Returning to Zimbabwe After 25 Years: What Has Actually Changed?

A return after decades is not a neutral comparison. Memory freezes a country at the point of departure, while the country itself keeps changing unevenly. The KJR return audit therefore avoids the simple question “Is Zimbabwe better or worse?” and instead compares systems.

Some changes are unmistakably modernizing. Airports, border infrastructure, power projects, digital services, retail environments and private construction can look substantially different from the Zimbabwe remembered by someone who left in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

At the same time, other systems have weakened. Rail mobility, parts of the road network, municipal services and legacy industrial capacity can reveal a different trajectory. A household may therefore experience improvement and decline in the same day: better connectivity, a newer airport and digital payments alongside a water tank, solar backup and a damaged public road.

That mixed picture is analytically more useful than nostalgia. It shows where the state has delivered large capital projects, where households have privately substituted for unreliable services, and where older public systems have not recovered.

For a returning diaspora household, the practical task is to update assumptions. The country may be more digitally connected and commercially adaptive than memory suggests, while still requiring more self-provisioning for utilities and transport than the returnee expects.