ON April 26, 2026, state media reported that President Emmerson Mnangagwa had directed the government to begin removing all trade barriers with countries in the Southern African Development Community (Sadc).
It is a bold statement. It is also one Zimbabweans have heard before. Before asking whether it will happen this time, it is worth asking something more basic: what is a trade barrier, why does Zimbabwe have them, and what would actually change if they went away?
A trade barrier is anything that makes it more expensive or more complicated to bring goods across a border. The most familiar type is a tariff, which is simply a tax charged on imported goods the moment they enter the country.
Import a bag of fertiliser from South Africa and the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) charges you a duty before it clears customs. Non-tariff barriers are less visible but just as real: slow customs procedures, crumbling road infrastructure, duplicate inspections at the border gate, and inconsistent regulations that change without notice. All of them add cost and time to every shipment, even when no formal tax is charged.
Zimbabwe did not put these barriers in place by accident. Tariffs serve three purposes that any honest analysis has to acknowledge. They protect local industry by making imported goods more expensive than locally-made ones, which gives Zimbabwean manufacturers a fighting chance against better-resourced foreign competitors.
They generate government revenue, because customs duty is collected in hard cash at the border the moment a truck rolls through, making it one of Zimra’s most predictable income streams. And they function as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations, giving Zimbabwe something to offer when it wants better access to other countries’ markets. Strip them away and you lose all three levers at once.
Now for the numbers, because they are the part of this story that never quite makes it into the press conference. According to the Zimbabwe Sadc Trade Brief published by ZimTrade, Zimbabwe’s imports from Sadc reached US$4,51 billion in 2023, up from US$3,15 billion in 2014. That is an 87 percent increase in a decade.
Against Zimbabwe’s total import bill of US$9,5 billion in 2024, as recorded by the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, Sadc accounts for roughly half of everything the country buys from abroad. Half. And within that, one country does most of the heavy lifting.
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South Africa supplies 78 percent of Zimbabwe’s Sadc imports, according to the ZimTrade brief. ZimStat’s December 2025 trade data shows South Africa delivered US$349,8 million worth of goods in that single month alone, representing 38,8 percent of all imports for the period.
So, when the government talks about removing Sadc trade barriers, what it is really describing in practical terms is opening the door wider to South Africa. Everything else is rounding.
What is coming through that door matters enormously. Zimbabwe is not importing champagne and luxury cars from its southern neighbour. It is importing the foundations of its economy.
The ZimTrade data shows that in 2023, Zimbabwe brought in US$572 million worth of machinery and mechanical appliances from Sadc, US$535 million in mineral fuels and oils, US$280 million in cereals, US$260 million in fertilisers, US$245 million in vehicles and parts, US$218 million in electrical machinery, US$213 million in plastics, US$182 million in iron and steel, and US$171 million in animal and vegetable fats and oils.
These are not discretionary purchases. Farmers need the fertiliser to grow food. Factories need the machinery and steel to produce anything at all. Everyone needs the fuel. The country cannot yet produce enough of these domestically, which is precisely why it is buying them at scale from across the Limpopo.
This creates the central tension in the government’s announcement. If tariffs on these goods are removed, they become cheaper at the point of import. Lower costs for businesses, lower prices at the till, more competitive inputs for agriculture. That is the upside, and it is real. But every dollar’s worth of goods that crosses without attracting duty is a dollar that does not reach Zimra’s accounts. And Zimra’s accounts are not in a position to absorb large shocks.
Zimra’s 2024 Annual Report shows the authority collected ZiG116,47 billion in total revenue, surpassing its target by 10,26 percent. VAT on local sales was the biggest contributor at 31,21 percent of collections, followed by Pay As You Earn income tax at 19,38 percent. Customs duty is a separate but significant line, and it is the one most directly exposed by this policy.
Zimbabwe currently applies a 25 percent surtax on many imported categories even from Sadc and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa members, on top of standard customs duty, with VAT at 15 percent charged on all imports in addition.
Apply even a conservative effective duty rate across US$4,5 billion of annual Sadc imports and the revenue at stake runs into several hundred million US dollars a year. The government’s 2025 revenue target was set at US$7,155 billion. Tearing a hole worth hundreds of millions out of that figure, without explaining what fills the gap, is not a trade policy. It is a wish.
And then there is what happens to domestic industry. Right now, Zimbabwean manufacturers of plastics, cement, clothing, and steel products survive in part because imported equivalents are made more expensive by tariffs. Remove that protection and South African products, produced with better electricity, deeper capital markets, larger factories, and lower input costs across the board, will undercut them on price in their own home market.
Some local businesses will close. Jobs will follow them out the door. This is not a theoretical risk. A 2021 academic study on Zimbabwe’s Sadc trade integration found that Zimbabwe’s trade balance deteriorated steadily from 2009 to 2016 even within the existing Sadc Free Trade Area framework, because there were no sectoral strategies, no comparative advantage analysis, and no coordination between the ministries responsible for trade and industry. The framework existed. The implementation did not.
Zimbabwe’s export profile makes this worse. The ZimTrade brief shows the country mainly sells minerals (35 percent), building materials (11 percent), tobacco (7 percent), and coal (7 percent) to Sadc partners. These are largely unprocessed raw materials.
Sadc is not buying Zimbabwean-manufactured goods at any meaningful scale. Removing import barriers does not change Zimbabwe’s export mix overnight. What it does is accelerate the flow of South African finished goods into a market that cannot currently compete with them on equal terms. That widens the trade deficit, which ZimStat already put at US$2,1 billion for the full year 2024, driven largely by rising grain and fuel imports.
None of this means free trade with Sadc is the wrong destination. It means the sequencing matters as much as the destination itself. For the announcement to mean anything, Zimbabwe would first need reliable electricity, which is the single biggest cost disadvantage local manufacturers carry against their South African competitors.
It would need a credible plan, written down with actual numbers, for replacing customs revenue. And it would need to invest seriously in the sectors where it has genuine competitive advantages: horticulture, processed food, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and digital services, all identified by the ZimTrade brief as having real export potential in the regional market.
Instead, what was announced at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair on April 25, 2026 was a directive, delivered on the sidelines of a business forum, relayed through a permanent secretary, with no timeline, no fiscal impact assessment, and no implementation roadmap.
The state media article quotes ambassador Albert Chimbindi saying the delays at border posts “should be things of the past”. He is right. But so was the minister who said something nearly identical in August 2021. And the bilateral commission that pledged the same with Botswana. The barriers are still there.
Zimbabwe’s dependence on Sadc imports is structural, deep, and growing. South Africa alone supplies more than a third of everything the country buys from abroad, most of it machinery, fuel, food, and fertiliser that Zimbabwe cannot yet make at home.
Cheaper imports would genuinely benefit consumers and the businesses buying those inputs. But removing the tariffs that generate several hundred million dollars of government revenue, without a plan to replace them, while exposing domestic industries to competition they are structurally unable to match, is not a bold economic reform. It looks very much like the same announcement, made again, hoping that this time nobody checks what happened the last three times.
Muhamba is a business analyst, market researcher and the AMH Group chair’s executive assistant. — [email protected]
