Online Reporter
ZIMBABWE’S sustained economic growth in recent years, with the economy even growing slowly during the worst drought for a generation last year, is a sign of the authorities putting in place the basics, and then everyone else putting in the hard work.
As President Mnangagwa noted at the start of the last Cabinet meeting of the year this week, the remarkable achievements resulted from a united approach, every authority, entity and person doing what was needed to create a spectacular result over the five years of the National Development Strategy 1.
There is a general acceptance that there were no short cuts to economic success; everyone knew that the fundamentals had to be fixed, which the Second Republic had the nerve to do even though this required a complete overhaul of procedures and the way we looked at funding our programmes.
Everyone knew that as the fundamentals were fixed, it still required a lot of hard work to move ahead, the big difference from the past being that this hard work would result in real growth and gains.
Most people doing the hard work wanted to improve their own lives and those of their families, which is fair enough, but doing it the way it was done meant that the whole nation benefited.
One huge change in thrust under the Second Republic was the creation of circumstances and policies that meant that hard work in production and marketing would move people forward, rather than manipulating bits of paper or trying to arbitrage exchange rates or stock market prices.
In other words you moved forward if you made and sold things, and that meant the growth that was seen was real growth, not virtual changes of figures.
A lot of the new policies used self-correcting market forces to advance to desired goals.
The President spoke about fixing energy generation and making sure we had enough.
This has struck a chord with investments, public and private, because there a good markets for energy. In fact, the expanding economy and the growth of businesses mean that whatever is generated can be sold for the foreseeable future.
By first fixing the fiscal and monetary markets, a process that needed more work than most people could initially imagine so entrenched were some of the complications in both public and private spheres, it has now proved possible for the first time in many years to use market forces rather than executive fiat to maintain the progress.
Exchange rates, for example, are set by banks using supply and demand and the liberalisation this year when retailers and others were allowed to set their own rates resulted in maximum swings of a few percent, and often so little change that no one noticed.
This stability throughout the systems has meant that hard work is now properly rewarded, compounding the policies already in place.
The drive against corruption continues, with some dramatic jail terms for those who think their contacts from the old days allow them to cheat.
But a lot of change has taken place because of other Government reforms that remove the possibility of favouritism and cheating.
We saw this early in the Second Republic with the huge changes in smallholder farming.
Policies were put in place where the only real test was a proven ability to do some hard digging.
People needed to attend training and make sure they did the initial preparations, the hard work, and once they were signed off on both they could expect inputs, with even these coming through community committees so they were not diverted to the lazy who did nothing.
The Second Republic has seen automatic high levels of transparency simply by adopting the sort of accounting and other financial policies that make it easy to track funds, see if the money is being spent properly and then making sure the books are audited at the required intervals.
This turn had build up confidence that the Government is not wasting scarce tax dollars and is spending the money in accordance with what Parliament approved, with Parliamentary committees now making sure we get value for money.
The private sector has seen outside investors, including some very big names coming to Zimbabwe, as well as some solid progress among the older companies.
It has to be stressed that both the investors, and the local firms expanding, are all production related, and generally want to turn basic raw materials from outside their factory doors to something they can sell.
So the unity the President was talking about is more of a unity of goals and processes and solid backing for sensible policies.
People can still argue where the secondary stress needs to be, but the general agreement is that we need to be a fair, honest and productive country that rewards hard work as well as needing that hard work for us all to succeed.
