The marketTwo arguments, and neither is about owning a better rock.
Harare's new administrative capital is under construction at Mount Hampden — the new Parliament, government offices, Zim Cyber City, the road network connecting them, and the commercial and residential development that follows.
Freight
Aggregates are heavy, cheap per tonne and expensive to move, so the supplier closest to the pour wins on delivered cost regardless of who has the better rock. That is arithmetic about distance, not a claim about geology — and it is a cost advantage over distant incumbents, not a monopoly of position.
Beneficiation
A business that extracts rock and sells it as rock is trading at the bottom of the value chain — the value leaves with the load, and what stays behind is a hole and a haulage bill. Every step of processing done on site is margin kept rather than given away. The quarry is the entry point, not the whole plan.
Three kinds of customer
Road construction and asphalt groups, who buy surfacing-grade stone in volume and repeatedly. Concrete and ready-mix suppliers, who buy graded aggregate. And the contractors and block makers who take the balance.
The new capital is enough, and it is not enough. Published development plans support a first decade of production; the years beyond that depend on ordinary Harare construction demand and on the value-add lines. Any plan that quietly assumes the capital builds forever is wrong, and ours does not.