The level of unemployment has reached alarming and unsustainable levels

people vending in front of their homes

The level of unemployment has reached alarming and unsustainable levels due to massive retrenchments, alarming levels of deindustrialization’s, exporting of jobs to South Africa and China due to high imports, high sovereign risk, institutional rigidities, low foreign direct investment which is all leading to massive despair, poverty ,idleness ,possible seething anger and a nation of nothing else except vending .

A man cares little for ideology, statements of intention, propaganda, historical imbalances and many other dummies being sold, no matter how noble, when he has no work and his family is starving.

The economic slide shows no sign of receding or ending but rather it’s on heightened deceleration. The government reassuring creed is that something is being done. Let that something be done!! That something is the hard decision points.

Zimbabwe cannot afford to be poor yet it is rich in resources’ and has innumerable other comparative advantages. The county needs to change its economic policy, operating environment and laws to attract foreign direct investments.

Large and small companies are failing and the government invokes the “too big to fail” and “national emergency” mantras and selects the winners in industry, not based on their merits but on the basis of lobby efforts, political influence and “national interest”.

This is not to say some of the goals are not practicable and laudable but there is real danger that we are yet know the economic abyss we face if we continue with this trajectory without making hard decisions.

The tools currently chosen to correct the decline are not compatible with achieving sustainable comparative advantages but rather promote investors to flee this jurisdiction and some of the investors never considering us as a choice investment destination.

I was thinking today about how much effort it takes to be rational in this irrational world. It’s a lot of effort. Rational thinking shows that reckless populist policies damages investor confidence and undermines the economy.

My rational thinking is that the government may have to backtrack on some of its major policies or we will soon have no fiscal space even to pay the revered civil servants.

The reason to backtrack is self-evident for any rational person to see, that the economy is in a downward spiral. Nothing seems to be in place to stop the haemorrhage. Maybe one’s rational is someone’s irrational but facts never lie and I chose to stick by them.

The Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act is a noble and laudable act but remains the biggest impediment to attracting and retaining Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

The act is an avoidable self-inflicted constraint which must be repealed or massively amended. The imperative should be to grow the economy first rather than sharing the inherited diminished Rhodesian industry crumbs.

If the government has candid conversations with itself the truth will prevail that Zimbabwe no longer has any significant industries to “indigenise “and resultantly create new employement. The industries are now too few and almost run down such that most are not worth the effort of making a business plan to acquire the loved 51% equity.

Priority should be to seek new capital to propagate new industries then think of a properly structured indigenisation policy or act maybe 10 or so years from now when the national cake is enlarged. Further unrelenting barrage of pronouncements on the act undermines any hope of job creation, increase in tax base and export growth.

It’s impossible to create a country of 6 million entrepreneurs so the act is rather a loud sounding nothing piece of legislation to the masses.

The indigenisation law is an attempt to appease the same old Zimbabweans who have means to benefit from the government largesse. It may be painful to the policy makers to know that the 90% of the unemployed care less of the ideology of ownership more so when these owners are the same faces who benefited from the land reform.

Many have truly said that choosing not to choose is a choice in and of it. Deciding not to decide has as many consequences as the decision – but it is easier to hide behind the nonsensical “its policy” thing.

Analysis and facts show that a once self-sufficient agro based Zimbabwean economy has dismally failed to produce maize, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, wheat and many basic agro products for its citizens a decade and half after “ land reform”.

The choice we have to make is to make a hard climb-down .Humiliating as it may sound, it is the most simple and rational decision to make.

It is better to bring contract farmers and joint ventures farming partners with expertise to do part farming for us irrespective of their colour, origin, ethnic or nationality, even if they are the same expelled and loathed farmers.

The country will benefit from sufficiency, investment, job creation, and contract farming fees, taxes, export growth, imports reduction and more importantly the reincarnation of downstream industries.

The government then can concentrate its energy and resources to support vulnerable small scale and peasant farmers then leave commercial farming to experts. Commercial farming is ideally a full time business which requires dedication in time resources.

Bulawayo vendors