By Jabulani Chibaya 

HARARE – EVERY market begins with a question of trust. Will my money be safe? Will the rules hold? Will anyone buy my shares tomorrow?

Zimbabwe’s capital markets have had to answer those questions under hard conditions. So when Justin Bgoni, group chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange Holdings, sat down with Business With Trevor, the conversation offered more than a routine executive profile. It was a useful look at how the man running three exchanges thinks about money, risk and nation-building.

What follows is a reading of that interview. It covers the career that shaped him, the case he makes for stock exchanges, the uncomfortable fact of low domestic participation, and the roles of the ZSE, VFEX and ZEX. Some of it is practical. Some of it is philosophical. All of it matters to anyone who wants Zimbabwe’s savings to build Zimbabwean enterprise.

One theme runs through it all. Capital is patient when the system around it is credible. Building that credibility is the job.

From the Accounting Desk to the “Horse”

Bgoni did not stumble into finance. He chose accounting and finance deliberately. He wanted a lucrative career and a fast track to business leadership, and he had watched school peers who followed that path succeed. It was a practical decision by a young man who could see which doors opened fastest.

Then came McKinsey, where he learned two things no textbook teaches well. The first was structured problem-solving: take a messy situation, break it into parts, and work through each in order. The second was the value of a reciprocal professional network. A reciprocal network is one where value flows in both directions.

The most striking lesson arrived in private equity at FNB. Investors love to debate business ideas. Bgoni’s experience points elsewhere. The most critical element of an investable business, he says, is the entrepreneur, the “horse”. The idea matters less than the person carrying it. What he looks for is hard work, honesty and resilience.

Think about what that means for a market operator. An exchange cannot manufacture good horses. It can build the racetrack: the rules, the disclosure, the pricing and the liquidity that let good entrepreneurs find capital and let investors back them with confidence. That logic echoes through ZEX, where entrepreneurs pitch for funding themselves.

Kierkegaard wrote that life is understood backwards but must be lived forwards. Bgoni’s career reads that way. Each stage looks, in hindsight, like preparation for the job he holds today.

The 8-Year Rule and the Road Home

After serving as CFO of the New Zealand Stock Exchange, Bgoni could have stayed abroad. Many professionals do. The skills were portable, the institutions stable, the career secure.

He came home instead, and he frames the decision through what he calls his personal “8-year rule”. The deciding thought was about regret. Picture yourself at 80, looking back on your life. Would you be at peace knowing you had the skills to help your home country’s economy and never used them? Bgoni’s answer was no, so he returned to Zimbabwe.

This matters for two reasons. First, it says something about leadership in difficult markets. People who carry a personal stake in a country tend to take the long view, because they cannot simply exit when conditions sour. Second, it speaks to a debate Zimbabweans know well: the flow of skilled professionals out of the country. Bgoni’s story does not dismiss the pull of opportunity abroad. It offers a different frame. Skills compounded elsewhere can be spent at home, and that is a quiet kind of capital inflow.

Why a Stock Exchange Matters

Strip away the jargon and a stock exchange does two plain things.

First, it lets companies raise equity capital. Bgoni calls this “patient” capital, and the word is well chosen. A loan comes due. Equity does not. A company that raises patient money can build infrastructure and hire people without a lender’s clock ticking behind every decision.

Second, it gives investors a secure way to price and exit. Price discovery is the quiet miracle of markets. Hayek saw that no central planner can hold the knowledge scattered among millions of buyers and sellers, and that a market price compresses it into a single number. When an exchange runs well, that number is visible and fair, and an investor who wants out can sell rather than stay trapped.

Put the two functions together and you get an economic engine. Savers become owners. Owners fund growth. Growth creates jobs. Jobs create more savers.

That is the theory. The interview gets most interesting when Bgoni turns to the stubborn numbers, because in Zimbabwe the engine is running well below its potential.

The Participation Problem

Here is the number that should trouble every policymaker. Across Zimbabwe’s three exchanges, only about 600 trades happen each day, in a country of 17 million people.

The picture is stark. A market that thin struggles to absorb large orders without moving the price, and thin trading makes investors wary of entering at all. Low participation feeds low liquidity, and low liquidity discourages participation. It is a cycle.

Bgoni points to three causes.

• Financial education. Young Zimbabweans are rarely taught how markets work, so equities feel like a game for insiders.
• A weak culture of saving. Where people spend what they earn, little is left to invest.
• Memory. The hyperinflation era left lingering skepticism. For many families, holding local assets once meant watching value vanish, and trust lost in that period has not fully healed.

None of these is a problem an exchange can solve alone. They are social and educational, and they are slow. But they are solvable. Schools, banks, employers, media and regulators can all teach what a share is and why owning one differs from holding cash. Every young person who opens an investment account adds a small, permanent piece to the market’s foundation.

