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The conflict in Ukraine hits Zimbabwe four ways and President Mnangagwa has carefully outlined where we will be hit and what we need to do, urgently, to minimise the damage so not only cope, but maintain our economic growth.
The first effect, that everyone has seen, is the rapid rise in the global price of crude oil and natural gas. This has come about not so much as a cut in output, since even the Russian wells are still pumping, but from the desire by a lot of Russian customers to switch to other sources and the general feeling that stocking up, hoarding if you like, is a good idea.
The markets are not helped by major oil companies wanting to maximise profits while this happens.
There are three ways we can ameliorate the resulting price rises. First, the Government is modifying its duty regime, cutting the taxes on imported petrol and diesel.
But there are limits to how far we can go since the Government needs its revenue, in this modern dispensation of balanced budgets, to among other things keep paying civil servants, and keeping their pay in line with inflation, and maintaining its capital expenditure since a lot of the other effects need more Government investment.
These two items, the payroll and the capital programmes, are easily the two largest budget items so we need to be careful.
The second way appears to be boosting ethanol output. At the moment we are on zero percent blending and fairly obviously whatever is causing the drastic downturn in production at our privately-owned ethanol plant needs to be fixed promptly.
The new sugar cane crop is coming to harvest time so there should be an improvement soon.
The third way is for us to use less petrol and diesel. We still waste quite a lot with unnecessary trips, poor fleet management and some high-use driving habits.
Both our business sectors and our private motorists need to manage vehicle use better and drive in ways that use less fuel for the vital kilometres.
Advice is readily available on how to do this, so what is now needed both for stopping rising business costs and keeping household costs down is the will to follow that advice.
The second effect of the conflict is that global wheat prices are rising with the three major exporters of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus all likely to have limited output and sales.
Other major exporters will not be offering discounts.
The Zimbabwean solution is to grow more, as President Mnangagwa noted.
Last year we came close to self-sufficiency, so the obvious solution is to boost production a bit more and get to self-sufficiency.
We have the water, we have already sorted out the seed and fertiliser and Zesa is giving the farmers priority.
So this is not impossible. Our farmers will obviously want something close to import-parity pricing, and that can be sorted out.
The main gains are that we will have the wheat without tapping global markets and that we will not need to spend foreign currency on imports.
The third effect is our fertiliser supply line. We buy a lot from Russia and Belarus.
Even if supplies are good, there is still the problem that petroleum and natural gas are major raw materials and those prices are rising.
We have talked about rebuilding our own fertiliser industry for some years, and the Second Republic has been taking action, for example to boost phosphate mining and encouraging more investment to use more readily available raw materials, but this seems a good time for the industry to make a major push.
The fourth effect is the possible decline in investment. Russian companies are investing heavily in our next major platinum mine, the Great Dyke mine, and in diamond production and Belarus has a major investment in agricultural machinery.
Some of the potential slack can be made up with more local investment, hence one of the needs to make sure that the tax flows remain good.
On the positive side world metal prices, from platinum group metals and gold down to base metals, are also rising. With the clean up by the Second Republic in the mining sector and the practical steps taken already by the Second Republic to re-open mines and boost investment in fixing processing plants, we will be among the winners in these markets.
We need to maintain that rapid growth in output.
The President did not see any insurmountable problems in doing this and achieving the set targets in our development strategy.
Also on the positive side is the growth in manufacturing, largely to fill local market requirements. But now we also need to keep pushing this to start filling some of the gaps that will arise in regional markets.
Already some sectors are well placed to push exports hard having sorted out their local value chains, and in some cases, such as with health supplies, have started efficient production of new products that meet international standards and so can be shipped.
The other positive aspect comes oddly enough as a result of the sanctions, mainly financial sanctions, imposed by the US, which is maintaining these, and European countries, which have started relaxing them significantly.
This meant that we did not borrow much, and the latter spendthrift years of the First Republic could have seen some horror stories, and we have never been reliant on aid flows.
What aid has come in has generally been for helping with precise needs, rather than for balancing the budget or balancing the current account so we have had to ensure that foreign currency being spent is the result of foreign currency earned, rather than given. This is unusual in Africa.
The net result is that we have already learned to cope in a harsher world, relying far more on ourselves. The Second Republic fiscal and monetary reforms not only made that coping possible, but have allowed us now to have a fast growing economy.
The balanced budgets, the greater local production and the rising exports have driven this growth, and can continue to do so.
This is a good base to build on, and we need to continue building rather than wringing our hands. Already road construction and maintenance is now local.
Several major dams have used external contractors, but the rebuilding of the Zimbabwean skills base after a long gap, and almost everyone doing the work on these dams was local, means we have the required skills at all levels to do a lot more ourselves.
So the optimism displayed by the President is not some pie in the sky, but is based on what his Government has already done, and what Zimbabweans as a whole have already done in their own business lives, since the start of the Second Republic.
The opportunities that now arise allow us to push harder.
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter