By Rashweat Mukundu
I CANNOT claim to be schooled in economics apart from growing up vending fruit and vegetables in Marondera. However, economic imperatives affect all of us and the Zimbabwean situation is no different.
Everyone agrees that Zimbabwe’s industry is at its lowest ebb ever, if there is any industry to talk about at all. A good example is the fact that Zimbabwe’s famous brands such as the Mazoe drink, available in supermarkets in Windhoek, Namibia, are manufactured in South Africa.
The only product from Zimbabwe I have encountered with a sense of pride in a foreign country is Tanganda’s silver tea on the supermarket shelves. Nothing more demonstrates industrial collapse than the near collapse of Mutare Board and Paper Mills, where machinery that appeared on ZBC news recently looks like relics from the German Krupps factories of the early 1900s. Zimbabwe’s industrial capacity of the 1980s and early 1990s is gone.
This brings us to the current public media push on the subsidies and duties that captains of industry have been asking from government. For some time now industrialists in the food industry, especially millers, have been pushing vigorously for a revision of government policy on food imports, especially maize meal.
The argument goes that the imported maize meal is too cheap hence it is pushing them out of the business or stopping them from coming back into business. The argument goes further that the millers should be protected so that they can have the sole rights to Zimbabwe’s consumers.
And, in my thinking, also raise prices to meet their production costs in an environment in which almost 90% of people are unemployed and five million surviving on donor food and millions surviving on less than a dollar a day.
In this regard the argument being advanced by Zimbabwe’s millers and food producers is very selfish and self-serving.
This argument is not driven by the national interest that people have no food, no money and are poor, but the desire by a few to resuscitate their “industry” and make money.
Granted, industry needs to be supported to get back to reasonable productive capacity. The question is, whose responsibility is it to do so? The second question is what is the Zimbabwe government’s priority under the current circumstances?
The priority should be to feed the people and avert the disaster of people starving. The majority of poor Zimbabweans have benefited from the decreasing food prices. At some point it became impossible to buy anything with US$100 in Zimbabwe.
I am, however, sure that civil servants can now afford to buy maize meal and cooking oil. This is not a justification of their paltry salary but an acknowledgement that US$100 now makes a difference in Zimbabwe. This is largely as a result of the reasonably priced food imports flooding the country.
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