Zimbabwe’s economy has grown a great deal over the past year. A lot of that growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has happened in the economy. But some of it has also happened in speeches and spreadsheets.
At the recent ZANU PF conference, President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube had a new figure for Zimbabwe’s GDP. We are now at US$66 billion, which Ncube pointed out to delegates means that “the economy is now more than twice as big as in 2017”.
Here is how the official number has moved around over the past year.
July 2025. Cabinet unveils ZimStat’s Economic Census results. GDP is revised to ZiG168.5 trillion, or US$44.4 billion, up from US$35.2 billion. Zimbabwe becomes the fifth-largest economy in SADC, it was said. That economic census, it was said, captured “a larger number of business entities that have emerged since 2019”, the last time Zimbabwe updated its GDP base year.
October 2025: Ncube tells the ZANU PF conference that the economy will reach US$52.3 billion in 2025. That is bigger than Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique, he notes.
November 2025. The 2026 Budget settles on these figures: US$52.4 billion for 2025, US$45.7 billion for 2024, US$44.5 billion for 2023
June 2026. ZimStat rebases again, this time to 2025, to include economic activities that had previously not been considered. GDP for 2025 is now about US$59.7 billion. Seven months earlier, Treasury had 2024 GDP at US$45.7 billion.
October 2026: Energy Minister July Moyo, at the signing ceremony for a 100MW solar project, had his own GDP measure, saying: “If we’re going to expand this economy to US$45 billion, electricity supply must grow exponentially…”
And the US$66 billion?
The number has history. In 2023, a UK research outfit, World Economics, estimated Zimbabwe’s GDP at US$66 billion. That was a purchasing-power-parity figure, topped up with the firm’s own estimate of the vast informal economy. State officials and media celebrated it, before leaning back to other figures. The same firm rated Zimbabwe’s GDP data “E”, meaning unusable for serious decision-making. That part got less airtime.
What do others think?
Afreximbank, in its latest Zimbabwe report, says “Zimbabwe is a mid-sized economy, with nominal GDP forecast at US$52.9 billion in 2026 and US$56 billion in 2027.” The World Bank puts Zimbabwe’s 2025 GDP at US$51.2 billion, while the IMF projects US$56.7 billion for 2026.
The economy may well be bigger than we thought, and growth may well be real. But officials just need to figure out how to settle on one figure and let it rest.
