admin
Zimbabwe’s industry continues to bleed under the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and their western allies.Although certain elements in the country and abroad have sought to play down the sanctions as restrictive measures, their toll on the economy is there for all to see.
The Industrial Development Corporation has reportedly lost over $20 million to the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), while a Zimbabwean resident in Botswana had his $1 000 frozen, Parliament heard last week.
The Zimbabwe Fertiliser Company, a subsidiary of the IDC, still has its $5 million frozen to date as the US applies its Zimbabwe Transition to Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, its sanctions law.
The Minerals Marketing Corporation also lost over $30 million in revenue to OFAC. Zimbabwe has lost a total of $42 billion in revenue over the past 13 years because of the sanctions regime maintained by the West.
The sanctions were imposed in retaliation to the land reform programme, which Harare has implemented and seen hundreds of thousands of the black majority owning farmland previously held by a few thousand white farmers.
Mberengwa East legislator Cde Makhosini Hlongwane told the National Assembly last week that none of the IDC’s 15 subsidiaries had been able to do telegraphic transactions with any international finance institution, either to pay for raw materials or any other transaction.
To call such a scenario, restrictive measures is to underestimate the ripple effect of the sanctions regime on the economy. Cde Hlongwane, who chairs the Zimbabwean delegation to the African, Caribbean and Pacific-European Union Joint Parliamentary Assembly, was moving a motion that the National Assembly writes to the European Union and the US to lift the embargo.
Our own IDC is struggling to fulfil its mandate while its counterpart in South Africa has even offered to help revive Bulawayo companies. The Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises and Co-operatives Development last week signed a memorandum of understanding with the South African Trade and Industry Ministry to fund the revival of targeted distressed Bulawayo companies. The difference in capacities between Zimbabwe’s IDC and the IDC in South Africa is because the latter is operating free of any hindrances.
Deputy South African Trade Minister Mrs Elizabeth Thabethe told our sister paper, Sunday News, that her country had identified five companies from various sectors in Zimbabwe that are under stress for a pilot bailout programme through joint ventures. These will be assisted through South Africa’s IDC.
The $20 million that the Zimbabwean IDC has lost to the US could have gone a long way in propping up local businesses while the Zimbabwe Fertiliser Company’s $5 million, which went down the sanctions drain, could also have helped the company a great deal.
The Zimbabwean individual who lost $1 000 has also been hugely affected by the sanctions because that figure is quite massive for an individual. And yet we hear the opposition MDC-T, which invited the sanctions upon our country, and such minded groups and individuals claiming they are just restrictive measures.
Another IDC subsidiary, Olivine, lost the $2 million it had secured from the PTA Bank to recapitalise and the firm is currently struggling to produce some of its popular household products.
When Parliament began sitting recently the newly elected Members of Parliament from the Zanu-PF benches started by calling for the lifting of the economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the West.
The MPs called on Zimbabwean political parties to unite and call for the immediate and unconditional lifting of the economic sanctions to ameliorate the suffering they have caused to people.
The examples cited above clearly show that the sanctions are not targeted at the Zanu-PF and Government leadership but meant to make the economy “scream” and cause untold suffering to the people of Zimbabwe.
Last week, MDC-T MPs sought to downplay the effects of the sanctions by calling them restrictive measures, as they have always maintained, but Cde Hlongwane’s presentation clearly shows otherwise.
Online Reporter