malvernmugadzikwa
In the good old days, Friday used to be a weekly ritual of hedonistic indulgence for legions of workers employed to drive burgeoning activities in our many round-the-clock industries.
Bulging orders for many on-demand quality products at home and abroad equally demanded ant-like industry from the workers, who were accordingly rewarded with decent wages every Friday.
Intoxicated by the then-buying power of the Zimbabwe dollar and promise and assurance of another pay day the next week, the workers would naturally splurge on drinks and groceries, and everything (both moral and immoral) in between.
It made nightlife, particularly in Harare and Bulawayo, energetic, vibrant and fast-paced.
It literally made Harare the city that never sleeps. Spendthrifts in many of the nightspots attracted a lot of wanted and unwanted attention, and not least from the pickpockets and robbers.
Those free-spenders unfortunate enough often met a violent end on these eventful and fateful nights, while those fortunate to live to tell the tale often bore lifelong scars that whispered the story of a great escape — sometimes a bulbous cyst-like protrusion on the forehead or the patterned skin imprint of stitches that sutured a once-weeping wound, or, in extreme circumstances, both the protrusion and stitches.
And those who had families based in the village were known to patronise the notorious Friday night buses that took them to their destinations for the weekend.
Such buses were often characterised by bingeing, raucous laughter, tall tales and frequent recesses demanded by boozy passengers. It was, therefore, not uncommon for some inebriated weekly travellers to lose their luggage, after which they invented fibs to tell their expectant families, who nevertheless comforted themselves with the thought that at least their loved ones would have had arrived home safe and in one piece.
Adversity breeds fortune
All this was powered by a formidable industrial machine, as Zimbabwe was the second most industrialised nation in the region after South Africa. This continuously grinding machine had a material multiplier influence on livelihoods and the economy.
It made the farmer productive and viable through demand for raw materials; it made the ever-busy industry a big employer for both skilled and unskilled workers; it fuelled general spending in the economy, which further oiled industry, creating a virtuous circle of growth, sustenance and prosperity.
Hordes of people used to travel from the village to spend their day(s) milling around factory gates in the hope that they would be called in to provide temporary extra hands needed to meet deadlines for orders.
Yeah, those were the good old days.
But students of history and those who care enough to learn will tell you that our teapot-shaped Republic did not become the second most industrialised nation in the region out of sheer good fortune but rather through adversity.
You see, the colonial regime that governed these sacred lands was purely extractive, as its preoccupation was solely raping the land and its people through getting raw materials, particularly from the mining and agriculture sector, for the metropole.
So, the manufacturing sector was not considered a priority. For instance, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II in 1939, it is believed that Southern Rhodesia had 299 industrial units, most of them light consumer goods industries privately owned by domestic white capital, with a gross output of £5,1 million and employing 17 554 employees. Conversely, gross output for mining and agriculture was £7,7 million and £3,7 million, employing 90 967 and 96 684 workers, respectively.
So, mining and agriculture dwarfed and eclipsed the manufacturing sector.
But a malignant combination of the two World Wars, the Great Depression (1929-1939) and sanctions imposed on Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was known then) after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by Ian Smith on November 11, 1965 (representing a severance of ties between Imperial Britain and the colonial administration), among many other adversities that made continued reliance on imports untenable, materially changed the regime’s disposition towards the manufacturing sector. The sanctions against Southern Rhodesia were mainly targeted at the primary producing and exporting sectors.
So, to mitigate the deleterious impact of these measures on exports, employment, output and investment, the Rhodesian Front government turned to domestic industrial expansion and began intensifying support to the manufacturing sector.
These interventions included import control for selected industries, greater use of customs tariffs and, in some instances, reserving the market for producers for specified periods.
As Bishop Lazi highlighted some time back, the regime also heavily leaned on the Apartheid South Africa for support.
By 1970, manufactured products accounted for between 25 percent and 30 percent of the country’s export receipts and for almost all consumer goods.
From all this, the greatest lesson is that fortune can be forged from adversity.
And, as for Zimbabwe, we have known adversity for quite some time, from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-prescribed Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, which planted the seeds of deindustrialisation, and sanctions at the turn of the millennium following the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme.
But the advent of the Second Republic, under the stewardship of President ED, has been as epochal as it has been transformative, as industrialisation, modernisation, and production and productivity have become the zeitgeist of our times.
After the massive infrastructure development programmes of the last five years, which have seen the regeneration of our roads, airports, irrigation projects, etcetera, equal effort is now being invested into adding impetus to growth in the manufacturing sector. ED could not have made it clearer when he addressed the ZANU PF 379th Ordinary Session of the Politburo in Harare on Tuesday.
“As we set our focus on the conference, it is critically important that the party locates the overarching need to support, revitalise and recalibrate our manufacturing sector as an urgent and central task,” he emphasised.
“The necessity to steer the party towards debating and considering a broad array of interventions to propel industrial growth anchored on local value addition and beneficiation of our resource endowments cannot be overemphasised. This is more so given the abundant reserves of key minerals that support the development of electric vehicles and other new energy solutions. This is an indispensable guarantee, ensuring that our efforts to modernise, industrialise and grow our economy are a success.”
Doubling down
This, folks, is the urgent task of our time, which was central to deliberations at the just-ended Annual People’s Conference of the ruling party.
What makes the outcome of last week’s indaba critically important is the fact that it will feed into Government’s policies, as ZANU PF is supreme over Government.
“The outcome of this conference has far-reaching implications. ZANU PF is the party that is leading Zimbabwe, developing every province, district, ward and village; we shall industrialise and modernise our motherland, ourselves.
“Forward and forward ever!” ED reminded delegates during his keynote address on Friday.
What is, however, impressive about the ruling party is the stepped, methodical and programmatic way it is going about its business. It reminded the Bishop of how the Jews built the walls of Jerusalem amid scepticism.
Nehemiah 4:1-2 says: “When Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became angry and was greatly incensed. He ridiculed the Jews, 2 and in the presence of his associates and the army of Samaria, he said, ‘What are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall?
Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble — burned as they are?’”
Brick by brick, we are rebuilding Zimbabwe and restoring its industrial machine.
The envisaged bountiful harvest that
will come with good rains expected in the 2024-25 summer cropping season and expanded irrigation infrastructure will likely provide the much-need raw materials for industry.
The mining sector has been growing in leaps and bounds, boosting the national purse.
Good rains will also boost water inflows in Kariba, helping increase power generation at the plant, which, with the added augmentation from supplies from Hwange Power Station, will guarantee energy security, ensuring that we can power our ambitions.
Next year, 2025, will surely be a good year.
The challenge, however, as articulated at the conference, is to develop local value chains and beneficiate our mineral and agricultural produce.
This will ensure that we add fillip to the ongoing reindustrialisation process, create jobs, lift many of our people out of poverty and improve the quality of life of Zimbabweans.
Trust the process.
Bishop out!
Tinaye Agere
Online Reporter