The Sunday Mail
Howdy folks! This season is pregnant with expectation! Some are expecting the Almighty to unleash the colossal floodgates of heaven so that it rains amply to embarrass all those weather forecasts to the contrary.
Others are simply expecting full bonuses in this month of the goat despite apparent affirmations otherwise. Many too are just expecting to soon hear the silver bells ringing melodiously and festively.
And the atmosphere of expectation, as they say, is the breeding ground for miracles.
ln light of the above, we need miracles in this season, lots of them!
And for Africa — her narrative will continue to be a wretched one if we do not experience this “supernatural” Damascene encounter that changes our methodologies.
Otherwise, Africa will just remain the trailblazer of writing albeit remaining an illiterate “dark continent”.
She will continue to comfortably rest on her laurel of being the inventor of architecture (with Great Zimbabwe standing as proof) yet with a quantum of the citizenry still living in two-by-two shacks and primitive huts — tichirasika muimba ye round.
And next week Friday’s occasion of Africa Industrialisation Day will once again come as another constant and painful reminder of how our continent accounts for less than three percent of gross global output and less than one percent of global manufacturing output.
This — despite naturally inheriting 30 percent of the world’s known reserves of minerals, 10 percent of oil and the largest cobalt, diamonds, platinum and uranium reserves on the planet.
All this is many thanks to a fact that we are all quite alive to — that natural resources account for 77 percent of Africa’s total exports.
And an apple falls not far from the tree.
The above can still be extrapolated to match the situation Zimbabwe finds herself in — that of an industry envisaged to become the engine of growth, yet with the same engine being broken down and knowing no mechanic.
Industrialisation has to be an integral and indispensable guardian angel of any sustainable socioeconomic transformation.
If the years 2010 up to 2012 have taught us anything, then it should be that — yes the country may post double digit growth rates, but that growth is tantamount to building a house of cards without a robust reinforcement of the manufacturing sector.
Our republic scored a hat-trick of double digit growth rates (11,4 percent in 2010, 11.9 percent in 2011 and 10.6 percent in 2012), yet the years to follow would see the house of cards crumbling down — in another ironic hat-trick of deteriorating single digit growths (4.5 percent in 2013, 3.5 percent in 2014 and 1.5 percent in 2015) — as it continues to become apparent that manufacturing has to be the subject of the formulae. In any case — do we have anything to show for the 2010-12 hat-trick double-digit growths?
Did it create any jobs?
Did it ameliorate any poverty? What did the ‘dynamic’ growth really accrue to Theresa Nyava in Gweru?
It can, therefore, be deduced that commodity exports cannot result in sustainable growth as commodities are vulnerable to external shocks as we are nothing but price takers in their trade.
What has hitherto happened to the prices of gold, platinum, nickel and copper can attest to this notion.
So long as the top five exports of the republic (unmanufactured tobacco, unwrought gold, nickel ores and concentrates, Ferro-alloys and unprocessed diamonds — accounting for not less than 72 percent of total exports) all have a mutual friend called ‘commodities’, we sure won’t be lying at all if we say that we are eating into our children’s heritage.
It is against the above background that I would like to urge that we put the industry on the spotlight, especially noting the recently launched industrial survey that laid bare most of the important issues that we have to brainstorm solutions to.
In the same vein, I would like to fundamentally differ with The Sunday Mail Business story in last week’s issue, which appeared under the headline “Confederation’s survey risks losing relevance”.
The story said that “market watchers say CZI’s manufacturing sector survey risks losing relevance if it continues to solicit views from big corporates only rather than small and medium enterprises.”
However, a closer review of the same survey, under the distribution of responses section, would clearly show that only 33 percent of the respondents were actually large corporates.
In fact, medium and small companies constituted 67 percent of the survey’s responses. In light of the above, it is, therefore, my view that the market watchers were misguided in that respect.
The story went on to say that “analysts opine that the survey needs to extend to other crucial sectors of the economy such as agriculture”.
Again, as an industrial economist who closely follow these issues, I argue that the survey remain constrained to manufacturing issues while the issue of extending to other sectors is dealt with through the ongoing value chain studies being conducted.
The media had already told us about the industry’s meeting with farmers to deliberate on value chain issues way before the survey was announced.
In fact, one of this year’s congress resolutions of CZI spoke about value chains, where the industry resolved “to finalise value chain mapping of the identifiable and sustainable value chains and to continuously refer and to consider the impact on value chains approach in all policy recommendations”.
The survey therefore needed not come in again and reinvent the wheel.
Again, many stakeholders now criticising the survey’s credibility got the wrong end of the stick of Dr John Mangundya’s words at the survey launch when he said: “How do you synchronise low demand and high imports… what are you importing if there is no demand?”
As a researcher and economist, I do not see any inconsistencies from the above statement to warrant criticism.
Imports can be as much as they want, but what must be noted is that the survey investigates local manufacturers and the demand patterns it analyses relate to the goods they produce domestically.
So, demand for domestically produced products can be low while that for imported products is very high, for a single reason we already know — differences in levels of competitiveness.
And the survey has no control over the competitiveness of the industry for a past period it is observing — just like a coroner’s autopsy cannot resurrect the dead. So, no relevance is really lost there!
What must be the focus right now is to really come with plans of action on how to deal with all the issues raised by the manufacturing sector survey with a view to repositioning this sector as the engine of sustainable economic growth.
This is a good expectation for the season!
