The Sunday Mail
WHAT an epochal year it has been for mankind!
It was a year when time was held hostage by the coronavirus — regarded as the worst global health emergency to affect our planet in the past 102 years.
This year, time, which is usually known for fleeting and flying from January to December, painfully doddered and crawled, as it was bogged down by an unrelenting, highly infectious and potent virus that has disrupted the world like we have never seen in modern times.
Well, time seems to stand still when you are doing time.
We might not have been behind bars, but at one point this year, we have all been under some form of quarantine to dodge the virus.
Thankfully, only one day separates us from the month of December, which usually brings the therapeutic festivities that come with the festive season.
And this year, we have every reason to celebrate — God has seen us through an extraordinarily tough year.
For Bishop Lazi, December, particularly the Christmas holiday, is a treasure trove of cherished yesteryear memories.
Back in the day, nothing never quite beat the energy, pageantry and gluttonous indulgence of a Christmas day spent at the village growth point.
It meant a rare early-morning bath in the chillingly frosty Save River water, a decadent and hearty mid-morning traditional meal and a dash to the shops, where we always had a whale of a time, with a fizzy beverage in one hand and gazelle-like feet rhythmically stomping in sync with soothingly throbbing sungura beats.
Argh! Life was good.
Cash-flush spendthrifts from the nearby phosphate producer, Dorowa Minerals, enlivened festivities as they really knew how to spend their way to happiness.
Decay
All this has since changed.
The energy, pageantry and indulgence have all but dissipated over the years.
The Bishop was quite disappointed when he recently retraced his footsteps to the iconic shopping centre near Dorowa to try and rediscover the magic that used to stir the spirit.
Well, one could find more cheer in a graveyard than in the sombre and melancholic emptiness that now characterises the once-vibrant area.
The mine, which is wholly owned by Chemplex Corporation, a unit of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), is now operating sub-optimally and the growling haulage trucks that used to wheel phosphate to Nyazura every workaday are now a rarity.
But, there is a reason for this decay.
You see, over the past decade or so, the country seemed happy to import fertiliser rather than source it locally.
We now know that over the past seven years, a whopping US$662 million — about US$95 million per year — was splurged on importing a product than can easily and ordinarily be produced locally.
Ideally, all this money could provide the lifeblood to communities such as Dorowa and create limitless lucrative activities and opportunities. It is the quintessential tonic that made such areas vibrant.
Yet all this precious foreign currency is being shipped to foreign fertiliser companies in countries some of which continue to arrogantly tell Zimbabweans to go back and look for jobs in their own country.
What is happening in Bishop Lazi’s beloved Dorowa is just a microcosm of an industry-wide aberration that is not only unnecessarily haemorrhaging critical foreign currency, but impoverishing communities and creating an endless vicious circle of joblessness, poverty and stunted economic growth.
We could as well talk about the local car industry, which has been allowed to waste away over the years.
At its peak in 1997 and 1998, the sector used to employ between 30 000 and 50 000 workers through four main companies — Willowvale Mazda Motor Industries (now Willowvale Motor Industries), Quest, AVM and Deven Engineering — and associated firms both up and down the value chain.
The sheer amount of accessories — bolts, batteries, steel sheets, tyres, upholstery, pain, carpets, shock absorbers, springs, glass windows, plastics and rubber components, brake and clutch linings, fuel filters, tie rod ends and timber, among others — required in the sector have the potential to create a significant multiplier effect in the economy.
The spin-offs could and would be immense.
Currently, our local motor vehicle industry has the capacity to produce 65 buses and 100 delivery trucks per month, and yet over the past two years we have splashed a whopping US$70 million importing public buses and delivery trucks.
Last week, the Bishop could not help but reminisce about the good old days when Zimbabwe used to assemble private cars such as the Mazda 323, Mazda 626 and the Peugeot 404, 504, 405, 407, 605, 306, 304, 607, including the iconic Nissan Sunny.
Who can remember those beauties — the Mazda B1600, B1800, B2500 and the Nissan single and double cabs such as the Nissan Wolf?
So, how did we find ourselves in such a mess, where we insanely depend on buying from our neighbours that which we could easily manufacture or assemble in our own backyard?
Well, greed is what happened!
Canny cross-border wheeler-dealers began to offer inducements and kickbacks to local buyers to procure vehicles particularly from the other side of the Limpopo.
Coincidentally, all this happened after South Africa had adopted its Motor Industry Development Policy (MIDP) in 1995, which it buttressed through the enforcement of the 65 percent local policy, especially on most of the pick-up ranges.
The rest, as they say, is now history.
Absurdity
What is, however, unbelievably absurd is our deeply ingrained fetish to import anything and everything, including the very food we eat despite the fact that we have more than 10 000 water bodies and swathes of fertile land.
Every year, we are spending in excess of US$800 million shipping in maize, wheat, potatoes, etcetera.
Worse, we even buy 60 million litres of the 130 million litres of milk that we consume locally.
In essence, we are shockingly paying more than US$1 billion every year to farmers in far-off countries and providing sustainable and well-paying jobs to foreign workers while our own young people continue to aimlessly and hopelessly pace up and down the streets in search of elusive jobs.
For this, we must really bow our heads in shame.
This is quite rich for an ostensibly poor country.
Proverbs 12 verse 11 reminds us: “Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense.”
The continued haemorrhage of precious foreign currency at a time when the country sorely needs it to support the economy has been a nightmare for authorities.
“We import everything. Zimbabwe needs to learn to feed itself, we need to plan for the drought so that at the end of the day, we minimise usage of foreign currency on things that we should produce.
“You are aware that we are importing maize, we are importing meat, we are importing cooking oil and we are also importing . . . carrots, potatoes — everything.
“Yet Zimbabwe can be self-sustaining on its own product and, therefore, that is why we are advocating import substitution strategies, so that at the end of the day, we do not import that which can be produced in this country,” complained Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Governor Dr John Mangudya on February 17, 2020.
The highly successful rehabilitation of the Harare-Beitbridge road, is a manifestation of the current political administration’s will and resolve
New path
If you didn’t know by now what the recently launched National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1) is all about, you will be happy to know that it is precisely about arresting these abominable practices and deliberately promoting a programmatic and sequenced re-industrialisation policy over the next five years. And, as you might have noticed by now, Professor Mthuli Ncube’s 2021 Budget is a resounding statement of a bold commitment to walk the talk.
In Amos 9 verse 14, the Lord says, “and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.
“They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.”
The highly successful rehabilitation of the Harare-Beitbridge road, itself a manifestation of the current political administration’s will and resolve, has already shown that it is doable.
In addition to pouring money into the pockets of the five local contractors that were roped in, Government has managed to save US$1,3 billion that would have been funnelled to foreign contractors.
Dear reader, you simply cannot begin to imagine what impact these projects are having on the economy.
Do not be distracted by comic sideshows from Tendai Biti, who seems to be
consumed by this inexplicable and obsessive desire to masquerade as a financial expert.
Merely looking at the key economic indicators during his tenure would show even the most incompetent of economists that he damaged the pillars of production in unimaginable ways by turning this country into a disproportionately consumptive and vending State.
It was under his disastrous watch that wheat production tumbled to an all-time low of 40 000 tonnes in 2011.
Conversely, it is only this year that output of the cereal — a critical ingredient for our daily bread — has vaulted to over 151 000 tonnes, which is the highest ever produced in the past 20 years.
Again, not only will we save US$100 million, but our farmers are grinning all the way to the bank.
Get this from the Bishop: This trend will gain incredible momentum going forward.
The toxic ill-will of sceptics will not change the fact that this country is now on the move.
Bishop out!
