Emmanuel

Chartered Accountant, Chelsea, Adventist, Manicaland

[Tazo @TheLifeZoomer]

The World Cup is in full swing, but I haven’t watched a single match.

No stress. No FOMO. No debates over referees.

Either I’ve reached a new level of maturity, or I’m officially getting old.

Which one is it? 😂

[Sharon Mazingaizo @sharonmufaro]

Friday Drinks is one of the best podcasts in Zimbabwe.

Why watch Friday Drinks podcast?

Because it helps you understand how money moves, how markets behave, and how real businesses make decisions - start thinking like an investor, or a entrepreneur.

Watch all episodes on the @fridaydrinks_ YouTube channel.

Cheers to the weekend 🥂

[🇿🇼 Babes wehunters 🍻 @BabesweHunters]

My kid's teacher recommended that we use shona when talking to my kid. I tried it one day ndikasiya 🤣😂🤣😂🤣 ndakatoona mwana anotozokuhunika nekuumburuka kwandaiita nekuseka kkkk how does this kid speak such bad shona nemapopotero andoita neshona achinzwa 🤣😂🤣😂

[Mulanyan @OchiAndrew316]

Cant believe my wife got me watching Jonasi & his shenanigans instead of watching France vs Senegal. Whoever made The Polygamist is son of a bitch no lie!

[Emmanuel @Emmanuel_TheCA]

@rufarogz Had tough time completing 10km.

[Savheya VeFashion @Savheya_Happie]

Now I'm asking myself kuti ko 2 hours phone call taitaura dzei ??

Haaa love yakashata now ave ma hi 👋 hi 👋. Watora mwana here? Huya uchinditorawo kubasa! ...

[Emmanuel @Emmanuel_TheCA]

No dancing before the penalty

[ᗩl wᗩdᑌd_tᕼe sIᗰᑭ @_MakdShelby]

Gabriel wanted a header not a penalty 😭😭

[Tinashe @baba_nyenyedzi]

I can’t believe it has been five years already.

I truly appreciate YouTube and X for the platform and everyone who has stolen a moment to share their thoughts, whether in agreement or disagreement.

I am all the better for it.

[MukanyaWoye!🐒🇿🇼 @IsheSvosve]

@VMusinachirevo Just take a drive in most high density suburbs, you will be shocked and angry by the number of toddlers playing in the roads without adult supervision.

[Tinashe @baba_nyenyedzi]

GoZ seems to actually think going Informal is a positive thing despite what the literature and empirical studies show.

The reason why Zambia gets the most of its copper is because its formal big businesses employing thousands. Even at that Chile does 7X more revenue than Zambia because it’s more formal.

[🇿🇼Engineer Mavis Jongwe 🇿🇲🇳🇦🇨🇩🦋 @Mavis_Jongwe]

The resurgence of Khayah Cement, previously Lafarge Cement Zimbabwe, marks a pivotal moment for the construction supply chain, with production scaling to 35,000 tonnes per month following a $20 million kiln rehabilitation.

This recovery is crucial for an economy experiencing an infrastructure and housing boom, driven by public projects like the Harare-Beitbridge highway and a surge in private real estate. Khayah's expansion, part of a broader initiative to enhance Zimbabwe's cement capacity and reduce imports, aims to restore clinker self-sufficiency and stabilize prices.

The strategy includes rebooting kilns and backward integration into local clinker processing, aligning with national industrial goals while boosting job creation in logistics and construction.

[Tinashe @baba_nyenyedzi]

From my vantage, the advantages of having a golf course in a neighbourhood far outweigh the benefit of squeezing in an extra 17 residential stands. A golf course is open land with trimmed grass edifying or beautifying the aesthetics of the land. Urban planning is about beauty as well. It is breathing space, scenery, drainage, leisure, property value and civic dignity all rolled into one.

That this is even being allowed to happen tells us there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

[Tasunungurwa Mufumiri @freemufumiri]

The Sweetest Story Zimbabwe Never Properly Told 🎋

One of the driest, hottest, most inhospitable corners of southern Africa. Months without meaningful rain. Tsetse fly. Red locusts. A relentless, punishing heat that drove most settlers away. One stubborn Scotsman looked at this wilderness and saw sugar. What he started, and what others built, contested, seized, defrauded, and replanted after him, is one of the most extraordinary industrial epics in Zimbabwean history. This is the story of Triangle and Hippo Valley. Most Zimbabweans know the name. Very few know the full story.

