However, it would be a great injustice if Zanu (PF) and its leader were the only culprits in the dock on the day of reckoning. Many of the greedy predators masquerading as Zimbabwe’s entrepreneurs and business leaders have a case to answer too for the way they have shamelessly attempted to sabotage economic recovery by hiking the prices of basic commodities.
Almost immediately after Finance Minister Tendai Biti restored duty on selected basic products such as mealie- meal, cooking oil, rice, salt and flour the vultures running our industries and shops responded by hiking the prices of these commodities.
They knew that the ordinary consumer would have no option but to pay the inflated prices to get their basics because they could no longer import them from South Africa. What a shameless bunch!
Of course, we know business is about exploiting opportunities to make more profit. However, inflating the price of cooking oil because the consumer has no alternative source of the commodity is not business, it is extortion.
The business community sent delegation after delegation to Biti to plead with the minister to scrap duty on the basic commodities, claiming they have sufficient capacity to produce the goods at reasonable prices.
Biti obliged and one would have expected businesses to show enlightened self-interest by ramping up production in order to sell more goods and generate more profit, while in the process creating more jobs and tax dollars for the fiscus.
Surely, what is good for country is and should be good for business too. This is the new philosophy for successful businesses across the world. Not for this bunch running our manufacturing and commercial sectors. The restoration of duty was the signal they wanted to resort to their bad practice of hiking prices, regardless of the economic fundamentals.
"You have let us down. I think I should not have removed duty, but you lobbied us to say, ‘Minister we have sufficient capacity to handle production’. And what do you do? There has been a sharp spike of inflation," a frustrated Biti told business leaders last week.
We do want to believe that our business community is nothing but a bunch of extortionists who carefully planned and carried out a horrendous deception on Biti, convincing him to scrap duty on basic commodities so they could extract super profits out of the misery of poor consumers. Business leaders must tell us otherwise.
Post published in: Editor: Wilf Mbanga