Opinion: Bulawayo Doesn’t Need a Saviour. It Needs Trust.

Every five years, a new wave of politicians arrives in Bulawayo waving flags and promising revival. Roads will be tarred. Factories will reopen. Water will run. Five years later, the same potholes have grown deeper, the same factories sit empty, and the same taps run dry.

Bulawayo does not have a hardware problem. It has a trust problem. Investors, residents and even its own diaspora hesitate to commit to long-term projects because they do not believe institutions will honour agreements over time. That is the real bottleneck.

Trust is unglamorous. It does not unveil ribbons. It does not generate photo opportunities. It is built quietly, over decades, by institutions that do small things consistently — collecting refuse on time, paying contractors on time, answering letters.

Until that boring infrastructure is rebuilt, no amount of summit speeches will move the needle. Bulawayo is ready to work. It is waiting to be trusted.