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The Herald, September 22, 1980
AFRICAN traders must harness their energy and enter the manufacturing industry with the object of controlling it, the Minister of Local Government and Housing, Cde Eddison Zvobgo, said yesterday.
“Dream big,” he told a meeting of about 150 members of the African Traders Confederation yesterday at a Highfield hotel.
“In strictly business terms, you are all kids, you are children. The challenge which we put to you is to grow up. Dream big and your dream should be the size of freedom,” the Minister said.
He was referring to the stranglehold which foreign companies might exercise on Zimbabweans unless local traders took the initiative. He warned against a situation where the “huge conglomerates and multinationals have the power in their pockets while we fly the flags and sing the national anthems.”
The Reserve Bank was not going to write out cheques for aspirant businessmen. The Government was not going to hand out money. Traders should rely on their own resourcefulness. He encouraged them to understand and assimilate currency regulations and business know-how.
“The difference between you and whites,” the Minister said, “is that you operate at a very unsophisticated level. Ask any white trader about currency regulations and they will know.”
Addressing one of the confederation members who made wagons, the Minister noted wryly: “When they (the whites) came to seize the country 90 years ago, they were riding in those.”
If the traders spoke “with one voice”, they would be very powerful because they had a large voice behind them. “You could send a message to the big boys that yesterday has gone.”
“Gone are the days of grocery’s shop,” he said. The trader, Cde Zvobgo stressed, was a friend of the people, a leader, “a man or woman on whose doors people knock in the darkness of night because they are in need of something.
“You have, on your own, with your own guts, a determination and inventiveness, put together something for the benefit of the people,” he said.
The Minister, reaffirmed Government policy when he told traders that they provided “an important link in the whole economic fabric of our country”, because they could help improve the quality of life in the tribal trust lands.
“Our people must have the good things of life and there is nowhere they can get them unless the little business man has them in stock.”
The “stingy, parasitic, exploitative” trader had no place in the rural areas. Money grabbers, insensitive to the needs and dreams of the people,” were public enemy number one, he said.
“The caring trader knows the conditions of the area in which he works,” he said. In this sense, “capitalism needs not be in conflict with socialist dreams.”
Cde Zvobgo said that traders should work together, preferably in co-operatives, because that encouraged mass participation. Corruption had to be destroyed.
“We are not going to create a few Rockefellers at the expense of all other businessmen to create an oligopoly. The Government cannot be bought. I have very, very decisive plans about this,” the Minister said. “I want personally to be satisfied that the sharing of business stands is fair.”
He then declared that he wanted to freeze the distribution of stands in Chitungwiza, to ensure that it was done fairly. Mr Zvobgo urged the traders to take note of the Afrikaaners’ example. Although the Minister did not like them for their political views, he admired the way they had wrenched business and political power from the English in South Africa.
LESSONS FOR TODAY
- Among policymakers and scholars alike, a robust manufacturing sector is broadly understood as a fundamental path to economic growth and development.
- Important factors behind industrialisation and job creation include political commitment to promote investment in employment -intensive manufacturing and quality of the industrial policy regime.
- The Second Republic has been on over-drive to revive and establish manufacturing companies in the country.
- Trade facilitation that lowers trade costs enables industrialisation and value chain development, by reducing the cost of inputs and improving their availability, raising competition in domestic markets, thereby enhancing efficiency, and making exports more competitive.
- The launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in March 2018, a single market for goods and services in Africa aiming at unlocking manufacturing potential and facilitating industrialisation, driving sustainable growth and jobs among other objectives is one major move that will sustain African Business people.
Online Reporter