The Sunday Mail
Rangu Nyamurundira
Four things have happened within the past month underscoring indigenous Zimbabweans reassertion of their intent to become an empowered society as envisioned in Zim-Asset.
The first defining event was the Inaugural Economic Empowerment Conference in Harare on October 16 under the theme “Accelerating Economic Empowerment: Localising the Ten Point Plan”.
The second, a direct result of this conference, was Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Minister Patrick Zhuwao announcing the US$10 million Localised Empowerment Acceleration Facility (Leaf), which was launched on November 4.
The third is the holding of district economic empowerment conferences across Zimbabwe on November 4. Communities were given the opportunity to assess available natural resources and the human and social capital that will define empowerment opportunities within their locales.
And on November 10, provincial economic empowerment conferences were held to strategise effective implementation of accelerated economic empowerment.
These events all fall within the National Economic Empowerment Strategy.
The significance of these events is that they amount to warning shots against a post-July 2013 empowerment slumber that had taken hold within Government.
There is no district in Zimbabwe without at least one of our God-given natural resources; if not trees, minerals or water, then certainly fertile land, scenery and fauna.
How then are we failing to transform our communities into empowered societies that can judiciously exploit such abundant natural and human resources, as called for by President Mugabe?
It is within this context of a post-2013 empowerment slumber that we must understand the National Economic Empowerment Strategy.
Minister Zhuwao has been engaging indigenous Zimbabweans within their communities, the majority of whom gave Zanu-PF a clear July 2013 mandate to transform them into empowered societies to grow the national economy.
The minister is only doing what a good sheriff must do – to have the law respected and enforced.
Our Constitution provides that “The State must ensure that local communities benefit from the resources in their areas”.
The same Constitution goes further to mandate Government and all its institutions and agencies to facilitate and take measures to empower, including through affirmative action.
The National Economic Empowerment Strategy can never be thought to belong to Minister Zhuwao or his ministry. That strategy is for our Zanu-PF Government to fulfill.
Government has adopted a line ministry approach to implementing indigenisation and economic empowerment so that the State and all its institutions and agencies lend their administrative authority towards implementing the people’s programme across all economic sectors.
The thing about warning shots is that they can have liberating effects. With warning shots must come an instant reaction, a sense of heightened alertness.
Local communities have defined an empowered society, established upon the backbone of their natural resources, on the human and social capital this country has in abundance, including billions in capital we can have from Diaspora direct investment.
Diasporan Zimbabweans will readily invest kumusha, within the local communities kune rukuvhute rwawo, if Government presents the opportunities with the same commitment it has been showing towards FDI.
This is the self-reliance provided for and mandated in our Constitution.
In pursuing our national economic empowerment strategy, we must be frank and accept that the challenge has been the fissure between the ideology of a duly elected ruling Zanu-PF and embracing such ideology in policies.
There is a disparity here which must be called what it is: a gross negligence on the part of Government, its institutions and agencies.
Must the people’s programme tolerate Government officials who do not want to be seen to be advocating indigenisation and empowerment, at worst undermining it, hoping to find acceptance should Zanu-PF’s rule as defined by its ideology for the people somehow come to an abrupt end?
What is the implication of appointing or employing such persons to Government, who don’t believe in the ideological foundation of the policies and laws they are mandated to implement?
Our Zanu-PF Government must think hard on this before it finds itself facing a disillusioned electorate. Why, for example, must Government go on and on about lack of production on acquired land, yet the same Government’s district and provincial lands committees actually exacerbate that problem? It turns out that some are frustrating applications for land by community share ownership trusts that now have financial capacity to invest in land for production.
Do Government’s agents not appreciate that CSOTs constitute the very newly-empowered indigenous societies that can begin to transform our agricultural sector without having to first look to joint ventures with foreigners?
Then there is the matter of a Government mandated to empower its youth by the Constitution and as framed within its National Youth Policy.
Most of these youths are inclined towards productivity and enterprise in the agricultural sector.
But alas, what is being done to protect these youths by Government in the face of outside businesses?
Even Mbare Musika is reported to be receiving trucks from South Africa, off-loading horticultural produce there.
Where is Government in all this, to protect its fledgling “empowered society”?
Kombuya wari kwaMutoko; where will she sell her matimati kuti wararamise wazukuru nherera? She has been effectively dis-empowered.
Where is her Government, along that chain regulated by her Government’s ministries, departments and agencies?
And then you will hear the hogwash that it is indigenisation that is denying livelihoods, frustrating economic growth.
Where is the clear national strategy in the agricultural sector to ensure we produce such basic things as tomatoes, nzungu, onions, apples and fruit juice locally through the empowered societies like CSOTs which we have already established? Or are we waiting to for the new Leaf to wither and die, simply because we fail to secure local markets for our hard-working and enterprising young people?
We must look to the National Economic Empowerment Strategy to bridge this self-evident fracture between Government as the implementing authority, and the people’s aspiration for an empowered society.
The people’s aspirations have been entrusted to Zanu-PF’s ideological objective to “create conditions for economic independence, prosperity and equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation”.
Let our Zanu-PF-led Government be liberated then from its post-July 2013 economic empowerment slumber.
Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and advocate of Government’s indigenisation programme and its establishing of a new indigenous economy founded upon an empowered indigenous society.
