By Wisdom Mumera
(News Of The South) – Less than a month after the presentation of Zimbabwe`s 2014 National Budget, the glare from it`s many ironies still calls for shaded eyes before one can be accustomed to its type. But as all ironies, one can discover hidden meanings once he can afford to ignore the obvious aspects and they are not comfortable.
Treading away from the vicious clawing of whats right and wrong economically ,people can look at them as the lazy Sunday magazine 101 facts of what’s economically peculiar from our bold budget as we brace for a bumpy 2014.
The informal industry which was partisan hailed as a new alternative to escape the straight jackets of formal trading which have shackled the mainstream industry, is itself weighted down by its own demons and faces a great fight for productive existence before any pigs appear to ferry off the nightmare.
Its failure, and that of the whole macro-economy, to prop back the shaky state of the country will be gleefully celebrated by some local quarters that have reclined back into armchair critics ready to douse into ashy fizzles any flames of life.
The justification they smear upon their consciences is that they submitted their leadership candidatures and credentials but were rigged out of contention. Thus they feel morally sanctified and qualified to laugh at the straining of their conquerors battling ill-winds.
Mind you they don’t laugh aloud in guffaws and obscene bar room ribalds grotesquely exhibiting their joy at the failure of the status quo and consequently the suffering of the pitiful me. Instead they silver foil their Judas joy under the fangled smooch of fake kisses offering alternatives at every swerve of the bus of our state.
“Why don’t we use this money to buy food for the multitudes Lord?
Every hiccup of the state body is readily given an unsolicited medication to take if it wishes to survive. Condescendingly armed to the hilt with solutions, no issue will take them by surprise, no problem will be hard to crack and tucked into the eaves of their solution proffering will be wonderment how the rest of the nation failed to perceive their ingenuity.
Worsening the situation for the political status quo is the fact of how the supposedly “bold budget” of Minister Chinamasa isn’t suddenly going to provide any miracles. That’s definite.
As most things bold and daring, its ingenuity lies in striking out in a new policy path, which itself is no guarantee of success. Being innovative isn’t another name of success, but just another type of a duck. Time will tell if it isn’t a sitting one.
Just like its blue collar peer, the informal side of business, currently estimated to be employing over 5,8 million people, has its own constraints as the Minister outlined in the presentation. Lack of access to credit, which can roughly be explained as the banking sector’s own hesitancy to accept the SMEs as safe institutes to lend money to, is one crippling defect. But with banks saddled with a 14% rate of non-performing loans no one can begrudge them if they withdraw into the safety cocoons of stifling loans out to these SMEs.
For the formal sector the path towards a successful revitalization of the economy, with the myriad thorns and thistles in it, will provide more ammunition for the armchair critics to aim more barbs at some political heads vulnerable in their weak strategy and the unfortunate size of their enemy.
The most plain and easily recognizable are the plenteous ironical facts on the ground.
They exists an irony in the fact of Zimbabwe’s economy being expected to grow while marginally dependent upon a sector projected to be in recession for the next 6 years. The whole phalanx of minerals and metals mined locally face a global downturn in prices.
By 2018 gold prices would have fallen from the current 1380 to 1335, platinum will swing down from 1480 to a depressing 1353. Coal will go down from 76 to 73, a constance in pricing for the next 5 years that seems better when compared to the other recessions.
The answer out of the quagmire of seeing our minerals going for peanuts, according to the Minister is in value addition and implementation of mineral benefaction so that before the minerals go we will have sucked off as much glow and glitter as we can.
This requires investment for the creation of institutions and companies to make effectual this noble aim.
This is where the indegenisation gospel becomes more zealotry than salvation. The packaging of the empowerment drive has been coarsely done and marketed that by generality it has become some frightful creation which is alien all over the world and is purely our own Frankenstein vampire.
The face which it has evolved to have (our terms or fuck off, we will take it by force and you can go to hell too) has only served to damage the credibility of something that is a requisite of many governments the world over in dealing with Foreign Direct Investment.
A purely economic parameter has been overtaken by the passion of politics such that it’s now a battle for the physical victor not for the progression on the economic front. Or rather the latter has been relegated to second place in importance by the former. Some political heads are more concerned with seeing to it that the Europeans and their local busy boys are shown their proper place.
However with our Chinese counterparts not that eager to pour in liquid cash as some of the Minister’s own graphs and charts showed, it’s imperative that the rigidity of the indegenisation laws be ameliorated.
After all the attention we have lavished upon them one would expect the squint eyed guys to show more responsibility by injecting cash, other than coming over to caress our land with mines and sifting away the money. Alas on the scale of Official Development Assistance (ODA) they lag far behind the supposedly frigid European clique of the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Sweden and Switzerland.
They, as our favoured political partner, are not providing the crucial injection of money which the country needs, resulting in the Finance Minister hollering about how they will continue to seek dialogue with the sanctions state to see how we can get the cash. What are friends for then?
It’s thus another irony that our favoured look east policy isn’t bringing the requisite financial muscle and at the end of our political rantings that we won’t back down from a rigidly sinewed policy we are retracing steps to receive support from the kinsfolk of the investors whom we are barring.
This makes the indigenization drive more of a political reaction gone too far to an extent where it needs to be curbed by the common sense of simple economics more so where the preferred Chinese are not providing the financial muscle as needed by the economy.
The pile of ironies grows furthermore when the Finance Minister indirectly applauds the demise of the formal industry under the pretext of fanning into existence the informal sector.In the budget he talks about the growth of SMEs in Taiwan and Japan citing them as glorious examples to copy.
Former Minister of Finance Tendai Biti pointed this out soon after the presentation of the document.
The SME’s, for all their novelty, have been failing to extricate the large population of Zimbabweans out of the poverty trenches and it’s a plain fact that the majority of the people it’s said to employ would readily dump their small holder empires for the modest security of formal employment.
The supposed support they seem to have is nothing but simple political support for its proponents. Remove the man so dies the support.
It’s thus an iron fact that the prophets from the tabernacle of indegenisation are still to provide the logical sermons for the flourishing of SME’s as a necessary level in the apotheosis towards economic divinity, besides borrowing them as a convenience shade to hide under because something else(which they favoured) has failed.
And the news that the sold batch of diamonds at the noisily hailed sale in Belgium grossed a ‘whooping’ amount that barely left the floor, after all the noise that’s not an irony. That’s a pain in the toilet seater.
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