The Land Was Never Empty

Before a single cane was planted, the south-eastern Lowveld, flanked by the Mutirikwi, Chiredzi, and Runde Rivers, was the ancestral home of the Shangaan people. They hunted it, farmed it seasonally, and knew its rhythms intimately. When colonial infrastructure arrived, it did not arrive in an empty space. It arrived in their space. The dispossession was explicit: communities were pushed off the land and relocated to areas like Bikita, just far enough to make room for cane. That fact is not a footnote to this story. It is the foundation of it.

The Scotsman and His Swazi Partner

Thomas Murray MacDougall was born on 4th March 1881 on the farm Auchnashelloch on Loch Awe, Argyllshire, Scotland, into a proud and independent Highland family known for their initiative and love of adventure. He left school at fourteen, worked in the Cammell Laird shipyards in Glasgow, served with distinction as a Captain in the First World War, was twice mentioned in dispatches, and was awarded the Military Cross. He arrived in southern Africa driving mules in transport, no farming pedigree, no inherited capital, no formal engineering training. He trekked through the Lowveld bush, reached the Mutirikwi River, and fell completely in love with a landscape most Europeans dismissed as worthless scrub. He applied for rights to 300,000 acres of land in 1912, ranched cattle, grew wheat, battled drought, wildlife, and official indifference. From the very beginning he was assisted by a man named Tom Dunuza, a Swazi co-founder, driver, and indispensable right-hand man whose contribution has been almost entirely written out of the official record. The museum on kuMusiamu remembers MacDougall. It took far longer to remember Dunuza.

The Name Came from a Failure

Here is a detail almost nobody knows. The town of Triangle did not get its name from geography or from a colonial map-maker. It got its name from a failure. When MacDougall first attempted to grow sugarcane in the Lowveld, only three pieces of cane survived the experiment. Three. Looking at what remained, he said there was only one thing you could do with three pieces of anything: make a triangle. That cattle brand, the mark of a near-disaster, became the name of a town, an estate, an industry, and a household brand that every Zimbabwean recognises. Workers eventually gave the place their own name entirely: they called it Meke, almost certainly a corruption of MacDougall. Too long, too Scottish, too foreign for daily use. So it became Meke: short, phonetic, entirely theirs. When a worker said he was going to Meke, everyone knew exactly what he meant and everything that single word carried.

427 Metres Through Solid Rock

In 1923, MacDougall began the project that would define his life: diverting water from the Mutirikwi River through two tunnels hewn entirely by hand through solid granite. The government's Irrigation Department called him impudent and misguided. He ignored them, improvised his instruments, and used a rifle's sights to plot where his tunnels would emerge from solid rock. It took seven years. The tunnels ran approximately 427 metres. Shangaan workers, men whose names history has not recorded, used picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and spans of oxen. Many died. The canal and weir now bear National Monument status and a bronze plaque records MacDougall's achievement. The plaque records only his name. That omission is not a small thing. It is the original sin of how the Lowveld tells its own story.

MacDougall planted his first cane in 1934, just 18 hectares. The first sugar mill in Zimbabwe opened at Triangle on 11 September 1939, the same week Britain declared war on Germany. Financial difficulties followed almost immediately. By 1944 the enterprise had failed and the Rhodesian government took it over. In 1954 a group of Natal planters purchased it but expansion stalled. MacDougall left for Scotland in 1945 and died aged 83 on 30 May 1964, just before the official opening of the new mill on 21 June 1964. He is buried on the hill workers called kuMusiamu, a corruption of 'Museum,' because that is what stood on its crest. The workers named geography by what they could see and feel. KuMusiamu told you exactly where you were going. It still does, among those who grew up there.

Two Rivals, Thirty Kilometres Apart

Here is what most Zimbabwean textbooks get wrong: for the better part of five decades, Triangle and Hippo Valley were not the same company. They were rivals. Competing corporate empires operating thirty kilometres apart in the same Lowveld landscape under entirely different ownership.

