Gvt to sweat finished projects to raise money for new infrastructure

Farirai Machivenyika

Senior Reporter

GOVERNMENT will leverage some of the infrastructure it has funded to raise money for the construction of more development initiatives, Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion Deputy Minister, David Mnangagwa, has said.

Deputy Minister Mnangagwa said this in the National Assembly while responding to issues raised by legislators during debate on the Mid-Term Budget Review statement presented by the Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion, Professor Mthuli Ncube, last month.

The Deputy Minister said the Government had deliberately engaged local companies for the construction of major infrastructure projects to empower them and prove that local entities can complete such projects.

“As a matter of fact, the main thrust of our economic strategy is to have a private sector-led economy,” he said.

“As Government, at the advent of the Second Republic, it was important to capacitate and ensure our local contractors that it is possible for a Zimbabwean Company to do a road and it is possible for a Zimbabwean Company to build dams.

“Right now, all the roads that are being done in Zimbabwe are being done by Zimbabwean companies. The Government had put its best foot forward in terms of economic, ideological and psychological thrust that you do not need a foreign company to come in.

“That does not necessarily mean that the Government should be funding roads, but it was a necessary step. What we are now doing to allow the Government Treasury not to spend short-term money on long-term projects, is to assign a lot of these Government projects, prescribed assets status. A lot of these projects are economically viable.

“We are going through asset recycling and we are in talks with Africa50 to raise financing through the Harare/Beitbridge Road. They will take over a portion of it and that will unlock new funding for something else. The Government does not need to be engaged in any of these projects, but we need to capacitate the private sector. This is a very deliberate exercise that we are going through.”

Africa50 was established by African governments and the African Development Bank to help bridge Africa’s infrastructure funding gap by facilitating project development, mobilising public and private sector finance and investing in infrastructure on the Continent.

It focuses on medium to large-scale projects that have a significant development impact and that provide an appropriate risk-adjusted return to investors.

Deputy Minister Mnangagwa also defended the country’s six percent economic growth projection, saying even the IMF had corroborated the figure.

“The six percent growth figure and projection, while the IMF went to other jurisdictions to revise downwards, they actually concurred and acknowledged the six percent growth for Zimbabwe,” Deputy Minister Mnangagwa said.

“These reports are public knowledge. The IMF has confirmed and corroborated our growth projections and that they are achievable. There is no motivation to fudge these numbers and to lie to ourselves as a nation.”