Editorial Comment: TICAD, a boundless opportunity for Zim President Mnangagwa

PRESIDENT Mnangagwa is among global leaders, investors, development partners and civil society leaders attending the 7th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), which opened in Yokohama, Japan, on Wednesday.

The nation’s hopes are high that the President will cut mega deals and cooperation agreements for the country, having reportedly gone into high-level closed-door meetings soon after his arrival in the Japanese Capital, Tokyo, on Tuesday.

It was expected the President would have a packed schedule that includes meetings with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Emperor of Japan; His Majesty Naruhito, and top business leaders.

The two countries already enjoy cordial relations and cooperation in the field of development assistance, investment, trade, technical assistance and cultural ties.

Amid an intensifying race among the powerful global economic powers to expand their presence in Africa’s rapidly growing economies, Zimbabwe is ably represented at the highest level to tap cooperation opportunities at TICAD, which Japan as a country can present through stronger bilateral ties, investments and development assistance.

Japan’s poor natural endowment has made the country dependent on international markets for natural resources, which Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, have in unfathomable proportions and should seek to capitalise on.

TICAD is a huge opportunity for Zimbabwe and here is why. In 2017, Japan exported US$7,5 billion in goods to Africa, one third of it to South Africa. In the same year, Japan imported US$8,3bn from Africa, from which 57 percent were South African goods.

Most of what Japan imports from South Africa are platinum and iron ore, Japan mostly exports vehicles to South Africa. There is a striking similarity between the composition of Tokyo and Pretoria’s trade and Harare and Japan’s. While South Africa is the world’s largest producer of platinum, Zimbabwe comes third after Russia and holds the second biggest known deposits after its neighbour (South Africa).

Harare also has some of the richest iron ore deposits in the world, estimated at over 32 billion tonnes.

On the strength of this, there is no reason why Zimbabwe cannot leverage its natural resources to significantly grow economic and trade relations with Japan and we expect TICAD to provide the perfect platform to pursue this trade, economic and cooperation agenda with Japan.

Energy and mining are certainly the two sectors that attract most of Japanese investment in Africa. As such, securing multiple sources of raw material, in the form of mineral resources and fuel for power generation, form the core of the economic dimension of Japanese foreign policy on the continent.

And so, just like South Africa, Zimbabwe should seek agreements on bilateral cooperation in a number of areas across the mining value chain, which includes skills development, decreasing the environmental impact of mining and research and development in technology.

Japan is also engaged in projects in power generation and distribution across Africa.

Given the energy and power situation in Zimbabwe, TICAD comes at an opportune time for Harare.

Japanese-backed infrastructural projects are found across most of the continent including Uganda, (power transmission), Tanzania (power), Botswana, Nigeria (power), Kenya (logistics infrastructure) and Mozambique (railway), among others, which are areas of huge interest to Zimbabwe.

Without doubt, Zimbabwe should also pursue cooperation under the African Business Education Initiative for Youth (ABE), which provides education and training to African foremen, plant managers, worksite leaders and student engineers, while business executives will receive training in Japan.

But Japan is much more than that; the Asian country is one of the most industrialised nations in the world with expertise in cutting edge science and industrial technology as well as information communication technologies, which Zimbabwe needs and must acquire and internalise.

Additionally, TICAD provides Zimbabwe, a more direct opportunity to seek increased cooperation in the field of knowledge and intellectual property.

Also, the experience of Japan in economic modernisation reveals that the country successfully pursued three strategies, diversification, domestication and indigenisation among others, a template Zimbabwe can borrow.

After nearly two decades of economic meltdown, Zimbabwe can surely learn so much about economic remodelling, coping from the way that Japan did it after the devastation of Second World War, which decimated many facets of the world’s third and Asia’s second biggest economy.

Zimbabwe must also capitalise on Tokyo’s concerns about spreading influence of other global powers, highlighted by the intensifying race on the continent among global powers, including Japan, China and Russia.

Zimbabwe must seize the opportunity at TICAD, given it will be among fastest growing economies in the next few years.

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