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SOME milestones have been achieved in improving the ease of doing business in Zimbabwe through collaboration efforts by the Government, private sector and development partners.
Ideally, the reforms are meant to improve the business environment. In particular, the reduction of days required to register a company from 90 to 13 days.
While commendable progress has been made so far on the ongoing reforms, there is still a lot of work, which needs to be done if we are to realise positive impact from these reforms.
We are of the view that the reforms should be communicated to various stakeholders so that they appreciate their roles. A robust communication strategy is critical.
For instance, Zimbabwe’s economy is now dominated by the Small and Medium Enterprises. So, you will note that the bulk of our economy is in the SMEs and the informal sector. If there is no deliberate effort towards dissemination of these reforms to this sector, such businesses will continue grappling with the same problems due to lack of knowledge.
The same applies to improvement in the ranking of the country. Naturally, one would expect significant improvements in the ranking of the country after reforms, which is of course critical for attracting foreign direct investment.
However, the methodological approaches used to evaluate the cost of doing business in Zimbabwe is squarely centred on SMEs. The World Bank will interview the SMEs to understand if they are noticing notable changes in the cost of doing business in Zimbabwe.
The tragedy is that if the SMEs are not aware of the reforms they may not report any change.
We also have responsibility of communicating reforms to external players especially would be investors. For example, Georgia took an aggressive approach to cut down the cost of doing business and managed to break the record in the doing business world ranking, but went to sleep in showcasing their investment opportunities. As a result, it took more than five years for Georgia to realise meaningful FDIs.
Locally, doing business reforms if not linked to paradigm shift in the way we approach issues regarding productivity will come to waste.
Zimbabwe at the moment is trapped in an unfortunate matrix of poor work ethic, loss of direction and lack of fighting spirit.
This is happening across all faculties, that is, from Government, private sector and the general populace. We have entirely lost the fighting spirit and those who still have energy are wasting it on wrong things, which are even costing us like corruption.
We need to come out of this and take our pride as Zimbabweans and fight on.
Online Reporter