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President Mnangagwa is making full use of the COP26 Summit in Scotland to not just press Zimbabwe’s commitment to arresting climate change and seeking the resources required to do this more quickly, but also to press hard on Zimbabwe’s diplomatic front of restoring and strengthening relations.

In many ways, the re-engagement has grabbed the headlines, with several important interactions, including with United States President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but the two purposes of climate change and friendship offensive are linked, as the President explained in his intervention at the summit. 

Zimbabwe is already one of those countries on the receiving end of global warming, with Southern Africa, never an overwatered region, already getting drier and set to get drier still as global temperatures rise. 

Ten of our last 20 years have seen drought, and while the extra cyclones, with frequency and intensity rising as sea temperatures rise, can bring water, this is dumped over a few hours and causes serious destruction of its own.

So to mitigate the effects of the global warming, and Zimbabwe is not a net contributor since our forests and orchards still absorb more carbon than we emit, a lot of resources are needed, and more resources still are required so that our economic development is pursued with negligible net emissions of carbon. 

So, the problem of financial sanctions needed to be raised as well. 

The damage has been well-documented already with the latest investigation by UN Special Rapporteur Professor Alena Douhan in her 10-day visit at the end of last month simply confirming the damage and quantifying it as even worse than previously estimated. 

Already, the Second Republic is not sitting back, wringing its hands and saying it cannot do anything because of sanctions. We are spending a lot of money, our own money, and putting in a lot of our own scientific and technological expertise into mitigating the effects of the growing intensity and frequency of drought and making sure we can handle the unpredictable strikes by cyclones.

We have changed, over a couple of seasons, the whole way most of our farmers grow their crops so that whatever rain does fall goes a lot further. 

We have a major dam building programme in place so that more and more of that diminishing rain is stored and is available for irrigation, either full irrigation or, more probably for many farmers, supplementary irrigation to start planting earlier and get through dry periods in a rainy season. 

But this is not cheap and with access to more resources we can obviously speed up the programmes, both of dam building and putting in the piping and other equipment so that farmers can use the stored water. 

A lot of other measures, even solar water heating and solar cells on all houses and flat blocks, both in urban and rural areas, will require huge investments. Our rich are already leading the way, but we have very few rich and a lot of poor so all sorts of financial assistance and programmes are needed. So the sanctions that limit seriously our access to global capital, both institutional and private investment, are serious. With full access, we could not only speed up our own already-impressive infrastructure development, but with faster economic growth many of our households could make larger contributions to what they need. 

And if both internal and external investors were able to mobilise for funding they could make larger contributions to manufacturing what is required right here in Zimbabwe.

Fortunately, there appears to be greater willingness to accept President Mnangagwa at his word, and COP26 has already seen important discussions. 

Zimbabwe is not setting any conditions, or sitting on some high horse. 

The President is ready to meet anyone and simply listen to their concerns and speak on what Zimbabwe is doing and how it wants to be reintegrated into global systems. And he does this whether it is a brief get acquainted meeting or a detailed discussion.

The European Union generally has in recent times being moving reasonably fast towards a far more normal set of relationships. 

This will be accelerated now with the comments made by Council of Europe President Charles Michel after meeting the President showing at least a willingness by this critical agenda-setting body to move forward. 

The council does not make legislative or executive decisions, but it groups all EU leaders in a process that helps outline policy directions, and pressing on with the shift to normalising at least financial and trade relations with Zimbabwe, in practice as well as theory, will be helpful, in fact critically important..

Zimbabwe wants to rejoin the Commonwealth. There are advantages in belonging to this body, directly through better access to technology and development programmes and indirectly to having excellent relations with other members. So, the meeting with Commonwealth Secretary General Baroness Scotland was a good sign that our application is not covered with dust in someone’s in-tray. 

And a half-hour private discussion counts as serious, where real issues rather than grandstanding can be dealt with.

Britain, along with the US, was, and in many ways still is, a leader in the sanctions drive. Again there are signs of at least better contact. 

There was a detailed, and again private, set of talks with British Minister of State for Africa Vicky Ford. This minister has real influence in how British foreign affairs with Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular move forward, and while no one is pretending relations are going to be wonderful this week, a lot can be achieved when people do sit down and talk.  Even COP26 host and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at least treated President Mnangagwa civilly and normally, rather than trying to ignore him, a symbolic step. 

And hopefully there can be something more substantive during the visit. Basically, President Mnangagwa is offering his own record since he won elections and came into office. He, and the experts he brought into Government, have been cleaning up the economy and have managed to switch more than a third of our taxes into capital development, so we are paying our own way. 

Systems have been put in place to stop corruption, and those suspected of past corruption are being wheeled before the courts. 

The Government has signed a deal with the farmers who lost land in land reform, so they are paid out for the development they did. 

These reforms are driven by the needs and expectations of Zimbabweans, not foreign pressure. 

So, when we move on our friendship offensive we are showing a well-managed country that simply wants to be on good terms with everyone.  We listen, we explain. We do not lecture. And that friendship offensive, done in that manner, is at least getting us into serious discussions, and the President is being treated seriously in these discussions, generating the goodwill that we all hope will translate into practical deals and action.