The Stone Stays Home: How Granite Polishing in Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe Is Rewriting the Rules of Rural Zimbabwe
For decades the arrangement was simple and humiliating: Zimbabwe’s granite left the country as raw blocks, and came back — if it came back at all — as somebody else’s polished slabs at somebody else’s price. In UMP, one of the poorest districts in the country, that is changing. A plant that is only half built is already cutting and polishing 4,500 tonnes a month on site, employing hundreds of local families in a district where the alternative was subsistence farming or the bus to Harare. This is what value addition looks like when it finally stops being a conference word.
A Media Tour Into One of Zimbabwe’s Least-Served Districts
On Monday 20 July 2026, government officials took journalists into Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe — UMP — as part of a media tour showcasing development projects across Mashonaland East and highlighting the Government’s rural industrialisation agenda. The centrepiece was the granite producer Eberne Investments, where the story is no longer extraction but processing.
Permanent Secretary for Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Nick Mangwana set out both the scale of the resource and the shift in policy — that the reserves could sustain mining for a very long time, but that the problem had been blocks leaving the country without adequate processing, and that firms now cutting and polishing locally were keeping more of the value inside Zimbabwe.
And then the number that should make every Zimbabwean economist sit forward. Eberne Investments director David Van Breda explained that the processing plant — still only half completed — can already handle 4,500 tonnes of granite a month in polished slabs, with slabs sold by the square metre and the yield depending on thickness, whether 2cm, 3cm, 4cm or 5cm. The company produces to order: fully polished, cut only, ground only, or honed, with some customers preferring to reprocess to their own specification.
Value addition means doing more to a thing before you sell it. Dig a rock out of the ground and sell the rock — that is raw export. Cut that rock into slabs, grind it flat, polish it until it shines, and cut it to the size a kitchen or a building needs — that is value addition. Same rock. Many times the price.
And here is the part that matters for a district like UMP: the difference between those two prices is not just profit. It is jobs. Somebody has to run the saw. Somebody has to operate the polishing line, drive the loader, do the quality check, keep the books, guard the yard, feed the workers. When we export raw blocks, we are exporting all of those jobs along with the stone — paying, in effect, to employ people in another country.
Every Step Up the Ladder Multiplies What the Stone Is Worth
Dimension stone is one of the clearest value ladders in all of mining, which is exactly why raw-block export has been such a costly habit. Each processing step adds price, and — more importantly — adds employment.
The Old Model and the New One, Side by Side
Jobs created: quarrying and loading only.
Skills built: minimal, and not transferable.
Value captured: the lowest rung of the ladder.
Who gets the factory: the importing country.
Local town: hosts a hole in the ground and a truck route.
Jobs created: quarrying plus sawing, polishing, QC, logistics, admin, services.
Skills built: machine operation, finishing, maintenance — real trades.
Value captured: several rungs higher, per tonne.
Who gets the factory: UMP.
Local town: hosts an industry, and the shops that feed it.
Why This Is Really a Story About Migration
The most under-appreciated line in the reporting is that this development reduces rural-to-urban migration toward Harare. To an economist, that is not a footnote. It is the entire argument for rural industrialisation, expressed in one sentence.
Understand the pattern that has shaped Zimbabwe for a century. A young person in a district like UMP finishes school. There is subsistence farming, and there is very little else. So they take the bus to Harare — where there is often no formal job either, and they join the crowded informal economy of the city, live in an overstretched suburb, and send money back. The village loses its most energetic person; the city gains one more pair of hands it cannot employ. Everybody’s problem gets worse simultaneously.
And note where this is happening. UMP is a district of roughly 124,000 people, described in the standard record as very rural, largely dependent on subsistence maize farming, and carrying high poverty levels. An industrial employer of hundreds of families in that setting is not a rounding error. It is, proportionally, transformative.
Welcome It Warmly — Then Ask the Hard Questions
This journal has championed value addition since its first entry, so we celebrate this genuinely. And precisely because we do, we will not let it pass without the questions a serious economic journal must ask on behalf of the people of that district.
1. “Hundreds of jobs” needs a number, and a quality
Officials described the company as a significant employer providing livelihoods for hundreds of local families — and we take that in good faith. But “hundreds” is a range, not a statistic. How many are permanent versus casual? What are the wage levels against the poverty datum line? How many are women? How many are being trained into certified trades rather than kept as general labour? Rural industrialisation is only transformative if the jobs are decent, secure and skilled — otherwise it is merely extraction with extra steps.
2. Finish the other half
A half-built plant producing 4,500 tonnes a month is an argument for completing it, urgently. What is the timeline, what is the financing, and what would the completed plant employ? This is where public policy can be decisive — through infrastructure, power, roads and access to capital rather than exhortation.
3. Value addition has further rungs still
Cutting and polishing is a real and significant step up from raw blocks. But the ladder does not stop there. Cut-to-size finished products, branded Zimbabwean stone, design and architectural supply, and offcut industries — tiles, tombstones, kitchen tops, cladding, terrazzo — are the rungs above. The ambition should not be to become a good exporter of slabs. It should be to become a country that sells finished Zimbabwean stone, under its own name, into the world.
4. The community’s own share
The stone belongs to the ground of UMP, and the people of UMP live on that ground. Beyond wages, what flows back — royalties, community share ownership, roads, clinics, schools, water? Zimbabwe has learned expensive lessons elsewhere about resource wealth leaving a district that remains poor. The test of this project in ten years will not be the tonnage. It will be whether UMP looks like a place that hosted an industry, or like a place that was mined.
We Have Always Known What to Do With Stone
I want to place this where it belongs, because Zimbabweans should feel the full weight of what a polished granite slab from UMP actually represents.
This is the country that built Great Zimbabwe. Not with mortar, not with imported technique, not under anyone’s supervision — but by quarrying, splitting, dressing and fitting granite so precisely that the walls have stood for centuries and still draw the world to come and look. Working stone is not a new industry on this Plateau. It is arguably our oldest and most distinguished one. The ancestors of the people now running saws in UMP were the finest stonemasons on the continent. Everything since has been an interruption.
So when I read that our granite was leaving the country as raw blocks to be finished elsewhere, I do not read it merely as bad economics — though it is that. I read it as the continuation of a very old arrangement: African material, foreign finishing, foreign profit, and the quiet suggestion that the making is beyond us. It never was. It is the one thing we most demonstrably know how to do. As I argued in Entry 47 about the workshops of the Green Market, our technical inheritance did not die under colonial education — it went underground and waited.
And now a plant in one of the poorest districts in Zimbabwe is polishing our own stone on our own soil, and a young person in Maramba does not have to board a bus to Harare to be part of an economy. That is nation-building, and it is worth more than any number of speeches about beneficiation. Finish the plant. Certify the workers. Climb the rest of the ladder. Put the name of this country on the finished slab, and let it travel the world announcing where it came from.
Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo — nemabwe ayo. A country is built by its owners — with its own stone. Pamberi nekugadzirwa kwezvinhu muno, pamberi nemabasa kumaruzevha, pamberi nemhizha dzeZimbabwe. Forward with making things here; forward with jobs in the rural districts; forward with the craftsmen of Zimbabwe. Ziva kwawakabva — we built in stone before anyone taught us anything.
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