The Sunday Mail
The Zimbabwe Special Economic Zones Authority recently designated four SEZs, with plans afoot to run a pilot in two of them next year. Last week ZimSeza chief executive Mr Edwin Kondo spoke to The Sunday Mail Senior Reporter Lincoln Towindo on the plans and the recent study tour of China. We publish excerpts in Mr Kondo’s words
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Edwin Kondo
We went to China on a study tour as part of a Zimbabwe Government delegation hosted by our colleagues who took us around different cities to study how special economic zones operate in China.
It is amazing that the Chinese economy is a trillion dollar economy and of that, the contribution of SEZs into Chinese economy is plus or minus 60 percent.
This development has happened in the last 40 years. In 1978 they decided to go the SEZs route and it took them 10 years to get them off the ground.
So SEZs, by definition, are long-term projects.
But the key lessons that came out are that their government took a key role in terms of developing infrastructure. Some of the infrastructure that the Chinese government developed includes industrial parks.
To put it into context, some of the industrial parks are in areas in excess of 100 square kilometres, that is — for example — five times the size of Harare; and that could be in one city.
The key lessons are that the Government must take the lead in terms of putting up infrastructure.
When we talk about infrastructure, we are talking about the road network, telecoms, commercial building, airports, sea ports etc.
While we have limited fiscal space in Zimbabwe, we need to start somewhere. We were taken around by an organisation called International Co-operation Centre — National Development and Reform Commission (ICC-NDRC) which, to put it loosely, is the equivalent of the Zimbabwe Development Agency.
They were articulating some of the reforms in terms of ease of doing business that were impressive.
Chief among those was the issue of technology to deal with applications, monitoring projects, reviewing the projects and others.
And we are very keen to replicate some of those lessons. The Zimbabwe Special Economic Zones Authority has designated four areas, namely Bulawayo (which has got two zones) Beitbridge, Mutare and Victoria Falls.
We have designated Bulawayo as our industrial hub with superb comparative advantages. We have designated Vic Falls as our finance and tourism hub; we have designated Beitbridge as logistics hub and Mutare our manufacturing and logistics hub.
What we are doing right now, together with the stakeholders, particularly the provincial ministers is to develop very detailed implementation plans.
These implementation plans will cover issues of ownership, management of zones, feasibility studies, master planning, and development of the infrastructure and after that we talk about actual investors coming in.
This is a five-year project and we have started on it. We are going to go to all the 10 provinces.
But as we speak, the areas were we have gone, the provincial ministers have been amazing, including in the new areas where we are still working on.
In the provinces my teams are already identifying land where we can set up and how the SEZs can be leveraged to enable provinces to take ownership of their own GDP.
It is aligned very square to the vision of the President that provinces must take ownership of their own GDP.
Coming out of China – whose economy spans high tech, manufacturing, tourism and logistics – we have begun to identify potential developers of infrastructure into our own SEZs and we have tentatively agreed with the ICC-NDRC to help us in terms of development of infrastructure.
Once the infrastructure is developed, there are already investors ready to enter into those zones.
I must caution that SEZs are not quick fix, they are long term and China is bearing fruits of what they embarked on 40 years ago.
The President is talking about devolving power to provinces and making them responsible for their GDPs.
The provinces can use different vehicles to stimulate their GDP and one such vehicle they can use is SEZs and they come with special benefits that they pass on to investors.
In turn investors should demonstrate to us how they will bring into the province FDI, export generation, skills transfer, employment creation, linkages to SMEs and how their own investment can beneficiate.
We are looking for those kind of investors and show us those key performance indicators.
And that is how we will improve the performance of the economies and ultimately that of the country.
We have done a lot studies and we now need to start from somewhere.
We need to have an industrial park or two that we begin to build and go out to attract the investors to come and use.
So, 2019 is the year we must begin to put actual infrastructure for SEZs.
Obviously because of limited fiscal space we cannot do all the ten province at once but we need to start from somewhere.
We want to do a pilot project in 2019; it is our immediate goal.
