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Brighton Gumbo Business Reporter
THE Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) has come up with a “12 Cs” strategy that it believes could be useful towards enhancing the ease of doing business in the country and attracting investment.
CZI president Busisa Moyo, says there is a need for Zimbabwe to urgently review its business operations focusing on 12 investor concerns. These are consistency in policy, local consumption, competitiveness, costs, corruption, courage, convergence, conversations, confidence, currency, common sense and copying.
Moyo, who is also United Refineries Limited chief executive officer says the 12 factors would assist the country to define reality correctly in the context of global economic forces.
“We’ve spent $7 billion on imports for local consumption alone.
“If we had produced goods worth that value we could have managed to create two million jobs for our people,” he said.
The CZI boss said investors were losing confidence in the local industry as a result of policy loopholes.
“People have lost confidence in us, our policies and how we implement them or how they get to be a policy. We lack transparency,” Moyo added.
He said common sense requires the country to seriously converse on the state of the economy as a matter of urgency in order to achieve development.
“We need to have conversations that span on real issues that impede growth of our country and that’s first and foremost the economy and development issues.
“Often we spend most of our time conversing on issues that are out of touch with reality,” said Moyo.
He said transport costs, for instance, were chocking business operations.
“Road transport costs don’t facilitate the viability of doing business.
“The local fuel suppliers get fuel as low as $0.40 but they charge here at $1.10.
“As such the business loses profitability,” said Moyo.
On currency, Moyo said some local suppliers of goods were still clinging onto the Zim-dollar mentality of seeking to make up to 200 percent profits.
He said suppliers should know how to handle the US$ in order to be competitive.
Moyo said the country needed the courage to face the reality.
He said apart from the 12 Cs, there was a need to capacitate and reform operations of parastatals such as Zesa and the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) who should be economic enablers.
derick.khumalo