Fuel crisis: When the ground is rich, but the ground rules are poor

Zimbabwe finds itself once again at the mercy of events far beyond its borders.

The latest increase in fuel prices, triggered by geopolitical shocks in the Middle East, is a reminder of a brutal and familiar truth: our economy remains dangerously exposed to external disruption because we have not yet built the internal capacity to insulate ourselves from it.

When oil markets sneeze in the Gulf, Zimbabwe catches pneumonia. That is not merely an unfortunate circumstance; it is a policy failure that has persisted across administrations, slogans, and economic cycles. It is also a warning.

If we continue to respond to every international shock with short-term adjustments and rhetorical reassurance, we will keep treating symptoms while ignoring the disease.

The deeper problem is that Zimbabwe is trying to run a modern, import-dependent economy on a fragile foundation.

Fuel is not just a transport commodity. It is the bloodstream of mining, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, retail, and public services.

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Every increase in diesel and petrol prices feeds into the cost of food, the cost of moving goods, the cost of production, and ultimately the cost of living.

For a country already battling low disposable incomes and constrained industrial recovery, fuel hikes are not an isolated inconvenience; they are a multiplier of hardship.

They widen inequality, punish formal business, and strengthen informal coping strategies that do not build a productive economy. In that sense, each fuel price review should be viewed not only as an energy issue but as a national competitiveness issue.

Yet the tragedy is that Zimbabwe is not a country without options. It is a country with possibilities that are repeatedly slowed by the very systems meant to unlock them.

The Muzarabani gas project is the clearest illustration of this contradiction. Here is a basin that has generated excitement, national hope, and strategic debate. Here is a project capable, in principle, of contributing to energy security, import substitution, and industrial growth.

And yet, despite the headlines and official optimism, the project remains stuck in the difficult space between discovery and delivery. That gap is where national aspiration goes to die if it is not managed with discipline, honesty and institutional seriousness.

The first barrier is uncertainty and in investment, uncertainty is often more damaging than bad news. Investors can deal with risk if the rules are clear. They can price geology, capital intensity, infrastructure needs, and even political instability if they know where they stand.

What they cannot easily price is ambiguity. When ownership structures are unclear, when decision-making appears politicised, when policy signals shift with the political wind, and when the boundaries between commercial logic and State ambition blur, capital retreats.

The Muzarabani project has suffered from exactly this kind of ambiguity. A frontier gas project requires patient capital, but patience is not infinite.

Investors want to know who controls what, who approves what, how disputes will be resolved, and whether the environment they enter today will still exist in the same form ten years from now.

This is where Zimbabwe often shoots itself in the foot. We speak the language of resource nationalism in a way that sometimes confuses control with development.

Retaining strategic interests in national resources is not the problem. The problem is when ownership is treated as a political trophy rather than a development tool.

A State can and should participate in strategic projects, but participation must not become interference.

It must not become an excuse for opaque negotiations, elite competition, or policy unpredictability.

If investors sense that a project is less about geology and more about access, patronage, or political positioning, they will either leave or demand such a high-risk premium that the project becomes uneconomic.

In that sense, the cost of weak governance is not abstract. It is measured in deferred investment, lost jobs, delayed infrastructure and continued fuel imports.

There is also a profound contradiction in the way we talk about sovereignty. We often invoke sovereignty as though it means the State should control everything. But true economic sovereignty is not the ability to announce control; it is the ability to convert national assets into public value.

A gas field sitting underground is not sovereignty realised. It is sovereignty deferred.

If the country cannot translate natural endowments into energy supply, industrial input, tax revenue, and broader economic benefit, then the resource remains symbolic rather than transformative.

The real question is not whether Zimbabwe owns the resource in principle, but whether it can build the institutional environment that allows the resource to be monetised for the public good.

That environment depends on trust, and trust is built through consistency. Investors need assurance that contracts will be honoured, that regulations will be applied fairly, that approvals will not be hostage to political cycles, and that the state will behave as a reliable partner rather than a moving target.

This requires more than pronouncements. It requires a governance culture. It requires institutions that can separate commercial evaluation from political theatre.

It requires transparency in licensing, procurement, revenue sharing, environmental compliance, and local content frameworks. Without that, every major project becomes a negotiation with invisible forces, and serious capital tends to go elsewhere.

The stalled Muzarabani opportunity also exposes a weakness in national planning. We are often excellent at announcement and poor at execution. We celebrate discovery before appraisal is complete.

We speak of transformation before infrastructure exists. We frame possibility as policy achievement.

But resource development is not a press conference; it is a long chain of technical, financial, legal and logistical milestones.

Gas must be proven, tested, commercialised, transported, processed, and integrated into downstream markets.

That means pipelines, processing plants, off-take agreements, financing structures, regulatory certainty, and project management capacity.

If any one of these links is weak, the chain breaks. Zimbabwe’s challenge is not merely the absence of money. It is the absence of a dependable execution ecosystem.

And this brings us back to fuel pricing. Because while we wait for future gas wealth, the country still has to function today.

This means the government must stop treating fuel import dependence as a permanent norm. We need a national strategy that reduces exposure, not just a pricing mechanism that passes shocks to consumers.

That strategy should be built around diversification of energy sources, including accelerated support for domestic gas development, renewable energy expansion, improved rail logistics to reduce diesel dependence, and stronger domestic refining and storage capacity where feasible. It also means rethinking transport policy, freight efficiency and industrial energy use. A country that relies too heavily on imported fuel will always be vulnerable unless it consciously builds alternatives.But even more important than technical alternatives is institutional credibility. If Zimbabwe wants serious investors in energy, mining, infrastructure and industry, it must become easier to do business with, not merely more vocal about what it hopes to achieve. That means a regulatory framework that is stable, transparent and professional. It means reducing the number of actors who can obstruct a project without accountability. It means ending the culture of improvisation where major economic decisions are announced before the supporting architecture is ready. It means respecting investor due diligence rather than resenting it. It means recognising that a frontier project like Muzarabani cannot be forced into existence by political enthusiasm. It must be earned through disciplined statecraft.There is, finally, a need for national honesty. We must be willing to admit that some of our setbacks are self-inflicted. It is easy to blame global oil markets, foreign capital, or geopolitical conflict.Those factors are real, but they do not absolve us of responsibility. If our legal, political and institutional environment were stronger, external shocks would still hurt us, but they would not paralyse us. If our investment climate were clearer, Muzarabani would be advancing more confidently. If our State institutions were more predictable, capital would not fear being trapped in a maze of competing interests. If our policy culture were more professional, we would spend less time explaining delays and more time delivering outcomes.Zimbabwe remains, in many respects, a Garden of Eden with too little irrigation from good governance. The resources are there. The potential is there. The need is there. What is missing is not luck, but coordination; not geology, but execution; not slogans, but seriousness. If we want to escape the cycle of fuel shocks, stalled projects, and missed opportunities, we must stop treating development as a political performance and start treating it as a national project. That means creating conditions in which capital is welcomed, rules are stable, institutions are trusted, and public interest is measured not by who controls the headline, but by what reaches the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans.If we do that, Muzarabani may yet become more than a symbol of promise. It may become a case study in how a country turned potential into production. If we do not, then the basin will remain a metaphor for our national predicament: rich in substance, poor in delivery.Lawrence Makamanzi is an independent researcher and analyst, passionately sharing his insights in a personal capacity. He is reachable at blmakamanzi@gmail.com or 0784318605.