leeroy mupariri
Zanu PF sees its function as the party running the Government with the backing of a majority of voters more and more as ensuring the economic success of Zimbabwe. That role is also reflective of its roots of ensuring that this success is shared by all and built by being fair to all.
This dual thrust is coming to the fore in this year’s Annual People’s Conference, which is being hosted in Bulawayo as part of the general rotation of venues introduced since President Mnangagwa took over the leadership of the party. But as Zimbabwe’s second largest city, and as the main city in the west of the country, Bulawayo has much to offer.
For a start, special arrangements and creating conference facilities and accommodation for delegates is not needed. The city has all this and the hosting of the annual conference has added to the general growing business in the city. As the city itself is making clear, it has been building up its capacity to routinely host conferences as an extra economic sector in what was once a pure industrial city.
But its position as a central industrial city, and one whose businesses are rebuilding the industrial base, it is the obvious venue for a conference whose theme is “industrialise and modernise towards attainment of Vision 2030”. Delegates do not have to go far to see practical efforts to do both, and see the opportunities being seized and note the bottlenecks that still have to be opened.
We hope many will look around and make contact with the practical business people who will have to do a lot of the actual work of industrialising and modernising, although they need the opportunities created by Government and those in turn are created by Zanu PF policies. It all tends to fit together.
The other major thrust of the Zanu PF economic drive is that everyone needs to be involved and to benefit, with no place and no person left behind. Zanu PF’s roots were as a mass political movement to first free the people and then let them benefit.
This is also good economics. The colonial economy was built on a small fraction of the population owning or controlling most of the assets and reaping most of the benefit. This did create a core of a modern economy, in the midst of a undevelopment and poverty, and was never going to grow that much since it excluded so many and never created large markets.
Since independence Zanu PF has been opening doors. The initial efforts, since maintained, were to open the doors of education and training, and the Second Republic has returned to those roots by upgrading that thrust with the heritage-based Education 5.0, so that the huge numbers benefiting from education and training can also apply that education, filling a gap in the process that had become apparent.
The Second Republic has been pushing hard, with Zanu PF providing a lot of the thrust, to make sure that economic growth is accelerated, is practical, that is achievable, and that it also benefits large numbers.
So we have seen the pro-investment policy that has brought a huge spurt of growth in mining, creating jobs and ensuring a rapid rise in exports that in turn ensures the economic conditions for other sectors to grow.
We have seen the conversion of land reform, an essential first step but only a first step, to practical farming growth through the Government financial and input programmes, making sure that farmers are trained in modern farming, and note that modernisation drive, and can plant and harvest crops for their own needs and to sell.
Industry has been growing, but at nothing like the same speed as farming and mining, and here is the urgent need for Zanu PF to look at the constraints and see how they can be removed. Bulawayo is a good site for doing this.
Some constraints are self-generated by some industrialists, who need to be encouraged to think outside the inherited boxes and move into a wider African market. Others require perhaps more action to open opportunities for new generations of industrialists to create and grow businesses.
This does not mean, of course, that older businesses should die; they need to adapt and modernise and grow as well. But it does mean that we should not be looking at our industry as a zero-sum affair that is there to meet local demand. We need the same sort of openness that has seen miners and farmers expand and continually look at exports and wider markets.
Government programmes can help, and industry does need help with infrastructure, such as the road and rail networks, now being fixed, the power generation, now being expanded, and the water supplies, a severe constraint in Bulawayo that is being sorted out with the building of the Gwayi-Shangani Dam and associated pipeline.
But when the conference goes into the details, it also needs to look as how the practical programmes that are revolutionising farming and mining can be extended more thoroughly to the industrialisation phases, and obviously the raw materials coming from the mines and farms should be the major components of expanding industry. The conference is in the right city to focus policies.
