Indigenisation board begins preps to establish regional offices

Economic Empowerment programme being implemented by Government becomes broad-based.
NIEEB looks forward to having the regional offices established by mid-year.
In an interview, NIEEB chairperson Mr David Chapfika said the board had started recruiting personnel to manage the regional offices.
“We are in the process of recruiting regional managers who will manage our offices at provincial level. The board has received applications to fill the positions of regional managers. For transparency reasons, we are working with a human resources consultancy to recruit the personnel,” he said.
He said applications for the vacancies that have arisen within NIEEB were still being accepted, adding that prospective employees were being shortlisted for interviews. Once the recruitment of regional managers was complete, Mr Chapfika said, they would also work on recruiting other supporting administrative staff.
“In terms of office space to operate from, I don’t think we still have a challenge in that regard. Considering that we are at the beginning of the year we still have reasonable time to secure the space in all the provinces. We also have an action plan to guide us to the intended objective,” he said.
In 2010, Government established NIEEB whose mandate is to work out modalities on how the majority people can benefit from the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment programme.
So far, NIEEB was looking at how the Government can assist the majority to get the funds to acquire shares under the ndigenisation programme.
Last year, through the indigenisation programme, the Employee Share Ownership Scheme was launched to enable companies to sell between five percent and 28 percent of their shares to their workers.
Community Share Ownership Trusts were set up to ensure communities in areas in which mining companies operate benefited from the extraction of minerals resulting in broad-based economic empowerment.
Zimbabwe enacted the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment regulations that seek to redress the imbalances that existed in the shareholding structures of most foreign-owned companies operating in the country.
Among the regulations is the requirement that all foreign-owned firms sell 51 percent of their shares to indigenous people.