Sometimes all you need are simple solutions

and big letters.
The country’s business leaders and politicians have been convening conference after conference, seminar after seminar, workshop after workshop and yet what the economy requires are simple solutions.

I have travelled throughout the industrial areas in Harare but what I found was factory after factory with little or no activity.
There was very little traffic unlike days gone by.
When I returned to Harare’s Central Business District, it was choked with vehicles of every description, not to mention the commuter omnibuses disobeying every rule of the country’s roads.
What then are the simple solutions? This reminds me of a discussion I had with an indigenous Marondera farmer.

He said our politicians, no matter which party they belong to, have failed to find solutions to our economic problems because, according to the farmer, they are all interested only in acquiring political power.
What then is political power without economic power or emancipation?
How can we acquire economic power or emancipation? As I have said earlier, factories are empty or are lying idle in the industrial areas.

Some are being used as warehouses for imported goods for resale, contrary to the original intention of their use.
All over the world, subsidies to the farmer are the mainstay of agriculture.
Unlike in Zimbabwe, farmers in other countries form the most powerful political bloc.
Farmers never pay back loans because their produce is used to tame the vocal urban populations, which could erupt if prices of food were to rise.
In Egypt, if the price of bread goes up by 1 percent, this would spark unprecedented riots.

The farmer then becomes the mainstay of the economy. The Government should recoup its expenditure on the support for the farmers by selling the produce to the manufacturers who then export any surplus products.
The Vietnamese government has gone a step further by making it a requirement that university students have to go to rural areas for attachment.

In Zimbabwe, medical students are required to do their attachment in rural areas. This is why they have become the best-trained doctors in Africa and are most sought after in the world. Vietnam sends its medical, economics, engineering and technical students to the rural areas for attachments.
Despite the ravaging wars the country experienced, within two decades, Vietnam has become an economic powerhouse.

Zimbabwe suffers from the white-collar job syndrome. The service sector cannot be well developed without the farming and industrial sectors.
Some are of the opinion that the introduction of duties on imported products would force investors to open up factories since closed.
Those with money to spare are not interested in putting their money into farming, manufacturing or industry for the simple reason that they have no confidence in the promises from politicians to protect their investment.

The individuals with money are canny animals. They can smell danger years ahead.
We are being encouraged to buy shares to localise the control of local foreign-owned companies. From thousands of shares, the dividends are not worth it.

In South Africa, blacks bought shares with borrowed money but they found out that the exercise was not worth it when they could not repay the loans from dividend payouts.
They sold the shares to the banks that had loaned them money. What then happened to the black empowerment crusade?
It hit a brick wall.

We have all heard about the Asian tigers, the countries that thrive on exports for economic emancipation.
The governments of those countries support a few companies to spearhead the exports drive.
They allow foreign companies to transfer the latest technology but also use them to penetrate the export markets.

Zimbabwe must learn that politics is one thing but economics knows no politics. It’s a dog eat dog affair.
We have to be aggressive in our export drive. There is no other way of increasing the amount of US dollars in circulation in the economy except through increasing our export earnings.
The country has no capacity to print the US dollar and has no capacity to borrow since we have our own debt crisis where we cannot adequately service our national and foreign debts.

Therefore, the simple solution is to live within our means but put more emphasis to supporting production on the farms without requiring the farmer to be lured into debt.
We have to make money from manufacturing and exports. We have to create a conducive political and economic environment to persuade those individuals with money to invest in farming and local industries.

What anyone with money wants is peace of mind, which can only be guaranteed by politicians who are not only after power but have the interest of the people at heart.