Zimbabwe Strikes Gas at Muzarabani: The Chance to Own an Energy Future, Not Just Sell It
After a century of being told its wealth lay in the ground for others to take, Zimbabwe has proven a real, commercial natural-gas field beneath the Muzarabani and Mbire districts — the first in the country’s history. This is a moment to celebrate, and a bigger moment to plan: the gas is only a blessing if the value stays home. Turn it into our own power, our own fertiliser, our own industry — not another raw cargo shipped out cheap.
This is Entry 64 of the Economic Journal, and it opens with good news that a Zimbabwean can feel in the chest: beneath the Muzarabani and Mbire districts of Mashonaland Central, roughly 300 kilometres north of Harare, drillers have proven a working, commercial natural-gas system — the Mukuyu gas field, the first genuine hydrocarbon discovery in Zimbabwe’s history. After decades of blackouts, fuel queues and an import bill that bled the nation of foreign currency, the earth beneath the Zambezi Valley has answered with something the country has never had before: its own energy, in commercial quantity.
Let us tell it plainly and proudly. The Mukuyu-1 well, drilled in 2022, was the first to confirm that the Cabora Bassa Basin holds a live petroleum system. The Mukuyu-2 well, in December 2023, turned promise into discovery — gas and light oil (condensate) flowed and were measured. Across the first wells the operator booked a resource that has since grown, through further appraisal, into a portfolio of the order of 4.2 trillion cubic feet of gas plus around 264 million barrels of condensate. Independent analysts at Wood Mackenzie ranked it the second-largest onshore gas discovery in sub-Saharan Africa in 2023. The wider basin has been estimated by some analysts at over a billion barrels of oil-equivalent — figures that translate, in-ground, into tens of billions of United States dollars. These numbers will be refined as drilling continues; what is no longer in doubt is that Zimbabwe is, for the first time, a country with proven gas of its own.
What Lies Beneath Muzarabani
Numbers make a discovery real, so let us set them down — measured figures, reported figures and analyst estimates, each labelled honestly for what it is.
only export raw
Flip the picture — process it here — and the majority of that value can be captured on Zimbabwean soil: as electricity, as fertiliser, as food, as jobs and as industry. That flip is the whole argument of this journal.
Climb the Ladder — Don’t Ship the Bottom Rung
Every unit of gas can leave Zimbabwe at any rung of a ladder. The higher the rung at which we sell, the more of the value stays home. This is value sovereignty — the framework this Institute researches — drawn as simply as it can be drawn.
Gas Is Not Just Fuel — It Is Food
Here is the part that turns an energy story into a survival story. Natural gas is the feedstock for nitrogen fertiliser. A country that makes its own gas can make its own fertiliser — and a country that makes its own fertiliser can feed itself without begging the foreign-currency market for every bag. This is the chain that matters most for Zimbabwe.
This is not a dream drawn from nowhere. The operator has already signed a memorandum with Sable Chemicals, Zimbabwe’s fertiliser maker, to explore using Muzarabani gas as feedstock — and a separate arrangement with Tatanga Energy toward gas-fired power generation. In other words, the plan to climb the ladder — from raw gas, to power, to fertiliser, to food — is already being drawn. The task of this journal is to insist, loudly and gladly, that we climb all the way.
Who Actually Found This Gas
A discovery is announced in a boardroom, but it is earned in the heat and dust of the Zambezi Valley — by geologists, drillers, rig crews and the communities whose land holds the treasure. This platform believes the Second Great Zimbabwe is built by every hand in the work, so let us name them, from the state that holds the resource in trust to the crew that turned the drill bit.
The End of the Blackout — If We Choose It
Let us be clear about the size of what this could mean, because on this platform we welcome what is good as loudly as we scrutinise what is not. Zimbabwe has spent decades importing electricity, importing fuel, importing fertiliser — each import a drain on the foreign currency the nation fights to earn. A working gas field changes the arithmetic of the whole economy at once.
Readers will hear the theme this journal returns to again and again: Zimbabwe’s prosperity lies not in extraction, but in production, ownership and the capture of value on home soil — what this platform calls value sovereignty. Gas makes the lesson vivid. The same field can be a curse or a foundation. Ship it raw and it becomes another Nigeria-style story of oil that enriched everyone but the people above it. Process it — power, fertiliser, food, industry — and it becomes the energy spine of a Second Great Zimbabwe. The molecule is neutral. The choice is ours.
Learn From the Continent’s Hard Lessons
Here is where this journal lifts its eyes, because a discovery is not a destiny — it is a fork in the road. Africa has walked this road before, and the map is written in both triumph and regret. We can read it, and choose the better path with open eyes.
How to Turn a Gas Field Into Real Value
Celebration given, now the forward part — the constructive steps that turn a discovery into a foundation, aimed squarely at power, fertiliser, food and ownership at home.
From the Wellhead to the Nation’s Wealth
- Anchor the gas to domestic use first. Commit the first tranches to Zimbabwean power and Zimbabwean fertiliser — Tatanga power, a revived Sable Chemicals — before any thought of raw export.
- Build the plants on home soil. Gas-to-power and gas-to-fertiliser facilities inside Zimbabwe capture the value, create the jobs, and train the engineers who run the next field.
- Let Muzarabani and Mbire share directly. A community stake, local jobs, roads, clinics and schools — so the people on whose land the gas sits are the first to feel the reward, not the last.
- Guard the ownership. Keep and grow the national equity through the Mutapa Investment Fund; negotiate hard so the production-sharing terms leave the lion’s share of value inside Zimbabwe.
- Train the skills now. Petroleum engineers, plant operators, gas technicians — grow them in Zimbabwean universities and colleges so the industry is run by Zimbabwean hands within a generation.
- Tell the nation, in every language. Explain the plan — in Shona, Ndebele and all our tongues — so citizens own the story, and hold their leaders to keeping the value home.
This Time, Let the Wealth Stay Home
I want to begin where a Zimbabwean’s heart begins — with joy. For as long as I have been alive, we were told our poverty was a fact of nature: no oil like the Arabs, no easy fortune, only hard soil and hard times. And now, beneath Muzarabani, in the valley of the Zambezi, our own people have proven a gas field of our own. I do not take that lightly. That is our earth answering us. Vakaita basa — they did the work, from the geologist who read the rock to the crew that turned the drill in the Zambezi heat, and I name them all with pride. This is a day to celebrate, and I celebrate it fully.
And because I love this country and have studied its wounds, I hold the celebration and the warning in the same hand. I have read the story of the continent’s minerals too many times to pretend the discovery is the victory. The copper of Zambia was real. The oil of Nigeria was real. The cobalt of the Congo is real. And in each case the wealth was real — and it left. It became someone else’s electricity, someone else’s fertiliser, someone else’s finished goods, while the people who sat above it queued for fuel and light. The tragedy of African resources has never been that they were not there. It is that we sold them at the bottom of the ladder.
So my word on Muzarabani is not caution against the gas — it is conviction about what we do with it. Burn it in our own power stations and end the blackout. Feed it into our own fertiliser plants and let Sable Chemicals live again. Grow our own grain on our own nitrogen. Build industry on energy priced in our own terms. Keep the ownership through our own funds, and let Muzarabani and Mbire — the people of that land — share first and share fairly. Do that, and this gas becomes not another chapter of the extraction story, but the first chapter of the energy spine of the Second Great Zimbabwe. We were told we were a poor country sitting on nothing. We are not. We are a country learning, at last, to turn its own gas into its own light. Hupfumi hwenyika ngahugare munyika — let the wealth of the nation remain in the nation. Tichazvivakira — we will build it for ourselves.
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