Manduna, Kennedy2024-09-192024-09-192022Manduna, Kennedy. (2022). Overpromising and underdelivering: Zimbabwe’s extractive industry indigenisation and uneven development [PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WireDSpace.https://hdl.handle.net/10539/40964https://hdl.handle.net/10539/40964A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Johannesburg 2022Uneven development has characterised Zimbabwe’s political economy landscape since the initial days of conquest to the present. Foreign-owned corporations and non-indigenous citizens have commanded the economy from the colonial era to the present, leaving the indigenous majority outside the mainstream economy. Zimbabwe’s indigenisation programme is a strategic policy choice responding directly to this widespread unevenness. The purpose of this explanatory study was to examine the structural and contextual factors accounting for extractive industry indigenisation underdelivering upon implementation. Findings show that extractive industry indigenisation’s implementation processes, mainly through Community Share Ownership Trusts (CSOTs), are producing largely disempowering outcomes for communities involved. These include the failure to address the uneven development problem in the mining sector, which is fuelling the persistence of uneven development. Findings further show that although the extractive industry indigenisation, may, in some instances, result in the restructuring of non- indigenous private mining capital, this is not correspondingly ‘empowering’ the disadvantaged indigenous citizens and their communities. Findings of this show that the following factors explain why extractive industry indigenisation perpetuated and maintained uneven development (i.e. in terms of scale, geography, income and wealth): (a) widespread cases of fronting; (b) except the Gwanda CSOT, all CSOTs did not get shares in the foreign mining companies, only seed capital/pledges/donations that are to this day yet to be paid in full; (c) widespread incapacitation (i.e. in terms of financial, human and managerial skills) and corruption in the CSOTs; (d) the security sector companies that got 50% equity in diamond companies operating Chiadzwa are not spreading the wealth around; and (e) the Finance Act of 2018 (No. 13 of 2018) made it optional for the qualifying companies to continue funding (as well as honouring the pledged amounts in full) the CSOTs. The combination of these factors results in further impoverishment of the disadvantaged indigenous people and their communitiesen© 2022 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.uneven developmentIndigenisationIndigeneityExtractive industryZimbabweCommunity share ownership trustsExtractive industry indigenisationMining capitalismUCTDSDG-16: Peace, justice and strong institutionsThesisUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg