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When all systems should already have been go to restore Zimbabwe’s industrial hub to its old glory days, we still have those involved in the revival act speaking and doing things at cross purposes — all this no doubt to the delight of Zimbabwe’s detractors still spoiling for the country’s economy to “scream” as a signal of the effects of illegal Western economic sanctions imposed to try to exact regime change as punishment for our land reform programme which has seen vast tracts of land acquired from white commercial farmers allocated to blacks who needed the land the most.
Professor Welshman Ncube, Minister of Industry and Commerce, and the Government’s protagonist in ensuring that Bulawayo lives again as the country’s industrial giant through the disbursement of $40 million under the Distressed Industries and Marginalised Areas Fund, protested just recently that CABS was not playing ball to ensure that companies shut down or teetering under the iniquitous Western economic embargo are recapacitated as a fillip for industrial growth.
[The Dimaf funding facility is between CABS, the Government and the Old Mutual.]
In a recent statement CABS said it has approved applications from 10 companies drawn from Bulawayo, Victoria Falls, Harare, Goromonzi and Marondera. It added that a total of $3 963 750 funding has been approved with $3 128 750 having been disbursed. Pending disbursements add up to $835 000.
But Prof Ncube, saying that the government had submitted 60 names for consideration, accused the Central African Building Society of refusing to co-operate with the Government.
“There is nothing for Bulawayo companies in the first $3 million they have disbursed so far. The bank did not consult us and continues to refuse that the first $40 million under that fund is for Bulawayo. They do not want to accept Cabinet decision,” said Prof Ncube.
Do we see a standoff here, technically or is it a case of: “He who pays the piper calls the tune?”
Hardly so as the revive Bulawayo industries is not a solo run for CABS.
But anyway, who rules this country CABS or the Government of Zimbabwe? It is not CABS for sure but what gives the building society the temerity to ride roughshod over the government’s wishes.
Moreover, the public at large has been made in various government statements to believe that Bulawayo industries would be first in the line of distressed companies elsewhere in the country to benefit from Dimaf. So it must have boggled the minds of many to learn that Victoria Falls, Harare, Goromonzi and Marondera were bracketed together with Bulawayo for financial infection to their ailing industries.
The manner in which CABS seems to play its cards, too close to its chest, might or might not make some people wander if some anonymous political smart alecs are pulling some strings in the ongoing Dimaf saga for reasons best known to themselves.
Or do some people somewhere fear that the revival of the ailing industries in Bulawayo would place a political crown on the head of Prof Ncube and therefore also political credit for the MDC formation that he leads.
This pen hopes to God that no-one pregnant with any such political jealous exists in Zimbabwe. But still why, indeed has Dimaf been thrown into such confusion when it should have demonstrated a unity of purpose and capacity between the government and financial and economic groupings to blunt Machiavellian plans by the external enemy.
As it is, the European Union must be greatly delighted that Zimbabweans are not at one in efforts to neutralise the effects of sanctions that the Union is still determined to mention, if necessary makes more draconian, to ruin the economy and the people of this country.
That the EU said this week it would “suspend” the sanctions it imposed along with the United States if a referendum on Zimbabwe’s new constitution is “peaceful and credible”, representing an important milestone in the preparation of democratic elections.
The silent message to Zimbabweans, a satanic message for that matter, encoded in the EU statement is that they do not know what their interests are and should therefore act as if under the tutelage of the Europeans thousands of kilometres away.
Clearly the EU is agitating, in fact silently campaigning for a vote in the forthcoming elections that will remove Zanu-PF from power and its leader President Mugabe who is viewed by the West as its nemesis.
For the EU and America, a “democratic election” in Zimbabwe will be those that reverse the gains of independence, chief among them land reform over which economic sanctions were imposed in the first place.
Zimbabwe is not an “Other” so Europe why the hell does the EU behave as though the country were its colony?
That the EU’s decision to suspend rather than end the economic embargo and all restrictions imposed on political leaders is a tactical lever intended to make Zimbabweans vote in a way that will unsay them as an independent and sovereign people accountable only to themselves in the way they shape their own destiny.
By refusing to remove the sanctions in total, the EU is rendering itself as an enemy of the people of Zimbabwe, whatever nice words leaders from that grouping of countries might say to try to appease a nation made to suffer for claiming its birth right from settler farmers of European stock.
The response of Zimbabweans to the EU stance should be total unity as what is at stake here is a plot for subtle yet blatant recolonisation of this country for the plunder of its vast natural resources.
Any Zimbabwean politician or politician who kow-tow to the Europeans and to the Americans and hope that they can ride to power on the backs of those foreigners should be warned that to whites, angry over the success of our armed revolution, a good African is a dead one or countless numbers of hungry children from whose mouths economic sanctions have taken out food by rendering their bread-winners jobless, suggests.
And the travel ban imposed on President Mugabe and Zanu-PF officials has Europe arrogated to itself the status of heaven on earth into which the Zimbabwean leaders are forbidden to enter because they do not subscribe to a religion of the Europeans and their ilk elsewhere that political and economic subservience is the portion for Zimbabweans and other small nations around the world.
But of course, the borders of Western Europe and also of North America, Australia and New Zealand, on whose hate list Zimbabwe appears, do not stretch out to the limits of the globe so that no friendly countries exist in between and which Zimbabweans can visit to do business.
Also, the value democracy is universally viewed as meaning a government of the people by the people for the people, and this is exactly the case in Zimbabwe which imperialists lecture on democratic governance as though it has become their hobby.
Indeed, these people’s obsession with democracy appears to connote a system of government for Zimbabweans that accord a partnership of a black horse and a white rider who uses the reins in his hands to make the horse canter or gallop in a chosen direction.
Zimbabweans went to war to eject the white rider from their backs and never again will his saddle be strapped on our backs, except over our dead bodies.
Back to Dimaf. It really sounds ludicrous that the pressed companies in Bulawayo should be subjected to this, that, or that other condition by CABS in order for them to qualify for funding to restore operations.
Surely, most of those companies that have shutdown or downsized their operations previously played a nought insignificant role in contributing to the country’s export market.
That alone should tell anyone with a sense and a desire for stepped up industrial and economic growth that the companies deserve to be thrown a lifeline without much-ado about nothing.
Zimbabweans have learnt from a survey by international development experts which forecasts that this country’s growing phenomenon within the next decade.
However, all that could end up as a pipe dream if a slap-dash approach that seems common at present in kick-starting and normalizing the operations of companies reeling under the effects of economic sanctions does not stop forthwith.
Bulawayo ought therefore to be and be seen as a legitimate point of departure in re-invigorating companies that will contribute towards the overall growth of Zimbabwe’s economy in the projected period.
Those Zimbabweans, be they blacks or whites, who have no faith in the country’s future and therefore in themselves as agents of sustained economic developments for the good of this nation, should have the courage of their convictions and step aside so that they do not remain as stumbling blocks in our country’s overall development initiatives.
Online Reporter