Bulawayo- For decades, the story of Bulawayo was told in the past tense. The factories that once earned the city its reputation as Zimbabwe’s industrial heartland stood half-empty, their machines silent, their gates padlocked.

Generations of school-leavers watched their parents’ workplaces shrink, then close, then vanish altogether. The city that once hummed with the rhythm of production seemed to be waiting for something — or someone — to bring it back to life.

That something, it appears, is now arriving. Three major industrial projects — the new ZITF Fairgrounds Shopping Mall, the Shumba Group’s manufacturing operations and the Fats and Feed Plant’s expanding cooking oil facility — are set to create over 400 jobs, with employment for locals already under way. For a city bruised by years of deindustrialisation and idleness for local communities, the numbers matter. But it is the names behind the numbers that tell the real story of devolution.

For Thabani Moyo, a 34 year old father of three from Nkulumane, the industrialisation agenda is no longer a story on paper. For six years he survived on piecework, painting, tiling, fixing a gate here, a door there, never knowing on Monday whether he would have work by Friday.

Today he is part of the construction team putting up the ZITF Fairgrounds Shopping Mall, a project he describes as the first time in his adult life he has been able to plan beyond the next week.

“I used to leave home at dawn to look for jobs at the industrial sites,” he says. “Now I leave home at dawn to go to my job. There is a difference, even if the hour is the same.”

His wages, modest as they are, now cover school fees and a monthly grocery run without the humiliating arithmetic of borrowing. “My children ask me what I do. I tell them I am building a shop. One day they will walk into it and know their father helped put it there.”

That is what devolution looks like when it stops being a policy document and starts being a pay slip. The government’s industrialisation agenda, delivered through local projects rather than distant pronouncements, is beginning to reshape the fortunes of ordinary Bulawayo families.

The ZITF Fairgrounds Shopping Mall, expected to be completed in the coming months, has already created employment for locals, a phrase that sounds bureaucratic until you attach a face to it.

Shumba Group offers another such face. Based in Bulawayo and specialising in animal health, environment and fumigation products, the company was established in 1982 and has grown into a brand to reckon with, penetrating regional and international markets. The government, notably, is its biggest trade partner.

But the group’s significance lies as much in what it does for the city as in what it sells. It employs local people, trains them, and keeps their skills in Bulawayo rather than watching them migrate to Harare or Johannesburg in search of opportunity.

Fats and Feed Plant, a cooking oil giant with a perfect spot in Zimbabwe’s food and supply chain, is currently expanding its plant and factory centre in Bulawayo — a move that will boost the country’s local content products while creating jobs through enhanced sustainability and industrial symbiosis.

For workers there, the expansion is not an abstract economic concept but a promise of continuity: more shifts, more training, more reason for young people to build lives in the city rather than abandon it.

Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Dr Zhemu Soda said the rescuscitation of industries were in line with the country’s Vision 2030 which aimed at attaining an upper middle-income economy status.

“What we have seen today is encouraging. Industry in Bulawayo is being revived. These projects show that we are on the right path towards Vision 2030. The Second Republic is committed to re-industrialising Bulawayo,” he said.

The impact on local communities extends beyond individual households. When people are employed, they spend — at the market, at the hardware store, at the tuckshop on the corner. Local suppliers to the three projects find steady demand for materials, transport and services.

The multiplier effect ripples outward, touching small traders who may never set foot inside a factory but whose livelihoods depend on the wages earned there. This is industrial symbiosis in its most human form: a city beginning to feed itself again.

There is also the quieter, deeper impact — the restoration of dignity and the recalibration of expectation. In a community where unemployment has been the norm for a generation, a steady job is not merely income; it is identity, structure and hope.

Parents who once counselled their children to leave Bulawayo now speak of opportunities at home. Young people who saw no future in technical trades are reconsidering apprenticeships.

None of this means the work is finished. Four hundred jobs will not absorb the city’s unemployed thousands, and the projects must be sustained, expanded and replicated. But devolution was never promised as a single dramatic rescue; it was promised as a transfer of initiative — decisions and resources flowing to the places where people actually live. What Bulawayo is witnessing is the first proof that this promise can be kept.

The machines are beginning to hum again, and this time the story of Bulawayo is being told in the present tense.

At the just-concluded 2027 National Pre-Budget Seminar in Bulawayo, Clemence Chiduwa, Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Industry and Commerce, urged government to invest in industry and local production.

He said: “The 2027 Budget should strengthen local production, reduce avoidable costs, protect fair competition and give businesses the certainty to invest, employ and export. In the automotive sector there is need for government to prioritise local assemblers.”

For Moyo, and for hundreds like him, the industrialisation agenda has a simple meaning: he now leaves home at dawn to go to work, not to look for it. That, more than any policy document, is how devolution is measured — one job, one family, one city at a time.