilation upgrades and potentially new processing infrastructure.

The economics of each component would have to be tested against the expected copper price and a conservative long-term price assumption rather than against today’s spot market.

Zimbabwe has other copper assets waiting for capital

Mangura is also not the only opportunity.

ZMDC’s portfolio includes the Angwa and Chidzikwe projects in Mashonaland West. According to ZMDC, Angwa remains substantially intact but requires steel casing and potentially deepening, while underground crushing infrastructure and dewatering would be required before underground operations could restart. The company says both operations ceased in 1997 because of funding constraints.

ZMDC also identifies the treatment of the Mhangura dumps as a separate opportunity.

This is significant because Zimbabwe does not necessarily have to choose between a large-scale underground redevelopment and doing nothing.

There is a spectrum of copper opportunities ranging from tailings and dump retreatment to brownfield rehabilitation and ultimately greenfield or deep underground development.

Indeed, Mhangura’s history demonstrates that value can be extracted from the old mining complex without immediately committing billions of dollars to rebuilding the original mine. ZMDC and a Chinese partner have already pursued dump processing, with earlier reporting indicating that the operation was producing copper concentrate for export.

That provides a potential staged-development model.

The case for international capital

The Zimbabwe Financial Mail, speaking to mining and equity-market analysts, finds the strongest argument for reopening the country’s copper sector in the fact that Zimbabwe does not necessarily need to finance the projects itself.

The Government’s role should be to make the assets investable.

That means providing geological information of sufficient quality, transparent mineral rights, predictable fiscal terms, reliable power arrangements, workable infrastructure and a clear framework for repatriation of investment returns.

An international mining company can solve a difficult engineering problem if the expected return compensates for the risk.

It is far less likely to commit capital if the geological uncertainty is combined with policy uncertainty, infrastructure deficiencies and an unpredictable fiscal regime.

This is where Minister Kambamura’s challenge becomes particularly important.

The ministry’s own mandate includes attracting mining investment and promoting mineral development and beneficiation. The test is whether that mandate can be translated into investment propositions capable of competing for capital against copper projects in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Botswana and elsewhere.

Rail, power and processing will determine competitiveness

The economics of copper mining do not end at the mine shaft.

A potentially profitable deposit can become marginal if electricity is unreliable, transport is expensive, processing capacity is inadequate or concentrate logistics are inefficient.

For Zimbabwe, this makes infrastructure as important as geology.

A revived copper industry would need reliable electricity, efficient road and rail connections, modern processing facilities and access to export corridors.

The Government should therefore think about copper as an integrated industrial value chain rather than a collection of individual mines.

Angwa, Mangura and other deposits could potentially feed regional processing infrastructure, while investment in transport and power would benefit multiple mining operations simultaneously.

A new investment model is required

The mistake would be to approach copper revival as a nostalgia project.

Mangura cannot be restored simply because Zimbabwe once had a copper mine there. Nor should the Government commit public money merely to recreate historical production capacity.

The investment proposition has to begin with the resource and work forward.

How much copper remains? At what grades? At what depth? What mining method produces the lowest unit cost? What capital is required? What recovery rate can modern processing achieve? What is the expected mine life? Who will buy the concentrate or refined product? What infrastructure is required? And, crucially, what internal rate of return does the project generate under conservative copper-price assumptions?

Those are the questions international investors will ask.

Zimbabwe should make the problem investable

The most constructive challenge to the Mines Ministry is therefore straightforward: do not attempt to remove the geological problem; make the geological problem investable.

If depth is the principal obstacle at Mangura, Government should commission or facilitate the technical studies necessary to determine the cost of overcoming it.

If capital intensity is the problem, structure the project for strategic investors.

If infrastructure is the constraint, develop shared infrastructure capable of supporting several mines.

If metallurgy is the obstacle, bring in specialist processing expertise.

And if the resource is ultimately incapable of generating an acceptable return even under favourable copper-market conditions, Zimbabwe should establish that conclusively rather than repeatedly promising a revival.

