Zimbabwean tycoon Ken Sharpe breaks ground on Chivhu EcoCity

WestProp Holdings broke ground on Tuesday at Chivhu EcoCity, a 5,000-hectare development planned for 20,000 homes and as many as 80,000 residents.

The work that started is on Founders Estate, the first phase, comprising about 600 residential stands. It has already sold out.

Ken Sharpe, who founded the company and runs it as chief executive, said the people who bought into that phase did very well, and that prices rise from Oct. 1.

That sequencing is the model. WestProp sells serviced stands before the infrastructure exists, uses the proceeds to build the roads, water and sewer networks, and raises prices as each phase de-risks the next. Selling 600 stands at a site with no services yet tells the company how hard it can price the remaining 19,400 homes.

Chivhu sits about 145 kilometres south of Harare on the Masvingo road, a farming town of a few thousand people. At 80,000 residents it would become one of the larger settlements in Zimbabwe.

Sharpe left school in Britain at 18 and came home to start a business.

He was born in Harare in January 1973, moved to South Africa with his family during the Rhodesian bush war in 1978 and returned after independence in 1980. His father owned a gold mine at Mazowe. He started West Group in 1991 distributing consumer goods and bottling beverages, and moved into property nearly two decades later, partnering with the Ukrainian businessman Oleksandr Sheremet in 2006 to create what became WestProp.

He has since built most of what is going up in Harare's northern suburbs: the Pokugara residential estate, the Millennium Heights apartment complex of roughly 1,000 units, Pomona City on 270 hectares, the Mall of Zimbabwe, The Hives, and a golf estate at Warren Park. He has said publicly he wants to lay a billion bricks in Zimbabwe by 2050 and make Harare's skyline comparable with Dubai, London and Singapore.

WestProp listed on the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange in April 2023, the first property company to trade on the dollar-denominated bourse, in a raise structured through preference shares. Forbes Africa named him its most innovative chief executive in 2021, the first Zimbabwean to take the award.

His access has drawn scrutiny. President Emmerson Mnangagwa has toured WestProp's Millennium Heights and Pokugara sites, appears regularly with Sharpe in public, and one block in an apartment project is named ED, which is read as a reference to the president's initials. Critics say the relationship explains how he has assembled so much land in the capital. Sharpe has rejected that, telling The Africa Report the allegations are baseless and that WestProp wins on merit with projects that stand on their own credibility. The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission cleared him and Augur Investments in a 2022 land dispute.

At Chivhu he is selling something the country has not had.

WestProp is building the first eco-city and the first green city in the whole country, Sharpe said, and the company is proud to be leading the way. The plan includes a game reserve inside the development, the existing weirs and water bodies turned into an ecotourism offering, and at least 20 schools.

Mandla Ndebele, the company's projects manager, said the immediate job is unlocking the site with the roads, water and sewer networks everything else depends on, and that the water features are meant to carry real tourism interest rather than serve as landscaping.

The development is mixed use, combining residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural components, which gives WestProp several revenue lines to unlock at different times rather than depending on house sales alone.

Shadreck Maoneni, district planner at Chikomba Rural District Council, said the project would put Chivhu on a pedestal and was top notch and a first of its kind.

For WestProp the start of civil works moves it out of land assembly and planning, where Zimbabwean property schemes frequently stall, and into something investors can watch being built.