Can Our Lithium Bring Back the Night Train? Zimbabwe’s Mineral-for-Railways Deal With China — Explained, and Questioned
On 24 June, in the Chinese city of Dalian, our Finance Minister said something that made this old train-lover’s heart leap: Zimbabwe is in talks to rebuild its roads and railways using the wealth of our lithium. For anyone who ever rode the night train from Bulawayo to Harare, or Mutare to Harare, that is a beautiful dream. But a dream with a price tag this large deserves to be understood by every Zimbabwean — not only the bankers in the room. So let us walk through it together: what was announced, how it would work, why our railway fell so far, and the one hard question we must all ask before we sign.
First, Let Me Tell You About the Night Train
Forgive me a moment of feeling before the figures, because this story is not only economics to me. I grew up on that night train. Bulawayo to Harare, Mutare to Harare — mumbombera, as some of us called her — the brown coaches, the smell of the seats, the vendors at every platform pressing maputi and cool drinks through the windows, the whole country sliding past in the dark while the wheels kept their steady song. You boarded at dusk in one city and the dawn handed you to another. For a child, it was the closest thing to magic the real world offered. So when our Finance Minister stood up in China this week and spoke of rebuilding our railways, I will confess: I felt butterflies.
But love is exactly why we must be careful. You do not hand over the family’s most precious inheritance to the first person who promises to fix the house — not without reading every line of the contract. And the inheritance on the table here is the largest one we have: the mineral wealth beneath our feet. So let us love the train enough to think clearly about the deal.
The Deal, in Plain Words
On 24 June 2026, on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum gathering in Dalian, China, Finance Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube announced that Zimbabwe had begun talks with China Railway about a way of paying for new roads and railways called “resource-backed financing.” In his own words: “We spoke to them about resource-linked debt instruments that we want to explore going forward to support our infrastructure development, especially roads and rail.” It is not a signed deal — it is an early conversation. But the idea is important enough to understand fully.
Minister Ncube was clear that the homework is ours to do first: “It is now up to us to determine which roads we want to develop, how much these roads will cost, how much revenue can be generated through tolling systems, and how much financing would need to be supplemented through natural resource-backed investments.” In other words — work out which projects, at what cost, how much the tolls can repay, and only then how much to borrow against the minerals. That sequence matters enormously, and we will return to why.
How We Let the Railway Die
To feel why this news stirs such hope, you must remember how far we have fallen. The National Railways of Zimbabwe, born in 1893 and headquartered in Bulawayo, was once one of the finest railways in Africa. In its prime it moved more than 14 million tonnes of cargo a year and carried us, in our hundreds of thousands, across the country in comfort. Then came deregulation, decades of mismanagement, and a collapsing economy. The numbers tell a brutal story.
- Among Africa’s best rail systems in the 1970s–90s
- Over 14 million tonnes of freight a year
- Night passenger trains linking every major city
- An electrified mainline (Gweru to Harare) from 1983
- Only about 60 of 168 locomotives still working
- The electric line stripped — copper cables stolen
- Passenger trains suspended since 2020; coaches rotting
- Abandoned carriages now shelters, not transport
That last line should shame us all. Reporters have walked through our once-proud passenger coaches and found them rusting in the long grass at Harare and Bulawayo stations — turned into hiding places and sleeping spots for the desperate. The train that carried a nation now carries only our neglect. This is the hole the Minister is trying to fill — and the African Development Bank puts the size of that hole at a staggering US$34 billion to modernise all our roads, rail and logistics. No ordinary budget can find that. Hence the reach for our minerals.
Why Lithium, and Why China
Here is the happy part of the story, and it is real. Zimbabwe is now Africa’s largest producer of lithium — the “white gold” that powers the batteries in electric cars, phones and solar storage the whole world is rushing to buy. In 2025 we sent about 1.13 million tonnes of lithium concentrate to China alone — roughly 15% of all the lithium China imported. Since 2021, Chinese companies have poured more than US$2 billion into our lithium mines (firms such as Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine and Yahua, at mines like Arcadia, Bikita and Kamativi). For once, the world needs something we have in abundance.
And here is the clever logic. China needs our lithium for its enormous battery industry; China also builds railways better and cheaper than almost anyone on earth; and China needs our railway to work so its minerals can reach the sea. Our need and theirs point in the same direction. That is genuine leverage — if we use it wisely.
Now the Hard Question — Ask It With Me
Here is where love must make room for caution, and where I need every Zimbabwean reading this to lean in. Borrowing against your minerals can build a nation — or it can quietly rob it. The difference lies entirely in the details of the deal. And we do not have to imagine how it can go wrong, because our neighbour has already shown us.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a famous “minerals-for-infrastructure” deal with Chinese companies — called Sicomines, worth some US$7 billion — promised roads and railways in exchange for copper and cobalt. So what did the DRC actually receive? According to the DRC’s own government finance inspectors, after all these years barely US$822 million of infrastructure had been built — while the Chinese investors took home nearly US$10 billion in profit. Look at that gap, and never forget it.
This is not a reason to refuse China. It is a reason to negotiate like our grandchildren are watching — because they are. A lithium-for-railways deal could be a triumph or a trap, and the line between them is drawn in the fine print. So before we sign anything, here are the questions every citizen should demand answers to.
Bring Back the Train — but Don’t Pawn the Mountain
Let me hold both feelings at once, because both are true. The first is joy. The idea of a Zimbabwean child once again falling asleep to the song of the rails, waking to a new city at dawn, riding a railway rebuilt and modern and ours — that is a future worth fighting for. A working railway is not nostalgia; it is cheaper goods, saved highways, revived towns, jobs in Bulawayo’s old railway yards, and minerals reaching the sea without destroying our roads. I want the train back with my whole heart.
The second feeling is vigilance. We have been here before, as a continent — handing over the certain wealth of the ground for the uncertain promise of development, and watching the wealth leave while the promise thinned to nothing. The DRC’s experience is not a rumour; it is a warning written by the DRC’s own auditors. So let our answer be neither the frightened “no” that leaves the coaches rotting, nor the reckless “yes” that signs away the mountain in the dark. Let it be the careful “yes, on these terms”: honest valuation, an open contract before Parliament, Zimbabwean hands on the work, tolls proven before minerals pledged, and protection if prices fall.
This is the same lesson stitched through every entry of this journal, from data to crops to power and now to steel rails: the wealth of Zimbabwe belongs to Zimbabweans, and our task in this generation is simply to stop giving it away for less than it is worth. The January 2027 ban on raw exports shows we are learning to keep the value home. Let the railway deal be cut from the same cloth. Build us the line — but let it be a line that serves us, paid for by minerals we sold at a fair price, with our names on the contract and our children on the train. Make the whistle sound in the dark again — but this time, let it be ours. Pamberi nezvitima zvedu — forward with our own trains.
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