That is the discipline required.

The copper window will not remain open indefinitely

The global market is offering Zimbabwe an opportunity, but opportunity is not the same thing as profitability.

The IEA expects copper supply gaps to remain a concern through 2035 under its project-pipeline assessment, while S&P Global argues that the combination of electrification, grid investment, electric vehicles, AI infrastructure and data centres could generate substantial additional demand.

For Zimbabwe, this creates a potentially valuable window to revisit assets that were previously considered too difficult or too capital-intensive.

Mangura’s depth is a barrier. It is not necessarily a death sentence.

The country’s mining authorities now need to establish, with modern geological modelling, engineering studies and rigorous financial analysis, whether that barrier can be overcome at a return capable of attracting serious international capital.

If the answer is yes, Mangura could once again become a strategic copper asset.

If Zimbabwe gets the economics, infrastructure and investment framework right, the revival of copper could extend well beyond Mangura — bringing Angwa, Chidzikwe and other dormant resources back into consideration as the country seeks to diversify its mineral economy beyond its traditional gold, platinum and lithium base.

The opportunity, ultimately, is not to reopen an old mine.

It is to build a new copper industry around old mineral assets.

The post Zimbabwe’s Copper Opportunity: Can Mangura Be Engineered Back into a Viable Mine? appeared first on The Zimbabwe Mail.

JOAHANNESBURG — Africa’s artificial-intelligence ambitions are increasingly being matched by the physical infrastructure required to turn them into commercial applications, after Cassava Technologies’ AI Factory was ranked 36th in the latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The ranking represents more than a technology milestone for Cassava. It points to the emergence of industrial-scale computing capacity on African soil at a time when access to advanced computing is becoming a strategic determinant of competitiveness in artificial intelligence, cloud services, financial technology, scientific research and digital industrialisation.

According to data published by TOP500, the Cassava AI Factory is installed at Africa Data Centres’ CPT1 facility in Cape Town and is built around HPE Cray XD670 infrastructure with NVIDIA H200 SXM5 accelerators. The system has 285,696 processor cores and delivers a measured Linpack performance of 77.79 petaflops, against a theoretical peak of 102.16 petaflops.

The system was installed in 2026 and runs on Linux, with NVIDIA’s HPL software stack and an InfiniBand NDR interconnect providing the high-speed communications architecture required for large-scale AI workloads.

For Africa, the strategic importance lies in the location of the computing capacity itself.

AI development has traditionally depended heavily on computing infrastructure concentrated in North America, Europe and parts of Asia. That geographic concentration creates challenges for African organisations dealing with data sovereignty, latency, connectivity costs and access to scarce high-performance computing resources.

The arrival of a major AI computing platform on the continent begins to change that equation.

The Zimbabwe Financial Mail views the development as particularly significant for countries such as Zimbabwe, where the next phase of digital transformation will increasingly depend not simply on access to the internet, but on access to sophisticated computing infrastructure capable of processing large datasets and running advanced AI models.

For Zimbabwean businesses, the implications extend well beyond the technology sector.

Banks could use high-performance computing for fraud detection, credit-risk modelling, customer analytics and increasingly sophisticated financial forecasting. Insurers could deploy AI to improve underwriting and claims analysis, while mining companies could apply machine learning to geological modelling, exploration, equipment maintenance and production optimisation.

Agriculture represents another potentially important application. AI models operating against weather, satellite, soil and crop datasets could improve forecasting and farm-level decision-making, while manufacturers could use computer vision, predictive maintenance and automated quality control to increase productivity.

The emergence of African-based computing capacity therefore potentially lowers one of the structural barriers between AI experimentation and industrial deployment.

From AI experimentation to industrial infrastructure

Africa’s AI debate has often focused on the shortage of skills, data centres, connectivity and computing resources required to develop locally relevant applications.

The Cassava AI Factory suggests that part of this infrastructure gap is beginning to close.