In 1957 South African businessman Guy Hulett purchased Triangle from the Natal Syndicate and brought the financial firepower and commercial vision the estate had been waiting twenty years for. Hulett regarded Triangle as his baby. He committed massive capital, expanded cane acreage, engineered new water infrastructure, and built the industrial architecture that would eventually produce hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sugar annually. If MacDougall lit the original spark, Guy Hulett set the Lowveld ablaze.

Hippo Valley entered the story separately. In 1956 local MP Ray Stockhill established Hippo Valley Estate, initially as a citrus operation near Chiredzi, listed on the Rhodesian Stock Exchange from 1964. The majority shareholder was Anglo American Corporation, one of the most powerful mining and resources conglomerates in the world, with London headquarters and deep roots in southern African capital. Two giants. Two parent companies, Tongaat Hulett and Anglo American. One Lowveld. For fifty years they operated side by side in structured competition, each with its own management, its own mill, and its own corporate personality. When the global sugar market crashed in 1975, Hippo Valley pivoted decisively from citrus into sugarcane and never looked back.

The separation ended on 6 December 2006 when Triangle Sugar Corporation acquired Anglo American's 50.35% stake in Hippo Valley for US$36 million, bringing fifty years of parallel corporate histories under one strategic roof for the first time.

The water infrastructure that sustained both estates is itself one of the great engineering achievements of sub-Saharan Africa. Kyle Dam completed in 1960 created Lake Mutirikwi, named after the Kyle district of Scotland, MacDougall's own homeland, built on land that had once been his farm. The Triangle Canal runs 59 kilometres through thick Lowveld bushveld at a maximum flow of 21 cubic metres per second and has been raised twice since original construction. Bangala Dam adds further storage. The Mkwasine Estate draws from the same system. Together they transformed one of the harshest landscapes on earth into the most productive sugar region in southern Africa.

The People Who Built and Named This Place

Triangle is a company town in the fullest sense. Its schools, hospital, stadium, and streets are named after the people who shaped it. Reading those names is reading the estate's full and complicated history.

Tom Dunuza died on 26 July 1972, having spent his entire adult life at Triangle. The cover photograph of the official estate history shows him alongside MacDougall at their last meeting outside the main office in April 1964. When Triangle's African community named their first primary school, they chose Dunuza School, not after MacDougall, not after Hulett, but after Mac's legendary faithful waggoneer. That choice was the community's own verdict on who truly mattered.

Terry Goss, T.E.S. Goss, arrived at Triangle in November 1958 as Field Manager, sent by Guy Hulett to transform raw Lowveld bush into productive cane fields. Born in Mount Fletcher, Eastern Cape on 7 November 1918, he had started as a junior cane cutter in Natal. Hulett warned him on arrival: 'Watch out, because this place Triangle will always fight you back.' Within weeks a Christmas Eve flash flood submerged the new pump station. Goss had Rolls-Royce engineers driven from Bulawayo over Christmas to strip and rebuild the engines. That set the tone for his entire tenure. He rose to Managing Director in 1976 and Executive Chairman in 1977, guiding Triangle through UDI international sanctions and diversification into cotton, wheat, and tobacco. Terry Goss High School, Triangle's first secondary school, bears his name.

Cedric Gibbs, Gibbo, served as Company Secretary under both the Natal Syndicate and Guy Hulett, later rising to Business Manager and Managing Director. He identified so completely with Triangle that he arrived before dawn each morning to tour the mill before the office opened. It was Goss who twice saved him from dismissal, first persuading Hulett to keep him, then again when the consortium wanted him replaced. They were a legendary partnership: Goss in the fields, Gibbs in the office. When Gibbs died in office from illness, his funeral was attended by hundreds of people of all races. Gibbo Stadium was named by the employees themselves, a spontaneous and unrequested tribute by Triangle's African workers to the man they genuinely loved. The Gibbs Field at Murray MacDougall School was also named in his honour. A man honoured twice, by two different communities.

