Online Reporter
ZIMBABWEANS have to be responsible for developing their own country, communities, families and lives and cannot expect others to do this for them.
Of course, this does mean that they need backing and that is one of the jobs of a Government, to make sure that the environment is right so that people can progress securely and convert their talents, hard work and innovation into real productivity and value creation and then enjoy the results of that effort through better harvests, more profitable businesses and all the other rewards.
President Mnangagwa has consistently pressed both the need for Zimbabweans, as individuals and communities, to roll up their sleeves and get on with it, and the need for Government to back this individual and community action by making it easier to create value chains and create new industries.
The Second Republic has stressed the fact that economic growth is the result of all these individual actions, rather than the Government trying to run the economy, but that an effective Government makes sure that those creating the real productive wealth have a lot of backing.
So farmers have been given support through financing and services and guaranteed markets, but they still have to do the digging and the ploughing and look after the crops and livestock and make sure they harvest at the right time and do the initial on-farm processing properly.
So successful have the initial programmes been, as the President remarked at the Zanu PF Politburo meeting on Wednesday, that it has become possible to put in more advanced programmes, such as the new productivity booster kits that will allow practical access to irrigation to the highly skilled and go ahead small-scale farmers who are now a good low-risk bet when it comes to advancing loans.
As economics and societies become more complex, ever more opportunities open up.
Governments can make sure that every child gets an ever-better education to enter the real world and earn a living, often by being able to open their own business, perhaps small to start with, but with the sky the limit.
Efforts are also being made to provide the sort of support that has proven so successful in upgrading farming from the subsistence level with little hope to the present concept that all farmers must be businesspeople, working out how to use their land to produce more and ever higher value produce and to support local value chains and start to create their own value chains as they look at more farm and community processing.
Again, high levels of integrity and good reputations will make it easier to build up support as Government likes to reinforce at least potential success and a lot of private sector finance likes to have smart and honest business people on their books.
In many ways this integrity, willingness to put in the hard work, willingness to look for and accept innovative solutions is what the President means when he says we are responsible for our own destinies, as individuals and as a nation.
This does not mean that we do not need extra investment, but just as we wish to treat those who invest in Zimbabwe fairly, we want the investors to treat Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans fairly.
The Second Republic has a good reputation for dealing fairly and correctly with investors, or at least the sort of serious investors we are determined to attract. The pro-investment climate is making their path ever smoother and a sensible investor can make a decent return on what they put into the country.
But the respectable investors, the ones we have been attracting and who have been making their money here, also accept that there are rules that all in business, local and foreign, have to accept. Among the first needs when a new business is being established is to make sure that the rational and fairly obvious environmental rules we have found are needed are observed, so that the new business does no permanent damage and does not compromise the safety of those in its vicinity.
Sensible businesses accept this as they also benefit when others move in next door.
Investors also have to follow the basic labour law of Zimbabwe, and this is largely applied to each concern via the relevant national industrial council, which is run by the local businesses and their worker representatives and so has built up practical and workable solutions.
Again the foreign investor finds plugging into what their local counterparts have built up makes sense.
Tax laws apply to all.
Zimbabwe has very clear and straight-forward tax codes, with respectable allowance made for capital investment, and unlike those countries that have thousands of pages of tax law, the relatively far more comprehensible Zimbabwean codes are easy to apply.
We all follow the same codes, local and foreign, so again the investor knows they are plugging into something that has been hammered out by those they will be working with.
In fact, one of the major attractions that Zimbabwe offers the respectable foreign investor is the assurance that they will be treated exactly the same in practice as if they were a Zimbabwean, with all those rights and advantages, but obviously also making sure they follow the duties of the local people.
This double means that we have been building up the group of much needed investors without giving up our own responsibilities or our own rights.
