The Sunday Mail
Government has reaffirmed its commitment to improving the country’s business environment as an assessment on progress made against set targets to ease the way of doing business shows positive results.
The Office of the President and Cabinet has designed a programme to reform the investment climate to improve ease of doing business in Zimbabwe as directed by President Mugabe in his 10-Point Economic Plan presented in the State of the Nation Address in August.
The reforms, which focus on laying foundations to attract sustainable and mutually beneficial FDI, are expected to enhance Zimbabwe’s competitiveness, create jobs, generate revenue and support economic growth.
Under the initiative, five thematic working groups were formed: starting business; construction permits and registering properties; credit insolvency; paying taxes and trading across borders; as well as protecting minority investors and enforcing contracts. At the end of the first 100 days of the programme, it emerged that over 50 percent of the set targets were met.
Deputy Chief Secretary in the Office of the President and Cabinet, Colonel (Retired) Christian Katsande told attendees at a one-day workshop in Harare last week to assess progress that the overall performance by all teams was commendable.
“The rapid results approach used has enabled us to achieve quite a lot and allowed us to work as teams. On average, it was a good performance meeting targets that were set,” he said.
Presenting results from the construction permits and property registration thematic group, Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Secretary Engineer George Mlilo said a lot of time was being consumed on building plan approvals and inspection at the expense of real work. The thematic group was mandated to reduce the time for obtaining construction permit from 448 to 120 days by December 21, 2015.
It was also tasked to reduce the number of days required for registering property from 36 days to 14 days.
Eng Mlilo said the time taken under old regulations was “unbelievably” long.
“The knowledge of the 448 days was a shocker to me also. I did not know about it. This was not a pleasant revelation to me,” he said. “The laws we were using were put in place a very long time ago, it is time we visit them to align them with current trends unless if we want to be pre-occupied with demolitions.”
Secretary for Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Mrs Virginia Mabhiza — who presented results for the thematic group on starting business — said some laws were archaic and out of sync with trends and the 2013 Constitution.
She cited the Companies Act as a case in point. This thematic working group’s main goal was to reduce the starting a business period from the current 90 days to 30 days by December 21, 2015. The group also focused on non-legislative reforms such as local authorities licensing processes.
Mrs Mabhiza reported positive changes, saying municipal application forms were now available online for the City of Harare.
She, however, called for increased private sector participation in the programme. Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet, Dr Misheck Sibanda, said Zimbabwe should take a leaf from countries like Mauritius that are efficiently processing company registration applications.
“The bigger picture is that we attract both international and domestic investment to grow the economy,” said Dr Sibanda. “We need to assure the world we are committed to improving the business environment. We do not want red tape.”
Government is reforming the investment environment for both domestic and foreign investors. To achieve this, Government used the rapid results approach to set targets that would quickly improve capacity to diagnose institutional constraints, improve capacity for project programme planning and implementation.