Dr Colin Saunders was almost certainly the son of Christopher J. Saunders, described in the official Triangle history as a young graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Oxford, heir to his father's power at historic Tongaat, who masterminded the 1962 consortium takeover of Huletts and subsequently became Chairman of Triangle's board, formally opening the Murray MacDougall Museum in March 1976. His son Colin wrote the definitive Triangle history, Murray MacDougall and the Story of Triangle (1977), signing off as 'Colin Saunders (Sqn Ldr, Medical VR),' confirming his medical and Air Force reserve credentials. Beyond Triangle, Dr Colin Saunders chaired Zimbabwe's National Parks and Wildlife Board from 1975 to 1987, later chaired the Malilangwe Trust adjacent to Gonarezhou, and authored Gonarezhou: A Place for Elephants (2006). He retired to the Vumba and passed away approximately six to eight years ago. The Colin Saunders Hospital on Hospital Road, Triangle, one of Zimbabwe's best-equipped private hospitals, is his monument: doctor, conservationist, historian, and son of the man who helped build Triangle into what it became. A multigenerational Lowveld story written in cane and stone.

Who Actually Cut the Cane: The Labour Migration Story

The engineering marvel of the Lowveld has always rested on a human foundation the official histories consistently understate. As Triangle and Hippo Valley expanded through the 1940s and 1950s they faced a fundamental challenge: the Shangaan were leaving. South Africa's Witwatersrand gold mines were offering wages that dwarfed what the sugar estates could pay. At peak, Shangaan labour constituted between 50% and 75% of the entire African mining workforce on the Rand. Every young man with a strong back and an economic choice looked south, not at the cane fields thirty kilometres from his ancestral home.

The replacement came from the north and east.

Malawian labour migration to Southern Rhodesia had been underway since the early 1900s. These were the men the scholarly literature called "machona," the lost ones, migrants who stayed for years or decades and sometimes never went home. Mozambican workers followed a parallel path; the border with Mozambique runs just east of Hippo Valley and for many it was a colonial imposition rather than a real barrier. The estates recruited actively from both countries, offering compound housing, food rations, and steady wages in an era when those were not small things.

Alongside the foreign migrants came workers from the surrounding Masvingo Province communal areas, men and families from Zaka, Bikita, Gutu, Chivi, and Masvingo districts who walked south and east to the cane fields, often seasonally at first and then permanently. These were Karanga people with their own complex relationship to the Lowveld, some descended from communities displaced by the very land alienation that had created the estates. By the time Triangle and Hippo Valley reached full production the workforce was a genuinely multinational community: Shangaan, Malawian, Mozambican, and Karanga, all living in estate compounds, cutting cane together, their children going to the same schools, intermarrying across every boundary the colonial world had tried to impose.
In the residential areas of Rufaro and Rufaro B, the townships that housed Triangle's African workforce, most streets were named after former African workers of the estate. Not managers. Not engineers. Not shareholders. Workers. Their names are embedded in the street grid of Rufaro permanently. Significantly none of the street names are Shangaan, reflecting the demographic reality that by the time these townships were formally laid out the Shangaan community was a small minority and the workforce was overwhelmingly Malawian, Mozambican, and Karanga. The streets of Rufaro are a map of labour migration. Walk them and you walk through a century of who actually built the Lowveld.

What the Lowveld Survived, and What Nearly Destroyed It

At full production Triangle and Hippo Valley together produce up to 640,000 tonnes of raw sugar annually from approximately 25,000 hectares of irrigated cane, employ around 14,772 workers, the largest private sector workforce in Zimbabwe, and support over 800 A2 outgrower farmers on a further 20,000 hectares.

When land reform came after 2000 high-level negotiations averted wholesale destruction: approximately 16,000 hectares of outgrower land transferred to new farmers while the core estates remained under company management. The new outgrowers, dismissed by sceptics as unqualified, were supplying 852,000 tonnes of cane by 2013, roughly 22% of the industry's total intake. That vindication has never received the attention it deserves.

What nearly destroyed the industry was not land invasions but boardroom fraud. In June 2019 a PwC forensic audit found that Tongaat Hulett had inflated its financial results by between R3.5 billion and R4.5 billion. Financing arrangements structured as sugar sales. Raw sugar recorded as refined. Operating costs fraudulently capitalised. Zimbabwe executives named in the report included Sydney Mtsambiwa, MD of THL Zimbabwe and briefly interim Group CEO globally, John Chibwe of Hippo Valley, Shelton Nhari of Triangle, Steve Frampton, and Raphael Pfunye. The share price collapsed from R168 to single digits. Mtsambiwa was forced to resign as Chairman of First Capital Bank. He disputed the allegations. The sugar that had survived colonialism, sanctions, independence, hyperinflation, and land invasions was nearly undone by fraud in a Johannesburg boardroom.

