Why “Bizarre” Tells You More About Them Than Us

Let us begin with the framing, because it matters. When Zimbabwe’s economy posted strong numbers, a respected Western publication reached for a telling phrase: a “bizarre economic boom.” Sit with that adjective. Not a “surprising” boom, not an “impressive” one, not even a “fragile” one — bizarre. As though Zimbabwean growth were a glitch in the natural order, a thing that should not be happening and therefore requires a word that means “strange, inexplicable, weird.”

This is an old habit, and we should name it without anger but with clarity. African excellence is routinely narrated by the West as miracle, mystery or fluke — never as the ordinary, expected result of hard work and good planning, the way European or Asian success is described. A miracle requires no effort and no respect; it just happens to you. By calling our boom “bizarre,” the framing quietly erases the obvious truth: that millions of Zimbabweans worked for it, and a government executed a plan to deliver it. TeteGetty’s response is simple. There is nothing bizarre here. There is a hardworking people and a written strategy. Let us read both.

Zimbabwe’s government projects at least 8.5% growth in 2026 (potentially 9–10%), up from about 6% in 2025 — its fastest pace since 2012. The IMF is more conservative at around 5%, partly because Zimbabwe’s large informal economy is genuinely hard to measure. Both numbers describe growth; they differ on how much. Sources: Zimbabwe Treasury / Ministry of Finance; IMF.

Yes, the Doubters Have a Point — and It Proves Ours

TeteGetty never sells a fairy tale, so let us be straight. The IMF projects nearer 5% than 8.5%. Critics — including the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development — rightly note that headline growth has not yet reached every household, that unemployment and currency volatility persist, and that health and education remain underfunded. The percentages also look large partly because the base, after decades of crisis, was so low. All true. All worth saying.

But notice what the biggest disagreement is actually about: how to count an economy that is roughly 60% informal. Western-built metrics struggle to see the vast, vibrant informal sector — the market trader, the cross-border entrepreneur, the small producer — that is the beating heart of African economic life. One serious estimate puts Zimbabwe’s real economy as much as 65% larger than official figures suggest. So the gap between “5%” and “8.5%” is, in large part, the gap between what an outside ledger can measure and what is actually happening on the ground. The doubt itself is partly a measurement failure — and that failure is exactly how real African growth gets dismissed as “bizarre.”

Sanctions Don’t Work on a Communal People

And all of this — let us not forget — is happening under sanctions. A generation of Zimbabwean Gen Zs has been born and raised under Western economic restrictions, and still the economy grows. Why do the sanctions not deliver the collapse they were designed to produce? Part of the answer is cultural, and the sanctioning powers never understood it.

Sanctions are a weapon designed for individualist societies — squeeze the individual’s comfort, and the theory says the individual will turn on the state. But the Zimbabwe Plateau does not run on individualism. It runs on community — on the extended family, the kinship network, the totemic order, the reflex to share and to carry one another. When hardship comes, a communal society closes ranks and pools its strength; it does not fracture into self-interest. You cannot starve a people into surrender when their first instinct under pressure is to feed each other. The sanctions architects modelled a society that does not exist here. That is why they have not worked, and will not.

Consider Britain specifically. The United Kingdom needs critical minerals — lithium for batteries, platinum-group metals for clean energy and industry — and Zimbabwe sits on world-class reserves of exactly these. Every year the remaining restrictions persist, British industry is shut out of real, tangible, in-the-ground wealth while competitors walk in. And imagine the alternative: if the UK and EU lifted the remaining economic punishments on a generation of Zimbabwean Gen Zs who were born into them, the result would not be one “bizarre” boom but several entirely ordinary ones — the predictable fruit of a young, educated, hardworking, newly-unshackled economy. The sanctions are not restraining a threat. They are delaying a partnership.

Not the Economy — the Distractions

If the sanctions cannot stop Zimbabwe and the figures keep climbing, what is left to slow the rise? Distraction and destabilisation. A country doing well, holding a UN Security Council seat and courting new partners, becomes a target for forces that would rather see it divided and distracted than confident and connected. TeteGetty names these honestly, as concerns — and answers them with the most powerful weapon we have: clarity.

The oldest tool against African nations is divide-and-rule — the colonial habit of setting brother against brother. Today it wears modern clothes: separatist agitation that would carve up a unified people along the very ethnic lines that colonialism invented; xenophobic mobilisation in the region that turns poor against poor and harms Zimbabweans living abroad; and a steady drip of imported distraction narratives designed to keep educated minds chasing nonsense instead of building. These are real currents, and a thinking citizen is entitled to ask the sharp question of any movement built on division: who benefits from a fractured, distracted Zimbabwe — and would such projects survive a week without quiet outside encouragement? We need not allege a conspiracy to insist on that question. We need only follow the logic: division has always served someone, and it has rarely been the divided.