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Business Reporter
GOVERNMENT is working on transforming the Standards Association of Zimbabwe into a regulatory authority to ensure that locally produced and imported goods meet set benchmarks. The development will effectively address the problem of sub-standard and inferior products dumped into the local market at the expense and risk of the well being of unsuspecting consumers.
Industry and Commerce Minister Mike Bimha confirmed to The Herald Business in an interview on Friday last week that Government was crafting the relevant legislation, which would be discussed in the current session of Parliament.
“It is what we are in the process of doing. It (Act) is going through the normal legislative process. SAZ establishes standards; it assists organisations to come up with standards. (But) it is not a regulator because it is not (legally) empowered to deal with standards,” Minister Bimha said.
“The legislation will establish a regulatory authority with the legal power to administer standards so that we meet set requirements for both local and imported products,” he said.
It however, remains unclear whether the legislation will compel compulsory testing for quality standards of all imports amid concerns of a proliferation of inferior goods on the local market. On many occasions local goods have also fallen short of minimum standards.
While SAZ has in the past done random test of products sold on the domestic market and found a good number of them to be sub-standard, it had no legal clout to enforce compliance.
Zimbabwe has become a fertile dumping ground of sub-standard products due to leaky borders and the attractiveness of the returns due to the use of the stable multicurrency regime.
However, this has affected local industry whose capacity utilisation has fallen to levels below 40 percent. Bata Shoe Company managing director Mr Luis Pinto was recently quoted in local media as saying capacity utilisation plummeted especially in 2010, due to a myriad of challenges chief among them cheap and sub-standard products from the East and Asian countries.
“The imports from the Eastern countries are affecting us. The people bring poor quality footwear which do not last as compared to our genuine products,” Mr Pinto was quoted as saying.
According to Comesa secretary general Dr Sindiso Ngwenya a total of US$568 million worth of shoes were imported into the Comesa region from across the entire globe world and this translates to approximately 28,4 million to 113,6 million pairs of imported shoes.
According to a study by the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries’ 2013 manufacturing sector, including stiff completion from foreign products contributed to factors behind the drop in capacity utilisation in industry has fallen to 39,6 percent this year from 44,9 percent in 2012.
CZI found that in terms of external competition from imported products, South Africa tops the list of competing imported products with 85 percent of respondents indicating that they compete with South African products while 67 percent of the competing products are from China.
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