By Justin Mahlahla, Deputy Director, Communication and Advocacy, Ministry of Skills Audit and Development
The road into Plumtree carries a different kind of traffic these days. Buses idle at the border post, engines ticking as they cool and off them step Zimbabweans who left with nothing but a plan and are returning with something more valuable – experience. Welders who worked the industries of South Africa. Caregivers who ran households in Gauteng. Artisans, mechanics, hospitality workers, farm supervisors, boiler operators. They are coming home. And for the first time in a long while, there is a table set up specifically to ask them what they know, rather than simply to stamp their passports and wave them through.
That table belongs to the Ministry of Skills Audit and Development.
MoSAD has deployed a dedicated team to Plumtree Border Post, one of the country’s busiest re-entry points and a natural gathering place for returnees moving back from South Africa and Botswana. Led by Acting Deputy Director ICT, Taona Hlupo, the team’s brief is simple to state and demanding to execute: identify the skills walking back into Zimbabwe, register them and begin connecting them to where the nation needs them most.
This is not a passive counter. It is an active registration exercise, asking each returnee what they trained in, what they practiced, what certificates or informal apprenticeships shaped their trade, and where in Zimbabwe they intend to settle. It is the practical, ground-level expression of a philosophy of the nation, one that the Ministry has carried through its work: Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo (The nation is built by its own people). A returning welder is not a statistic on a migration report. He is a skill set the country spent years watching leave and can no longer afford to waste.
Recognising that reception matters as much as registration, MoSAD has asked District Development Coordinators (DDCs) to engage local communities directly, preparing the ground for returnees to be received well rather than viewed with suspicion or indifference. A returnee’s first weeks back shape whether that skill stays and contributes, or drifts back across the border in search of a warmer welcome elsewhere. The DDCs’ community engagement is designed to close that gap, encouraging local leadership, traditional structures and community members to see returning skills as an asset arriving home, not a burden arriving unannounced.
This reception effort does not rest with the Ministry alone. MoSAD is working alongside the Civil Protection Unit and the DDCs to manage the process on the ground, from the safe and orderly handling of returnees at the border posts themselves to the coordination that gets them from a registration desk into a community ready to receive them. It is a division of labour that matches each structure to what it does best: the Civil Protection Unit bringing its experience managing people at points of entry, the DDCs bringing their reach into local leadership, and MoSAD bringing the skills register that ties the whole exercise back to the national plan.
Plumtree is not the only crossing point feeling this movement. Two further border posts – Maitengwe and Mphoengs – are seeing returnees as well, and both sit roughly 100 kilometres from Plumtree. That distance is not a footnote; it is the operational challenge at the centre of this exercise. A team stationed at Plumtree cannot simply extend its reach to two points a hundred kilometres apart without a deliberate rotation plan, transport logistics and local coordination through the DDCs on the ground at each post.
The skills audit cannot afford blind spots. A returnee crossing at Mphoengs with a decade of plant-operator experience carries exactly the same value as one crossing at Plumtree. So, the data has to capture both, or the national picture is incomplete before it has even begun.
The exercise sits inside a larger architecture. It feeds directly into the national skills audit that underpins MoSAD’s mandate, and it aligns with the objectives of the Zimbabwe Global Skills Partnership Programme (ZGSPP), which exists precisely to match skills wherever they are found with the sectors and regions that need them, locally and abroad. A returnee registered at Plumtree today could be the difference between a stalled TVET workshop and a fully staffed one tomorrow, between a mining cluster short of qualified operators and one that finally has the hands it needs.
The register is already proving its worth beyond the border post itself. Local companies in the surrounding districts have begun approaching MoSAD directly, asking what skills are coming through and how they can absorb them. A returning welder need not wait for a workshop to be built from scratch; there may already be a workshop nearby short-staffed and ready to take him on. This is the quiet, practical payoff of registering skills the moment they cross: the data does not sit idle in a file, it becomes a live matching exercise between what has just walked into the country and what local industry is short of right now. It is early evidence that the exercise is not just counting skills but circulating them.
It also speaks to Vision 2030 and the National Development Strategy 2 in the most literal way possible: an upper-middle-income economy is not built only by policy. It is built by the artisan getting off the bus in Plumtree, the caregiver walking through at Mphoengs, the mechanic crossing at Maitengwe, each one a data point, and each one a builder.
The message from the Ministry is deliberately plain, because plain messages travel best across a border post crowded with tired travellers: returning Zimbabweans are welcome. Their skills are welcome. And they are needed, not as a courtesy, but as a matter of national planning.
The team at Plumtree will keep the register open. The DDCs will keep preparing communities to receive their own with warmth rather than wariness. And at Maitengwe and Mphoengs, the plan is already in motion to make sure that no skill crossing home, however far from the main gate, goes uncounted.