The Sunday Mail
Well, let’s bring in some of the quantitative targets and structural benchmarks of the IDP to demonstrate what I am talking about. The overall vision of the IDP is to transform Zimbabwe from a producer of primary goods into a producer of processed value-added goods for both the domestic and export markets. Don’t blink yet!
Folks, a lot has been happening in the Republic. Your cowboy will, however, restrain himself to the few things his horse is inclined to gallop towards.
So the big brother – the International Monetary Fund – was in town recently, looking as clever as always, with a mighty pen in hand to tick those boxes in the Staff Monitored Programme.
Tick, tick, tick… again, the big brother managed to tick all the boxes.
None was left unticked!
Domenico Fanizza, the IMF’s head of mission, later issued a remarkable statement, saying: “Despite substantial economic and financial difficulties, the authorities have made progress in implementing their reform programme, meeting all quantitative targets and structural benchmarks for the first review under the SMP.”
Bravo!
A couple of days before Fanizza’s statement, the Zimbabwe Independent had told us that “diplomatic sources say Zimbabwe still has much work to do (in implementing the SMP) before securing the much-needed financial assistance” as if this is classified information.
The IMF has bluntly told us from the very beginning that “SMPs do not entail financial assistance or endorsement by the IMF executive board”.
Then there was a regional ministerial task force meeting that deliberated on the interim report on the development of the Sadc Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap, which shall be submitted to the Extraordinary Sadc Summit set for next month.
A week later, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa convened in the majestic Victoria Falls for the Inter-governmental Committee of Experts meeting, held under the theme “Accelerating Industrialisation in Southern Africa through Beneficiation and Value-Addition”.
We are not new to the discourse of value-addition and beneficiation, so I am sure our republic immensely contributed very brilliant ideas in all these homilies. When we launched our Industrialisation Development Plan in 2012, Sadc was then still mulling its Regional Industrial Development Policy.
All it had then was a Regional Industrial Development Strategy, which had been drawn up to guide development of industrial policy. Zimbabwe was actually the second country in Sadc to come up with an industrial policy after South Africa’s Industrial Policy Action Plan.
Enter Zim-Asset, which has a cluster solely dedicated to value-addition and beneficiation.
The year 2016 will mark reckoning time for the IDP, and what saddens me already is that we are behaving like a country that has no industrial policy at all.
Shouldn’t there be some kind of a difference on the ground?
Well, let’s bring in some of the quantitative targets and structural benchmarks of the IDP to demonstrate what I am talking about. The overall vision of the IDP is to transform Zimbabwe from a producer of primary goods into a producer of processed value-added goods for both the domestic and export markets.
Don’t blink yet!
One of the quantitative targets of the IDP was “to increase capacity utilisation from the current levels of around 57 percent to 80 percent by the end of the planning period (2016)”.
As you can notice, industrial capacity utilisation then was 57 percent.
But now it has fallen to 36 percent, shedding a significant 21 percent.
If we are to still meet the 80 percent capacity utilisation target by 2016, it means capacity utilisation has to increase by 44 percent. I am sure it would be much easier for the camel to enter through the needle’s eye than to achieve this.
I believe in miracles though!
And do you know why we are failing to meet all these quantitative targets of the IDP? Because we didn’t do the things we vowed to do in the policy.
The IDP spoke of establishing a financial institution solely for the purpose of providing medium and long-term funding to the productive sectors of the economy.
And where is that industrial bank, four years down the line?
Again, the IDP identified four priority sectors as its pillars and engine.
The pharmaceuticals sub-sector was identified as one of the four priority sectors. But my heart bled when companies in the prioritised sectors such as CAPS went bust right before our eyes.
What is also saddening is the message from NatPharm that 98 percent of the country’s drugs are coming from the donor community.
What if our good donors wake up one day and withdraw their benevolence?
The latest Finscope Consumer Survey says 37 percent of Zimbabweans have gone without treatment or medicine because of lack of money, up from 20 percent in 2011.
This can only point to the fact that we have to capacitate our local pharmaceuticals and give them the priority they have always deserved.
Now, coming back to the IMF, there is one question that has always boggled my mind: Why are we very good at meeting IMF’s quantitative targets and structural benchmarks, yet fail dismally to meet the targets of our very own policies?
Can someone please answer this small town cowboy?
Otherwise, I am now very convinced that if the IDP had been written by big brother IMF, and handed to us in the manner they handed the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme and SMP, we would have met all those quantitative targets and structural benchmarks in the IDP.
It is my sincere hope that we will not treat Zim-Asset the same way we treated the IDP.
I certainly hope that we shall give this sacrosanct blueprint twice as much the treatment we are giving to the “royal” SMP.
