The Africa Journal · Regional Trade
The Chair Comes Home: Zimbabwe Leads COMESA With a Blueprint to Make Africa Trade With Itself
Harare hosted the 25th COMESA Summit, Kenya handed Zimbabwe the chairmanship of a US$1 trillion market, and President Mnangagwa set out an agenda built on the one thing that changes everything — Africa making, moving and selling to Africa. And the proof it works is already running on our own borders.
This week in Harare, President Mnangagwa received the gavel of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa from Kenya’s President Ruto, and Zimbabwe took the chair of a bloc of 21 nations, 640 million people and a US$1 trillion economy. For a country that spent two decades being told it could not be trusted to run its own affairs, leading one of Africa’s largest common markets is not a small moment. It is a homecoming, and this Journal names it as one.
When Zimbabwe first stepped up to the chair, we set out the great prize the whole bloc is reaching for (see our earlier entry, “Harare Takes the Chair”): a trillion-dollar market whose members still sell more to the rest of the world than to one another. President Mnangagwa went straight to it in his own words at the COMESA Business Forum, naming both the problem and the opportunity in a single breath:
“Intra-COMESA trade and investment remain significantly low.” The private sector, he urged, must “move decisively from the export of commodities towards value addition.”— President E.D. Mnangagwa, COMESA Business Forum, Harare, 21 October 2026
That is the whole game in one sentence. The bloc’s trade with itself is low not because Africans have nothing to sell each other, but because too much leaves the continent raw and comes back finished and expensive. Mnangagwa’s answer — value addition, regional value chains, and the removal of the barriers that clog our own borders — is the right answer. And the best reason to believe it is that Africa has already built the machinery that makes it work.
The prize Harare is reaching for
A trillion-dollar market, and the biggest untapped customer is Africa itself
The climb Zimbabwe is leading
Share of COMESA members’ trade that stays inside the bloc — today versus the 2030 goal
Illustrative scale (0–20%), not a forecast. Roughly nine of every ten export dollars still leave the bloc — so the target is not a stretch into the unknown, it is Africa simply keeping more of the trade it already does. Intra-COMESA trade dipped recently (from about US$18bn in 2023 to US$13bn in 2025), which is exactly the ground the proven tools below are built to recover. Source: COMESA / ZimTrade via The Herald, Oct 2026.
The blueprint on the table
From commodities to finished goods — and Zimbabwe is already doing it
Mnangagwa did not arrive with slogans. He arrived with a method, and pointed to Zimbabwe’s own record as the proof. He reminded the forum that Zimbabwe restricted the export of unprocessed lithium ore in December 2022 — a decision this Journal has tracked closely — and called on the bloc to do the same across the goods Africa already grows and mines: agro-processing, leather, cotton turned into clothing, pharmaceuticals, battery materials, and clean-energy technology.
He asked member states to cut tariff and non-tariff barriers, harmonise slow customs procedures, and build cross-border investments tied to regional value chains rather than isolated national projects — and to do it so that the jobs land with young people and women. This is the correct agenda, in the correct order: make the thing, keep the value, and sell it across a border that actually opens. The question readers rightly ask is whether a bloc can really move from talk to trucks. The answer is that it already has.
Already proven on African soil
Harare is not inventing the solution — it is scaling what Africa already built
Every obstacle Mnangagwa named has already been beaten somewhere on this continent, often by COMESA’s own members. The chairmanship’s real work is to take these working models and make them the norm from Cairo to Cape Town’s doorstep.
Africa’s first one-stop border post opened on the Zimbabwe–Zambia frontier in 2009. Trucks that once queued up to twenty days now clear in hours — and on the Zambian side, border revenue climbed from US$10m to US$20.3m a month with no new taxes. The template for unclogging a border was written on our own river.
Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda put cargo on one electronic tracking platform. Monitored goods now move in under two days instead of more than three, roughly US$311 is saved per consignment in escort and demurrage costs, and theft is intercepted in real time. A digital answer to the non-tariff barriers Mnangagwa wants gone.
By refusing to ship its lithium out as raw rock, Zimbabwe pulled processing investment onshore and began capturing value that once fled the continent. It is the President’s own proof of concept, and the model he is now offering the whole bloc for cotton, leather, pharmaceuticals and battery metals.
The cross-border traders — overwhelmingly women — who already move food and goods between our countries can clear small consignments with light paperwork and lower duties. Scaling this brings a vast, real, everyday trade in from the margins and counts it where it belongs: inside the bloc.
None of this is a pilot waiting to be imagined. Chirundu is open. The trackers are running. The lithium policy is paying. The traders are already trading. Harare’s gavel is a platform to make the exception the rule — and that is a far more hopeful task than starting from nothing.
Tete’s Take
For too long the story of African integration has been told as a story of failure — summits that lead nowhere, plans that gather dust. I do not accept that telling, because it is not what the evidence shows. The evidence shows a continent that opened Africa’s first one-stop border post on a Zimbabwean river, that built a cargo-tracking system three governments now share, that drew lithium processing home by simply saying no to raw export. Africa has been solving these problems in daylight while the world kept writing that it couldn’t.
So I read Zimbabwe’s chairmanship with real pride and clear eyes at once. Pride, because the gavel in Harare’s hand is a seat of leadership our generation earned. Clear eyes, because leadership is measured in trucks that cross and factories that hum, not in communiqués. The good news — the thing worth celebrating today — is that President Mnangagwa has named the right prize and the right method, and that Africa already holds the tools to reach it.
Let this be the chairmanship that scales what works. One more border made to flow like Chirundu, one more corridor tracked like East Africa’s, one more mineral kept home like our lithium — and the line of Africa trading with Africa climbs. That is not a hope. On this continent, it is a repeat performance.
Make it, keep the value, and sell it across a border that opens.
Tovera Mudzimu Dzoka
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