Steel is the backbone of structural transformation.

It underpins capital formation in transport, energy, housing and industrial machinery while transmitting productivity gains to a wide constellation of upstream and downstream activities.

Zimbabwe once grasped this logic. For decades Ziscosteel at Redcliff coordinated a dense web of coal, limestone, refractory, rail, engineering and construction linkages and, at its peak in the late 1980s to early 1990s, produced around one million tonnes per.