Homelink Zimbabwe Disaster

Homelink is a concept that developed into a fully-pledged project engineered by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) at the height of the Zimbabwe crisis. The project was in essence an out-reach to Zimbabweans living abroad to invest home. Its main thrust was facilitating money transfer and investment needs of Zimbabweans living abroad. The company legally known as Homelink (Pvt) Ltd was wholly owned by the reserve bank and launched on the 2nd of February 2005 in Harare.

For a period of time Gideon Gono [pictured] the Reserve bank of Zimbabwe Governor from 2003 onwards was not on the EU and American targeted travel sanctions list. This allowed him and an entourage of RBZ staff to carry out whirlwind tours promoting the project across the world in places where Zimbabweans were highly concentrated. These places would include the UK, the USA and South Africa. The RBZ undertook the tours in phases spending millions of United States Dollars and publishing video and thick news paper supplements of the tour.

The company set-up a call centre at Hardwick House along Samora Machel Avenue in Harare which operated seven (7) days a week to make it possible for Zimbabweans abroad in different time zones in the world to contact the call centre.

The RBZ saw the homelink project as an effective way of raising much needed foreign currency for the cash trapped government of Zimbabwe. Thousands of Zimbabweans participated in the project through which the RBZ acquired tracts of land in cities in Zimbabwe on behalf of those abroad in order to build houses.

The government racked in millions of United States Dollars. Most of its clients abroad complained the buildings built in their absence were of a great sub-standard. Today some of the houses have been allocated to Zimbabwe military personnel after a fall-out with the RBZ. For instance in Harare, up to 120 houses were built in the Wesgate surburb.

In general the disastrous failure of the Homelink initiative was predictable. The government of Zimbabwe is remarkably known for failing to follow-through on key capital projects including infrastructural development.

Apart from building homes, homelink also facilitated transfer of remittances by Zimbabweans abroad to friends and relatives at home. It is widely believed that the Zimbabwe economy before the world wide economic recession of 2008 and 2009 heavily survived on money sent from overseas by fellow Zimbabweans. The RBZ opened facilities across the country and recruited full-time staff to run the homelink project.