The distinction is important. An AI application may be developed using relatively modest computing resources, but training and deploying sophisticated models at scale can require enormous computational capacity. Businesses moving from prototypes to production therefore need infrastructure that can support sustained workloads rather than isolated experiments.

That is where high-performance computing becomes economically significant.

The Cassava system’s 77.79 petaflops of measured performance places it firmly within the global high-performance computing ecosystem. Its NVIDIA H200 accelerators are designed for demanding AI and accelerated-computing workloads, while the InfiniBand architecture allows large numbers of processors and accelerators to operate as a coordinated computing environment.

The consequence is that African organisations can increasingly contemplate AI as production infrastructure rather than merely as an experimental technology.

Why Zimbabwe should be paying attention

For Zimbabwe, the development comes at a particularly important moment.

The country’s financial services, telecommunications, mining, agriculture and manufacturing industries are generating increasing volumes of digital information, while businesses are under pressure to improve productivity without proportionately increasing costs.

The availability of regional AI infrastructure creates the possibility of building applications around African datasets while keeping computing workloads geographically closer to their users and commercial operations.

That could become important for Zimbabwean banks and other highly regulated institutions, where questions surrounding data governance, security and the location of sensitive information are becoming increasingly relevant.

It also creates an opportunity for Zimbabwe’s technology companies.

Rather than attempting to build expensive hyperscale computing infrastructure domestically, software companies could potentially develop AI applications in Zimbabwe while accessing large-scale computing capacity elsewhere in the region. This creates a model in which intellectual property, software engineering and industry expertise can remain local while computational infrastructure is accessed as a service.

The economic value could therefore move beyond the physical data centre.

Zimbabwean developers, financial institutions, mining companies and universities could become consumers of African computing capacity while building products designed for Zimbabwean and wider African markets.

The next infrastructure race

The significance of the Cassava AI Factory is ultimately not its position at No. 36 alone. The more important question is what comes next.

AI infrastructure is becoming an increasingly strategic asset. Countries and companies that possess large-scale computing capacity can participate further up the technology value chain, from simply consuming AI applications to training models, developing proprietary systems and providing computing services to other organisations.

Cassava’s achievement consequently places Africa inside a global infrastructure race that is likely to intensify.

The opportunity for African economies is substantial, but computing capacity by itself will not produce an AI economy. It must be connected to reliable electricity, high-capacity telecommunications networks, cloud platforms, skilled engineers, data scientists, researchers, commercially useful datasets and businesses capable of converting technology into productivity gains.

For Zimbabwe, the lesson is particularly clear: AI policy cannot be reduced to encouraging businesses to use chatbots or generative-AI applications. The more consequential question is whether the country can build an ecosystem in which local companies possess the skills, data, connectivity and capital necessary to exploit increasingly accessible regional computing infrastructure.

Cassava’s AI Factory demonstrates that the continent is beginning to build the physical foundation.

The next challenge is to ensure that African businesses — including those in Zimbabwe — are sufficiently prepared to use it.

The emergence of 77.79 petaflops of computing capacity in Cape Town is therefore not simply a South African technology story. It is an indication that Africa’s AI economy is acquiring the infrastructure necessary to become commercially consequential.

And for Zimbabwe, the opportunity is to ensure that it does not remain merely a consumer of that infrastructure, but becomes one of the businesses, developers and industries creating economic value from

The post Cassava’s AI Factory Breaks into Global Top 40, Signalling New Era for African Compute appeared first on The Zimbabwe Mail.

Prison bosses grant inmate leave to attend UZ graduation ceremony A Zimbabwean prisoner serving time for unlawful entry has been allowed to leave prison temporarily to attend the University of Zimbabwe graduation ceremony where he received an honours degree in Biological Sciences. Robert Zivengwa, 30, was granted permission by the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service […]

The post Prison bosses stunned as inmate graduates with UZ Upper Second Class Biological Sciences Degree first appeared on My Zimbabwe News.