eBusiness Weekly
Zimbabwean industrialists need to look at building proper heavy industrial sector as the giant steel mills in Chirumhanzu being built by Tsingshan of China continue to take shape with production still scheduled to start in 2024.
And this needs to tie in with a whole lot of other factors, such as the switch to electric vehicles over the next decade, a policy that has gone global and is driven hard by the need to control carbon emissions as well as reduce energy consumption sharply for every kilometre travelled.
Whatever modern economic theories state when it comes to de-emphasising metal bashing industry, developing countries like Zimbabwe need to bash a lot more metal to catch up, although this can and should be done using modern technologies.
There used to be a growing steel-based industrial sector in the Midlands built around what Zisco could produce. There were limits, since Zisco used what are now obsolete production technologies and sometimes quality standards were a bit difficult to meet. This was understandable since quite a bit of both the steel production and the downstream industries were pushed hard in the UDI era, when buying modern new equipment was almost impossible, and then continued in the controlled post-independence economy until everything wore out and broke down, with new investment extremely limited.
Tsingshan is planning an ultramodern steel complex, capable of producing flows of almost any desired steel, and as Zimbabwe mines its own chrome and nickel and Tsingshan already has a major foothold in processing those products needed for alloying. But Tsingshan has also said it will produce sheet steel and quality bar steels, and those are the raw materials for a lot of existing industry, that has to import at the moment, and for new industries that will have a readily available supply of raw materials.
One suggestion, dropped in almost casually, is to gear up for what is called the assembly of electric buses, although a far higher local content that mere assembly is possible if we plan this right.
The urban bus fleet should be moving towards electric vehicles, and Zupco and others should be taking the lead in introducing electric vehicles to Zimbabwe. Very little additional infrastructure is needed for an integrated urban bus fleet, since very few charging points are required.
In fact you can start with just one set in each city at the city bus depot and largely charge overnight if you had to, although it would be relatively simple to have charging points at the major terminuses so that bus drivers could “top up” while parked and waiting for the next trip. But already fairly standard designs allow at least 200km between charges, which while not good enough for intercity travel until a lot more rapid charging points are available, is a usable range for urban transport, where a return journey rarely exceeds 40km and so a full charge can cope with the continuous operation in the morning and late afternoon peaks, with charging in the slower periods during the day.
If the worse came to the worse at the beginning, it would even be possible to have spare battery packs on charge at a depot and switch these for the empties as the buses came in. Some innovative manufacturers are also experimenting with solar panels on the roofs of buses, to provide a continuous trickle charge during daylight. Buses have large roof areas so the concept can work.
But the advent of a steel industry producing a decent range of products, coupled with the existing industrial capacity to make cable and wind motors could allow a lot more local manufacture, rather than just assembly.
- Dahmer and Company once dominated the supply of buses in Zimbabwe. Their AVM buses, some of which are still earning money on the roads, had a large element of local design and local manufacture, although using imported materials. The same concept could be recycled, although with greater local content.
The AVM bus used an exceptionally strong steel chassis, made locally from long bars of high-grade steel imported from Germany but cut and bolted together in Msasa. On top of this was a steel body framework, and to that were attached aluminium panels. The body was not a monocoque bolted to a chassis or having a chassis type reinforcement, but a simpler design. This was required so no pressings were needed for body parts, which also partly explains the aluminium panels since these were easier to work with a bending press and could be shaped by being stressed onto the frame.
While Dahmer obviously used a lot of general bus design, they made adaptations for Zimbabwe and for their own manufacturing methods. For a start ground clearance was bit higher and their buses were longer than most, since the old colonial planners had insisted on wide streets in a grid layout. Dahmer also built for strength.
The old managing director liked to show a picture of one of his buses, grossly overloaded with roof cargo, going through a ford on a gravel rural road at some speed; as he said his chasses never broke.
We could, with local steel sheeting, do something more modern although remembering a bolted body, rather than a welded body, has advantages for maintenance. The old R4 car had such a body which is why taxi companies adored it, since a dent could be fixed in a an hour if you had some spare ready-painted panels, often salvaged from scrapped cars. Panel beating could be done at leisure to restore the spares inventory.
But the number of different types of panels on a bus is limited if you are doing pressings, so the tooling up is a lot less dramatic and could well be viable in a small country like Zimbabwe, especially if the company licensing the designs was prepared to make design changes to suit local conditions and local manufacturing, which it might well wish to in order to get the export markets within the African Continental Free Trade Area. We already see on our roads what a smart South African company has been able to do with body designs on a range of heavy duty chasses and power trains.
One interesting point when it comes to electric vehicles is the far greater simplicity of the power train, starting with the two facts that an electric motor is easier to build than a diesel engine and such a vehicle has no gear box. We can make the copper windings for the motors in Zimbabwe and wind them, since we do that already.
Even the shafts could be machined locally from the right sort of steel, since the computer guided machine tools these days can be bought and operated one at a time; you now need what is basically an advanced PC to guide the cutting tool, rather than a laundromat mainframe, so with the right software you can have a lot of flexibility and an operation that can encompass anything from one lathe all the way up to a huge hall of the things.
There would still be range of imported parts, especially in the control systems, and royalties would be charged for design and software. And the batteries would be imported. But the imported content by value would be a lot lower than buying made-up buses for a design that, while good, perhaps does not fit all Zimbabwean roads and needs.
This is just one new industry that could be re-established fairly quickly with moderate investment and could be expanded to trucks relatively simply, since so many parts are identical. Buses and trucks are designed for function more than cosmetic exterior looks and body shapes tend to remain in production for many years since buyers only replace when the vehicle wears out, and a selling point is to allow that to be postponed as long as possible, rather than to have something your friends at the gold club assemble to admire as the new look.
One point when looking at import substitution is the running costs, and electric vehicles can use Zimbabwean fuel. Even if we had to use coal stations to generate the electricity, carbon emissions would be sharply reduced. Internal combustion engines are notoriously inefficient when compared to electric motors, using about three times as much energy if they are really good and four times as much more often. Thermal stations, at least the modern designs and especially if they are properly operated for base load rather than switched on and off frequently, are again highly efficient at converting coal to energy.
But Zimbabwe does have the option of boosting electricity output with solar, coupled with hydro stations that are larger than the pure river flow would require, so lakes could, in effect, be the batteries that store water during the day by not using much when the sun is shining and then going flat out all night.
This possibility of building a proper vehicle industry once the steel mills are operating is just one of the new industries that can be opened up. And over the next three years we should be thinking of the possibilities that will be made available, rather than just converting imports to local steel products but not expanding what we have.
