Zimbabwe’s Manhize SEZ Wants 300 Companies Around Its Steel Plant

Dinson Iron and Steel is trying to turn its 800-hectare special economic zone at Manhize into more than a steel plant.

Officials say the park could eventually hold more than 300 companies, most of them set up to take the steel and by-products coming out of the mill and turn them into finished goods. Wilfred Motsi, the company’s chief operations officer, put it this way: Zimbabwe has talked for years about its minerals. The real question is how many factories get built, what those factories make, and how many people get hired.

The zone is supposed to answer that. Downstream work is already on the table—fabrication, roofing sheets, pipes, nails, and products made from slag and ash. The government has said more than 300 firms have expressed interest. The plant is now producing about 600,000 tonnes of carbon steel a year.

Motsi expects that figure to rise toward two million tonnes. The lineup already includes pig iron, billets, rebar and wire rod. The company is also moving ahead with mill balls and other gear that mines have long imported. Logistics are starting to catch up. On Monday the National Railways of Zimbabwe and Grand Railway Solutions, a Dinson Group unit, signed a deal to build a roughly 54-kilometre rail link from Manhize to Mvuma, fix the Mvuma-Gweru stretch, and put locomotives and wagons on the line.

The Manhize-Mvuma section alone is pegged at about $125 million. The goal is to haul coal and coke in from Hwange and ship finished steel out to local and export markets. For any manufacturers that set up inside the zone, that rail connection could matter as much as the steel next door. DISCO says it already buys about 90 percent of its raw materials inside Zimbabwe. It runs a 50-megawatt thermal plant and is recovering waste heat from the blast furnace to generate more power.

Taken together, the project looks less like a single mill and more like an industrial cluster—mining, steelmaking, fabrication, power and transport feeding off one another. Whether 300 factories actually open is another matter. Interest is easy; signed leases, local contracts and real output are harder. For Zimbabwe’s industrial push, the test will be how much value stays on the ground, how many jobs stick, and how tightly the steel complex links into the rest of the country’s mining and manufacturing base. The rail work now under way is one concrete step./.