No way forward

There are very necessary- mainly hard- decisions to be made by a righteous minded government, in order for our nation and its economy to be restored. They cannot be made while New Ones wine is expected to be stored in Old Ones wine bags. They cannot be made while each of those disparate bodies is trying to offset whatever the other is doing, in order to appease or please a desperate electorate.

My industry, I am a registered member of the Construction Industry of Zimbabwe, recently granted itself a 66,7 per cent wage increase. As the NEC members were not necessarily drunk when they came to that decision, which was also backdated a couple of weeks, they must have been affected by the same forces that rule in the GNU. The rest of the world has been in recession for little over a year and they are very circumspect about giving wage increases- if not executives bonuses. Zimbabwe has been in a self-imposed, foot shooting depression for nearly 10 years and here we are, still handing out Zimdollar type wage increases.

The customer base was obviously not consulted as they are balking at giving us work. The members of our NEC’s exemption committee are finding difficulty in obtaining a quorum, to deliberate over requests from companys such as ours for wage exemptions. Why? Because they to are out looking for customers now, and have no time for such committees.

Zimbabwe is like a magnificent pot that has produced many a good stew over the decades. The pot is still good to go, but the stew inside is fast drying up, the pot is in danger of cracking from overheating and lack of ingredients to stop it from doing so. Apart from adding more ingredients to the pot, in order for the stew to continue being produced, the fire also needs to be dampened down. The fire that is composed of, amongst other things, all those necessary statutory bodies: the NSSA’s, the NEC’s, the ManDev’s, the StanDevs, unions etc. That fire is overheating the pot in that the statutory bodies have decreased little in size compared to the ingredients of the pot. In fact, in the interim, another union emerged, for what?

Some of the hard decisions that politicians have to make are concerning those bodies. Do we need to be shovelling so much to NSSA, when all they can produce from their vast empire of real estate is US$25 pre pensioner? Do we need a ManDev whose skilled graduates continue to bless every other nation around us, except ours? Good enough reason on its own for SADC to be intransigent.

Do we need a StanDev to turn a blind eye to imports of a dodgy quality? Do we need unions to continually be a thorn in the employers flesh? Employers are a rare breed in Zim and need to be treated with more appreciation and understanding. What are they all doing to alleviate the supposed 80 per cent unemployment rate? Here lies the rub; so many of those “unemployed” are working in the vast informal economy.

I have said to our local statutory bodies for years, “you should all get into the ZIMRA bus and go and register the informal sector”. No, it is much easier for NSSA and the rest of them to charge Zimdollar type penalties against late paying formal sector adherents. We employed 100 people at the turn of the century, we now have three permanent workers, and still we are being hounded.

As is an old age home that I know of, by a union that thinks it is fair game, just because it is in the formal sector. The sad thing for some of the workers and the unions is that they do not seem to care about the possible lack of tomorrow for themselves, even if they destroy their employer. These then are some of the hard decisions for the New Ones to make- on their own- less of the statutory bodies and more registering of the informal economy, an end to the vindictiveness of unions.

Our economy has perhaps had far more statutory input of one sort or another, than even South Africa has now. Was good for the times, but the times have been changed, for the while. So does our thinking need to change. PATRICK, Juliasdale