The Sunday Mail
The other day I had a discussion with a senior editor from a privately owned newspaper.
Predictably, the discussion slowly steered itself towards the parlous state of the Zimbabwean economy and whether Government was doing enough, or whether it had the capacity to achieve a miracle turnaround.
The debate went on and on. There was a lot of corruption in the country because the culprits were not being punished, he said. What became of salarygate? Where is the money from diamonds going? None of us had the answers, just like we could not enumerate the direct benefits from other minerals such as gold, platinum, chrome, etc, where private multinational corporations are involved.
Poor folk in Mutoko have nothing to show for the black granite which has been mined in their area since before independence. All they see are caverns in the mountains and the occasional 23 000kg bold that drops by the roadside along the Harare-Nyamapanda highway.
We need foreign direct investment to turn around this economy. Fine. Where does that come from?
That question, as usual, takes one back to the issue of sanctions, corruption and ‘‘bad policies’’ such as indigenisation and black economic empowerment.
There is a debate there. Can a nation develop purely on the basis of foreign direct investment without local savings? Doesn’t that tell us something wrong with Zimbabweans? Excuses are invented every day about why people can’t save. They have no money; there is no confidence in the banking system.
But surely foreign direct investment comes from savings, it doesn’t come from trees. And those who do save for a rainy day need not always be millionaires. The money we spend buying second hand vehicles, fancy cellphone handsets, human hair and related products to the tune of $13 million a year comes back as foreign direct investment. As Zimbabweans we simply love to consume, if foreign the better, it shows class.
You know what, agriculture is the mainstay of our economy, went the debate. So why is Government not prioritising agriculture? What was the purpose of the land reform if we can’t feed ourselves and have to import the staple maize from Zambia and Malawi?
Good point, so what needs to be done? I ask.
You know, I think Government should be bold. In one of its budgets, it should simply allocate all the money to agriculture. Forget education, forget health, forget defence, he declares. We have become, as a nation, susceptible to the vagaries of weather because we have become dependent on nature. In this day and age, how does a nation depend on rain-fed agriculture?
That bold budgetary decision should enable Government to establish irrigation infrastructure, purchase tractors and combine harvesters and train extension service providers. It should be able to build dams in all the country’s 10 provinces and provide farmers with inputs. Resettled farmers definitely need to be trained. Most of them are like they have been thrown at the deep end and left to swim or drown.
It was a bold declaration, trying in its mischievous way to address long-term investment in agriculture.
Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa presented his mid-term fiscal policy review statement on Thursday showing the country’s import bill for the first six months of the year stood at $3 billion, down from $3,9 billion the same period last year.
That’s commendable, but what are we importing?
Vegetables, fresh and canned fruits, poultry, cooking oil, soap, maize meal, flour. Beverages, dairy products, sugar, among others. I don’t know if there is a single product in that serpentine list which is not, or cannot, be manufactured or produced locally. More so, are all these imported products paying duty? Are people aware that in importing these “basics” they are in fact exporting jobs in turn?
In raising duty on these consumption goods Minister Chinamasa pointed out that these imports were accelerating the collapse of the local industry and ballooning the import bill. Which should be a plain truth. Local goods are expensive, thus constraining our exports, and that reflects the downside of the multi-currency system the country is using, especially the US dollar.
It is not rocket science that Zimbabwe has become a magnet for everyone in the region who needs US dollars. You come in to sing or sell second-hand clothes or human hair. By the end of the day you carry back home your bag of US dollars, which you can’t easily get in your own country.
Because we are the US dollar kings of the region, we are highly-prized as customers in the region. We can buy anything anywhere because “our” currency is convertible. Hence the deluge of imports which are killing our own industry. Those who can’t eat what is produced or manufactured locally must be made to pay premium duty, it’s that simple.
But Chinamasa did more. He said Government was mobilising about $252,3 million to support agriculture under the presidential inputs scheme. It is not the whole budget as my friend would have wanted, but by eliminating grain imports, the country is slowly moving towards food self-sufficiency, a basic necessity for national stability.
That leaves other producers to focus on commercial crops needed to supply raw materials to industry.
So far the biggest crisis faced by Zimbabwe is too much politics and less confidence in what we can achieve as a nation working together. Everything is looked at through the political lens: who said it, which political party or what political leaning?
Then the belief in the magical power of the former colonial power. If Britain and the United States are not involved, no investment deal will work. Only the United States and Britain bring genuine investment, China and Russia are latter-day imperialists seeking to exploit our resources. What nonsense!
Secondly, no Government policy works if the United States and Britain are against it. Only what the IMF and the World Bank prescribe should be swallowed without question, even against a lot of literature in Africa and beyond exposing the trail of disaster caused by these institutions’ neo-liberal prescriptions.
It is high time we faced the fact that we are on our own.
There are no foreign messiahs bringing free gifts. So when the Chinese talk about “bankable projects” they are only pragmatic, they are not “ditching Mugabe” as some people claim.
The Chinese can’t skimp just to give Zimbabwe free money.
