I want to write today, on Independence Day, to the Zimbabweans reading this who are also founders. There is a particular weight that founders in this country carry, and it deserves to be named rather than ignored. The standard public discourse about independence sits at one of two poles. The first pole is celebratory, treating 1980 as a finished achievement to be commemorated. The second pole is despairing, treating the country as an irredeemable case to be written off or escaped from. Neither pole is honest, and neither serves the founder who is trying to build something that lasts on Zimbabwean soil.
I want to argue for a third position, and I want to argue for it specifically because founders are uniquely positioned to take it.
The achievement and its limits
Independence gave us a country. It is worth remembering what that meant in 1980, and to whom, and at what cost. The colonial state was a deliberate construction designed to extract value from this land for the benefit of a small population, with most of the people who lived here treated as inputs rather than citizens. The end of that arrangement, in legal terms, was a real and important achievement. The constitutional and legal infrastructure that followed, however imperfect, was built on a premise that this is our country, and that the people of this country have rights that the state must respect.
That premise is what is being eroded today, and the erosion is the centre of why the post-independence project feels unfinished. The state has not fully delivered on the promise of 1980. The economy has not delivered on the broader promise of African post-colonial possibility. The legal infrastructure that was supposed to protect the rights of citizens has been steadily weakened by amendments that consolidate executive power and narrow the ground on which citizens can challenge that consolidation. We are living through one such amendment cycle now, and the founders reading this know it whether or not they have read the bill.
It would be dishonest to celebrate Independence Day without naming this. It would also be dishonest to use the naming as a reason to give up. Both moves, the celebratory and the despairing, let the founder off the hook. The honest position is harder, and it is the position I want to argue for.
The founder’s particular stake
Founders in Zimbabwe carry a particular share of the unfinished independence project, and I want to be specific about why.
The first reason is that founders are the people who are trying to build the institutions that the country actually needs and that the state has been unable or unwilling to build itself. Every Zimbabwean founder running a venture that produces real value, employs real people, pays real taxes, and operates with integrity is part of the institutional infrastructure of the country. This is not a romantic claim. It is an accurate description of what private-sector institution-building does in a state where public-sector institution-building has stalled. The founders who go on to build Stay-Up phase ventures, ventures that survive their founders and outlast the political cycles, are quietly building the country in ways the political class has consistently failed to do.
The second reason is that founders are the people for whom the country’s instability is not an abstraction. The currency volatility hits the venture’s books. The regulatory uncertainty hits the licensing pipeline. The political instability hits the ability to attract foreign capital, retain talent, and plan beyond the current quarter. Founders cannot retreat into the comfortable distance that allows the diaspora to comment without consequence or that allows the politically connected to live above the worst of the conditions. The founder lives inside the country’s problems, and the venture’s survival depends on solving them, at least to the degree of finding workable paths around them.
The third reason is that founders, by the structure of what they do, accumulate exactly the kind of practical knowledge that the country needs to develop. The founder who has built a payments network across three African jurisdictions knows things about cross-border infrastructure that no government white paper captures. The founder who has hired and retained talent in a hyperinflationary environment knows things about compensation and culture that no business school teaches. The founder who has navigated the regulatory thicket knows things about the gap between policy intent and operational reality that policymakers themselves often do not know. This knowledge is a public good that founders produce as a byproduct of building their ventures, and it is the kind of knowledge the country desperately needs.
What the founder owes, and what the founder does not
I want to be careful here, because there is a temptation in this kind of writing to overload founders with civic responsibilities they did not sign up for and cannot reasonably carry. That is not the argument I am making.
What founders owe is something narrower and more demanding. Founders owe the country the work of building ventures with the integrity and rigor required to produce institutions, not just transactions. This means resisting the easy temptation of the corner-cut, the bribe paid, the regulatory workaround that solves today’s problem at the cost of tomorrow’s institutional health. It means building governance infrastructure that holds, paying taxes correctly even when nobody is watching, treating employees as citizens rather than inputs, and competing on the basis of actual value rather than on connections. It means, when the time comes, training successors, sharing what has been learned, and refusing the option of becoming the irreplaceable centre of an organisation that cannot survive without one person. The founders who do this build ventures that, taken together, are the country’s institutional infrastructure in waiting.
What founders do not owe is the responsibility to fix the political dimension of the country’s challenges by themselves. That is the work of citizens collectively, of civic organisations, of journalists, of lawyers and judges. Founders are citizens too and can participate in those structures, but the venture is not the political instrument. Conflating the two is how founders burn out, lose focus, or become caricatures of themselves. The discipline is to build the venture with full integrity, to participate in civic life as a citizen with the same integrity, and to refuse the assumption that one must substitute for the other.
The long game
The Zimbabwean founder’s position requires a longer time horizon than most founder writing assumes. The Silicon Valley vocabulary of fast iteration, twelve-month milestones, and quick exits does not map cleanly onto a market where the operating environment may not stabilise for a decade. Founders here are playing a longer game. The ventures that will matter most in twenty years are not necessarily the ones that look most impressive today. They are the ones that survive, that institutionalise, that become difficult to dislodge precisely because they have been built carefully on terrain that punishes carelessness.
The Sprouting Curve framework I have written about elsewhere is directly relevant. In an unstable economy, the early years produce more learning than revenue, and the learning compounds in ways that competitors and entrants cannot replicate. The founder who treats the difficult years as the constitutive years of the venture, rather than as misfortune to be endured until conditions improve, is the founder who builds a venture that survives the cycles. The founder who waits for stability before truly committing builds nothing, because the stability does not arrive on the timescale a venture can afford to wait for it.
Independence as ongoing work
If you are a founder reading this on Independence Day, the most useful frame is this: independence is not an event that happened in 1980. Independence is the ongoing work of building a country that delivers on the promise of self-determination, and that work is unfinished, and your venture is part of how it gets finished, whether or not you signed up for that role.
This is not a heavy weight if you carry it correctly. It does not require additional civic activity beyond what you already do as a citizen. It requires only that you take the venture you are building seriously as institutional work, and that you build it with the rigor and integrity that institutional work demands. The country needs ventures that last. The country needs founders who refuse to become caricatures of either the despairing diaspora cynic or the politically connected operator. The country needs the slow, patient, decade-scale work of building things that hold.
That is the founder’s contribution to the unfinished independence project. It is not the only contribution that matters, and it is not a substitute for the political work that other Zimbabweans are doing. But it is real, and it is ours, and it is what we are positioned to do better than any other group of citizens.
To my fellow founders: keep building. Build with integrity. Build for the long horizon. The country we want is the country we are building, one venture at a time, on terrain that punishes carelessness and rewards persistence. The Stay-Up phase, in this country, is the institution-building phase. That is the work in front of us.
Happy Independence Day.
Tirivashe Mundondo writes from Sandton and Harare. For the framework that underlies how he thinks about long-horizon venture building, see The Sprouting Curve.
