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employment before the doors close, paints a very gloomy picture.
In Spain’s capital, Madrid, the queues are forming at an employment agency that is just 3km away the imposing Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, which is home to the richest football club in the world, Real Madrid.
Real Madrid has a market value of US$3,3 billion and its choking salary bill is out of sync with the intricacies of everyday life in the city.
This is just a mirror of what Europe is going through but while the house is on fire abroad and other parts of the world, emerging markets notably from Africa and the Asian countries are smiling all the way to the bank.
These markets have been registering impressive growth rates on the back of rising commodity prices, subsiding political upheavals, improved policy frameworks and the freezing of physical borders as the global village mantra is gaining currency.
The emerging markets are being led by the Brics nations, which comprise Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. About 86 percent of the world’s largest shopping malls are located in the Brics community and not the Western capitals.
The purchasing power of the Brics nations combined also outweighs the average for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations.
On the home front Zimbabwe, with a population growth of roughly 13 million, can certainly capitalise on the massive appetite of Western nations to find new ways of sustaining their economy as they seems to have exhausted their traditional sources of growth.
Only recently Portugal, with an official unemployment rate of 18 percent, received about US$110 billion as a rescue package from the European bloc.
The bloc has also come to the rescue of Spain with a jobless rate of 25 percent and Cyprus.
Cyprus, however, is still reeling under the unfriendly rescue package, which might crowd out domestic investment going forward.
Back home we have a diamond sector in Zimbabwe that has potential to contribute about 25 percent to the global supply that is definitely the envy of the world.
Our energy sector is operating at below 55 percent capacity of its installed capacity of 2 200MW and is generating 1 200MW and we have an equities market with only about 28 percent of counters trading regularly.
We also have an aviation industry where our national carrier plies fewer routes than cargo carrier business from fellow African airlines such as South African Airways, Kenyan Airways, Ethiopian Airlines and Egyptair.
Given this scenario, the country’s leadership should urgently seek foreign partnerships to mobilise the kind of investment needed for us to leverage on the massive potential that we have as a country.
For instance, we need to urgently secure a business partner for Air Zimbabwe if our national airline is to play its rightful leading role during the United Nations World Tourism Organisation General Assembly that we are co-hosting with Zambia in August.
Most countries in the West are in desperate need of resources to refuel their economies and Africa is ripe for the picking.
This is because the geo-political shift in Southeast Asia makes countries like China, Indonesia, and those in Latin America such as Brazil, Argentina very tricky customers for the West.
However, if we are to engage foreign investors our resources have to fetch the right prices on the international market, our companies also have to engage partners who believe in a zero sum game without any room for a win-lose scenario.
In crafting and executing our indigenisation and economic empowerment policy, there must be room to empower locals by setting policy measures which attract foreign direct investment with traceable effects of job creation, poverty reduction and also technology transfers.
Let the multinationals set up bases in our land but only on Zimbabwean terms and conditions.
We should have agreements that expedite income equality, Gross Domestic Product growth and increased life expectancy.
In a normal market economy, there is literally no reason to go hungry when your output is generating strong external demand.
Let us wake up and correct our economic malaise by attracting the right kind of investors.
The abundance of diamonds, platinum, arable land and a solid education system should be used to boost the country and halt our slide into a nation of flea markets and boutiques.
How long are we going to rely on grey imports, which can only worsen the carnage on our roads?
We should also not continue to entertain foreign nationals who believe that our country is a spending economy, which does not need running machinery to power its economy but shops.
The Zimbabwe Investment Authority cannot seriously settle for US$30 million worth of Foreign Direct Investment since the beginning of the year.
A mid-term Budget Statement cannot be a weapon for offering an apology to the nation for failing to raise a mere US$4 billion in such a land of abundance.
It is time we start harvesting from the desperation of European economies as the global economy balance of power has shifted to the south and east with the massive protest that characterised the recent May Day celebrations in Europe, a clear testimony of how stretched their economies are.
So serious are Europe’s economic woes that British Prime Minister David Cameron has been considering pulling his island nation out of the European Union as he believes that problems in the 27-nation bloc had been weighing on the economic prospects of his nation. Italy, the third largest economy in Europe, is changing governments almost on an annual basis as it is failing to handle the debt debate in its echelons of power.
This could be the opportune time to revise the trade agreements we had entered into with these countries.
We need to implement the relevant strategy such as value addition, import substitution and specialisation in production of tradeable commodities.
Our empowerment policies should be more biased towards setting prudential limits where no foreign investor is allowed to open a shop but set up some form of industry.
We should also look beyond the nationality of an investor and rather focus more on the size of their investment and its potential benefit to the nation.
Let us rebuild our Zimbabwe to recompense for the lost decade. We need to start creating jobs for those who are willing and able to work.
We have to promote entrepreneurship not as a substitute for job creation but rather to widen our fiscal space through tax collection, which is an important background for infrastructural development.
Christopher Takunda Mugaga is an economist. He is the head of research for Econometer Global Capital, a regional finance and economics research firm. He can be contacted on +263 772 340 353 or / +263 776 266 062 or on email: [email protected].
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