harare Zimbabwe is benefitting from lucrative business deals with China, with the Asian giant becoming the biggest injector of foreign direct investment (FDI) in this southern African country. The Zimbabwe Investment Authority approved 929 million U.S. dollars of FDI in 2015 with more than half of it from China. “We would want to see them invest more in value addition and more on technology transfer and share more of their knowledge and expertise with local business people,” ZIA spokesperson Nixon Kanyemba told Xinhua Friday. “During the past couple of years alone we have seen the Chinese taking a keen interest in Zimbabwe’s agriculture, energy and tourism sectors,” said Joseph Ngwawi, head of the Regional Economic Development Institute at the Southern Africa Research and Documentation Center. “We are bringing about $30 million per month into Zimbabwe. China has become the largest source of foreign currency in Zimbabwe,” the Financial Gazette, a Zimbabwe-based weekly English newspaper quoted Xing Shanshan, vice secretary-general of the Chinese Federation of Zimbabwe as saying. Among the largest foreign importers is Chinese tobacco company Tianze, which helped revive the country’s tobacco output which had plummeted to a low of 48 million kilograms in 2008. Since inception, the company has injected $40 million annually in interest free loans and subsidized inputs, in addition to free technical support, training and other services to its contracted farmers. Xinhua.
