Our June 2026 issue is out. How Zimbabwe is rewriting the oldest rule of its economy – from a country that sells the rock to one that keeps the value – and what that turn asks of everyone doing business here.

Zimbabwe is testing a sentence most resource economies only recite. For a century the model has been to dig it, grow it, cut it, and ship it raw – to let someone else abroad do the refining, the processing, and the pricing, and to keep only the thin margin of the exporter. This issue argues that the country is finally trying to finish that sentence at home. We have called it the Beneficiation Doctrine, and it is the spine of the edition.

The signals are already on the table. Battery-grade lithium carbonate has climbed back above US$24,000 a tonne – the refined chemical that buyers actually pay for, not the ore that leaves the ground for a fraction of the price. A push into agro-processing that would turn crops into finished goods before they cross the border. Green hydrogen and e-mobility value chains taking shape. Maize moving onto a formal exchange instead of a farm-gate handshake. A currency, the ZiG, being reprinted for trust. Read separately, each is a headline. Read together, they describe a country deciding to capture the value it has spent generations exporting.

This is the argument the issue makes, and tests. Owning the resource is not the same as owning the value, and the distance between the two is capital, power, skill and governance. Beneficiation needs processing plants, reliable electricity, patient finance and rules that hold – none of which arrive by decree. So we set the vision next to the arithmetic – the deficit and the debt, the rate the Bank is holding, the currency it is trying to steady – and let readers weigh how far the country still has to travel between selling the rock and keeping the value.

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By The Kufunga Desk