Nigeria's Dangote offers Zimbabwe hope

Ordinary Zimbabweans are pessimistic over the potential $1bn investment

- Lenin Ndebele

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote's visit to Zimbabwe to pursue $1 billion worth of business prospects was a ray of light for a country whose economy has been in ruins for more than two decades.

Dangote's interests in the Southern African country include fertiliser manufacturing, energy (mainly coal mining), cement production, and fuel.

"We have signed an agreement between Zimbabwe and Dangote Group to do various investments in various sectors, some of which, of course, are in cement, some of it in power generation, and some of it in a pipeline to bring petroleum products," he told journalists after meeting President Emmerson Mnangagwa at State House in the capital Harare this week.

The biggest investment could be a pipeline that would link Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Bulawayo, to Walvis Bay in Namibia, where the Dangote Group is working on plans to build a large fuel storage facility expected to hold 1.6 million barrels of petrol and diesel, thereby reducing Southern Africa's reliance on fuel imports from Europe and Asia.