The Shangaan question remains open. Their ancestors hewed the tunnels. Their sons worked the first cane. Their young men left for the mines and the migrants arrived to replace them. When land reform came they found themselves once again peripheral to decisions made about their ancestral territory. In 2014 Shangaan villagers invaded the estates claiming offer letters never honoured. They were arrested. Promises were made. Most were not kept. That conversation is unfinished. It will not remain unfinished forever.

The Cane Is Still Standing

Three pieces of cane. A triangle. 427 metres tunnelled through granite by Shangaan hands. A Scotsman born on Loch Awe in 1881 whose obsession workers called Meke. A Swazi co-founder named Dunuza whose school stands on Mavusa Street. A hill called kuMusiamu where that Scotsman lies buried above the cane he planted. A Natal sugar dynasty and an Anglo American mining giant running rival estates thirty kilometres apart for fifty years. Malawian machona who never went home. Mozambican workers for whom the border meant nothing. Karanga families from Zaka, Bikita, Gutu, Chivi, and Masvingo who came south to the cane and stayed. Streets in Rufaro named after the men who built it all. A Gibbo Stadium named by workers for the man they loved. A Colin Saunders hospital built by a doctor who loved the Lowveld in every direction it stretched. A Shangaan people still waiting.

Zimbabwe's sweetness has never come cheaply. It has been grown, contested, seized, managed, defrauded, reformed, and replanted by every generation that passed through the Lowveld.

The cane is still standing🎋

What are your memories of Triangle or Hippo Valley, Meke, kuMusiamu, the mill smell at harvest, a street in Rufaro named after someone's grandfather? Tell us. 👇
What are your memories of Triangle and/or Hippo Valley, Meke, kuMusiamu, the mill smell at harvest, a street in Rufaro named after someone's grandfather? Tell us. 👇

[263Chat.com 🇿🇼 @263Chat]

They were still children, really.

In 1996, Chris Chidzanja, Ndaba Ngwenya and the late Nothando Ngwenya began Reunion Music with strict parents, young voices and more belief than they could yet explain.

During school holidays, they carried food to the Harare Botanical Gardens and practised for hours, sometimes long enough to make strangers stop and listen, long before wives, children and loss entered the song.

Thirty years later, Reunion Music, a mixed acappella ensemble from the Seventh Day Adventist Church, has grown into one of Zimbabwe's enduring gospel acappella ministries, with a journey shaped by discipline, rejection, growth, humour, grief and the hard work of staying together.

Full story on: https://t.co/gMJl1qwHs3

[Fadzayi Mahere🇿🇼 @advocatemahere]

🔸Muchabvuma henyu kuti Winky D chibaba. HICC haisi La Parada.😩

We need new leaders.🇿🇼

[Tinashe @baba_nyenyedzi]

The MPS did two things right. It kept the bank policy rate at 35% and it suspended the proposed 10% surrender requirement for small-scale miners, which was always a bad idea and which we rightly criticised at the time.

Unfortunately, it also managed to expose ZiG even more clearly for what it is: a fixed exchange rate in all but name. Commodity markets have been turbulent, currencies elsewhere have moved, volatility has shown up where one would expect it to show up. Yet ZiG sits there, unmoved, as if global markets have taken a holiday. The RBZ cannot seriously keep invoking willing-buyer willing-seller language when the market can plainly see otherwise.

The second failure was silence on Treasury’s fresh attempt to pay suppliers in ZiG. What do we make of that omission? The market already suspects this will be inflationary and the MPS should have addressed the practical question head on: how exactly are suppliers meant to settle USD-only domestic costs such as fuel? It is no use pretending this problem does not exist when it sits at the centre of the pricing chain.

