Zimbabwe’s push to beneficiate its mineral resources must first be matched by a clearer understanding of the country’s mineral endowment, available skills, energy requirements and industrial capacity, Zimbabwe Mining Safety, Health and Environmental Council (ZIMSHEC) Executive Director Makumba Nyenje has said.
By Rudairo Mapuranga
Nyenje raised the questions during discussions on regional critical minerals cooperation at the Zimbabwe Alternative Mining Indaba (ZAMI) 2026 in Bulawayo, where delegates were examining proposals for greater integration of mineral value chains across the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
His intervention followed a presentation by Farai Mutondori on a proposed SADC hub-and-spoke model for critical minerals, which seeks to encourage countries in the region to leverage their respective mineral and industrial capabilities.
Nyenje questioned whether Zimbabwe’s beneficiation ambitions were being matched by the practical capacity required to implement them.
“When you said we need to differentiate between wanting minimum beneficiation and possessing capacity to beneficiate, I was actually interrogating my own setup in this study,” Nyenje said.
“We have moved on to ban exports of raw material, simply because we want to beneficiate, but do we possess the capacity to beneficiate?”
For Nyenje, the question of beneficiation cannot be separated from exploration and the need to establish exactly what Zimbabwe has beneath its soil.
“Before we talk of beneficiating, do we even know what is going on in terms of mineralisation in this country, in terms of exploration?” he asked.
He said Zimbabwe needed to establish its resource base before determining how it could participate in regional mineral value chains.
“Before we knock on other people’s doors or other countries’ doors to say we want to join you in the African hub, to create an African hub, I think we need to know or ascertain what we have as a country,” Nyenje said.
His concern extended beyond the existence of mineral deposits to the quantities available and the infrastructure and inputs required to process them.
“There’s no way to say, okay, we have these quantities of lithium which we want to extract. Then we know what kind or what amount of energy that we want maybe to say let’s get from these other countries,” he said.
Nyenje said Zimbabwe therefore needed to interrogate the practical requirements of its industrialisation plans, including the skills that would be needed, the scale of processing the country could realistically support, the quantities of minerals available for extraction and the energy requirements associated with beneficiation.
“I’m just calling upon this now to say, I think there is a need for us to interrogate where are we here,” he told delegates.
The intervention comes as Zimbabwe continues to pursue policies aimed at retaining more value from its mineral resources within the country and encouraging investment beyond the extraction of raw materials.
The government has increasingly linked new mining investment to beneficiation and greater participation in mineral value chains, particularly as demand for critical minerals grows and countries seek to secure supplies of minerals required for the energy transition.
But Nyenje’s intervention placed the emphasis on the groundwork required to support those ambitions.
The questions are particularly relevant to proposals for regional critical-minerals cooperation, where countries would need to understand not only the minerals they possess but also the scale, quality and reliability of supply, as well as the infrastructure, energy and technical capabilities available to process them.
For Zimbabwe, that means establishing a stronger link between exploration, resource definition and industrial planning, rather than treating beneficiation as a policy objective separate from the geological and industrial information needed to support it.
Nyenje’s contribution therefore shifted the discussion from the ambition to beneficiate minerals to the practical question of whether the country has established the resource knowledge and capacity required to make beneficiation work.
The central question he left with the ZAMI gathering was straightforward:
“Do we possess the capacity to beneficiate?”
ZAMI 2026 is being held in Bulawayo from September 14 to 18 under the theme “Powering Tomorrow: Reimagining Mining, Energy, Agriculture and Community Development in Zimbabwe.” The Indaba is convened by the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Organisation (ZELO), the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) and the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD).