Is it fair to expect people to trust a financial system that once burned them? No. Trust has to be earned back through stable rules and consistent delivery, one year at a time.

Three Exchanges, Three Jobs

Bgoni oversees three venues, each built for a different purpose. The structure makes sense once you ask what problem each one solves.

The ZSE is the home of trading in domestic currency. It is the established market, where local companies raise capital and local investors trade.

VFEX, the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange, trades in US dollars. It operates within the Victoria Falls Financial Centre, a specialised international financial centre with its own banking and capital markets laws. The aim is to attract foreign investment by offering a stable, hard-currency environment with freer exchange controls. For an offshore investor worried about currency risk, that combination answers the first questions on the table.

ZEX, the Zimbabwe Entrepreneurs Exchange, is the newest, designed for smaller businesses and startups. Entrepreneurs can pitch their ideas and raise funding locally. ZEX also runs an invoice discounting service, and the mechanism is clever. Multiple institutional funders bid to pay a supplier’s invoice early. The supplier gets cash now, and competition among funders shapes the price.

Consider what that does for a small business. A supplier delivers goods to a large buyer and then waits to be paid. That wait is where many small firms struggle. Invoice discounting turns a receivable into working capital, and competitive bidding keeps the cost honest.

One way to read the three is as a ladder. An entrepreneur can begin at ZEX, grow into the ZSE and, where a business wants hard-currency investors, look to VFEX. Whether that ladder works will depend on how many firms actually climb it. But the architecture is coherent, and each rung answers a real need.

Delistings and the Power of Minorities

Not everyone is cheering. Some observers worry as companies delist from the ZSE to move to VFEX or to go private. Is the market shrinking?

Bgoni’s answer is calm. Delistings, he says, are a normal part of the market cycle. Companies list when they need capital and leave when circumstances change.

The more important point is who holds the power. In these transactions, minority shareholders decide. A delisting requires the approval of 75% of them. That is a high bar. A controlling shareholder cannot simply walk a company off the exchange; the people with small stakes must agree.

The fear behind the question is really about fairness. Will small investors be squeezed out? The 75% threshold turns a vague worry into a specific, enforceable right.

There is a lesson here for the investors the market most needs to attract. Participation grows when ordinary people understand that the rules protect them. A retail investor who knows their vote counts has a reason to hold shares and to read the notice when it arrives. Rights unused are rights wasted.

The Missing Sectors and the Holy Grail

Look at who is raising capital and a pattern appears. Mining, property and infrastructure are active. Agriculture, so central to Zimbabwe’s economy, remains heavily underrepresented on the main exchanges.

That gap deserves a pause. Farming and agribusiness need working capital, equipment and long-horizon finance, which is exactly what patient equity can supply. ZEX offers a partial answer: Bgoni notes that more agricultural startups are now applying. If the smaller exchange becomes a nursery for agribusiness, the larger boards may follow.

Then comes what Bgoni treats as the ultimate prize, his “Holy Grail”. He wants the Zimbabwean government to use the stock exchange: to raise debt through bonds and to list state-owned enterprises. He believes this would multiply the size of the market and sharply lift investor confidence.

The logic holds together. Government paper gives investors a benchmark and a core around which portfolios can be built. Listed state-owned enterprises must publish accounts and answer to shareholders, and transparency of that kind lifts confidence in the whole market. Scale also attracts scale: a bigger market draws more brokers, more analysts and more institutional money.

Whether the government acts on this is not for an exchange to decide. But the case is clear. A state that lists its enterprises and borrows openly is a state that accepts being measured.

What We Should Take From This

Three lessons stand out.

For investors, the venues now exist to invest in local currency, in US dollars or in early-stage ventures. The harder task is understanding what you own and what rights come with it. The 75% rule is one example. Learn the rules before you need them.

For entrepreneurs, remember the horse. Capital follows character before it follows concept. Hard work, honesty and resilience are what Bgoni says matter most, and ZEX gives you a stage on which to show them.

For policymakers and educators, the participation numbers are a mandate. Roughly 600 trades a day in a nation of 17 million is not only a market problem. It is a learning problem, a savings problem and a trust problem. The fix runs through financial education, credible rules and a government willing to use the exchange itself.

Justin Bgoni came home so he would not face regret at 80. The country’s task is to give a generation reasons to invest now, so that it does not face a different regret later: that the markets were built and nobody came.

Source: Justin Bgoni, Zimbabwe Stock Exchange Holdings Group CEO, on Business With Trevor.

Jabulani Simplisio Chibaya is a Data and AI Consultant specializing in data science, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cryptocurrency innovation. A seasoned conference speaker, he also writes on the intersection of technology, regulation, and economic development. Contact: Cell: +263 778 921 881 | Email: simplisiochibaya22@gmail.com | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jabulani-simplisio-chibaya