The crude oil price jump is, of course, a supply-side shock and sound monetary policy should rightly not react. But supply shocks become persistently inflationary when they are accommodated by money creation. That is the real issue. With money supply growth still running at 37% per annum as of December, the single-digit inflation narrative looks increasingly fragile. Pass-through is not some distant theoretical risk. It is the obvious danger. What the market wanted from the MPS was
a credible explanation of how this extraordinary money growth will be contained. That, more than anything, is why inflation expectations remain stubbornly high.

And then there is the question the ordinary citizen is entitled to ask: what, exactly, is the point of foreign exchange reserves if they cannot be used in the open market to cushion fuel price shocks? The MPS knows perfectly well that prices are sticky downwards. It also knows that money supply growth remains among the highest in the world. In those circumstances, the authorities should be doing everything possible to ensure the country is properly hedged against geopolitical shocks, or at the very least to smooth fuel price increases rather than simply absorb them and hope for the best.

[Tinashe @baba_nyenyedzi]

Price of fuel in SADC comparatives

A lot has been said about the price of fuel in Zim relative to other countries in the region. But let us at least compare like with like. It is pointless lining up pump prices in coastal economies with port access against those of landlocked countries that must drag fuel inland at great cost. The only sensible comparisons are Zambia and Botswana. And even there, Zim has moved first. The others will move too. They always do. The only real comparison is after everyone has had their turn at the pump.

That said, there are real issues here and they expose the structural deficits in the Zim economy. As some of us have argued for a while, there is a latent USD inflation in Zim over and above the inflation of the greenback itself. The “base effect” crowd say otherwise, but that collapses under the lightest inspection. Take a simple metric: USD interest rates in Zim are around 18% on the dollar. In neighbouring countries, including those with weaker currencies, comparable inflation dynamics are nowhere near as punishing. Fuel imports into Zim are financed through letters of credit carrying steep financing costs for local firms. That is not the prevailing reality in SADC comparables.

It is also worth considering that Zim may not have the reserves it says it has. If reserves were genuinely comfortable, the average cost of fuel would cushion short-term spikes in crude oil. Instead, Zim behaves like a country buying close to the spot price and living hand to mouth. That is why it is so often first to adjust. Not because it is uniquely honest, efficient or clairvoyant, but because it has less room to pretend.

The SADC comparables also expose the ZiG problem. Elsewhere, FX markets are allowed at least some freedom to breathe. As geopolitical events buffet commodity markets, currencies like the rand and the kwacha strengthen and weaken in response. It is part of the shock absorber. When gold and platinum prices rose, South Africa, being mineral rich, saw the rand strengthen. When oil rose, the rand weakened. For consumers paid in rand, the pain is delayed and partly spread out. The same is true of the Zambian kwacha when copper prices surge. It can strengthen on the way up, then weaken and absorb part of the import cost on the way down. In Zim, by contrast, the ZiG sits there like a portrait on the wall, unmoved by events, while the central bank insists it is backed by gold. Other currencies in the region are pure fiat and yet somehow manage to behave more honestly.

What does this mean for Zim? I often run polls and questionnaires here to gauge sentiment. As gold prices rose, I asked whether people would hedge. Most said no. They wanted to ride the wave. Zimboes are natural risk-takers 🤣 and that national habit seems to have travelled all the way into government. But the whole point of derivative markets is to hedge, not merely to cheer from the sidelines while prices soar. Reserves, too, are meant to do a job. They are supposed to cover six months or more and act as a hedge against volatility. So if gold is rising, hedge. There is nothing foolish about hedging at $3,800 an ounce if it gives you cover on the cost side as well.

The ban on mineral ore exports may prove one of the more self-defeating policy choices of the period. Australia, under a liberal social democratic government no less, had the sense to let ore exports to China surge and ended up as one of the few countries posting a budget surplus. South Africa, meanwhile, has idle smelters because many are loss-making. GoZ looked at this landscape and somehow picked the worst of both worlds, the wrong policy at precisely the wrong moment.

Meanwhile, production and supply chains in Zim still travel almost entirely by road because rail is defunct. Yet if ever there was a sector that could have underwritten rail revival, it was mining. The miners would have been the biggest beneficiaries, especially on export corridors into China-linked trade routes. GoZ did not need to do everything itself. It merely needed to provide the right framework and stick to it long enough for private capital to believe it.

Markets are better at solving these issues , free markets in the Fx , fuel and mining sectors and not government directives.