While the loss of existing jobs was bad enough, an even larger number of jobs were prevented from coming into existence. As a result of yet more policy decisions, party officials could authorise themselves to expropriate domestic savings and balances held in foreign exchange accounts. Even before the plans to force indigenisation were hatched, investor confidence had been destroyed, corporate savings had been confiscated, new capital inflows had been discouraged, businesses had been starved of resources and Zimbabwe’s productive sectors had been forced to become less competitive.
Leaving school at the rate of hundreds of thousands a year, our young people now have almost no prospect of finding jobs that will lead to any hope of respectable career development. It is they who will bear the highest costs. They are already resentful, but their anger will mount much more rapidly when they realise they will suffer directly from the consequences of the current disastrous policies for the rest of their lives.
In the past few weeks, the indigenisation pronouncements have been packaged in even more absurd terms, a shortcut through which might simply state that, whatever business non-indigenous investors run, 51% of dividends have to be shared with indigenous people who should not be expected to earn the money or pay for the shares.
But everyone is now feeling that the investment-hostile business environment and the stretching from months into years of the needed process of change have made the economy dangerously fragile. Indications suggest that the hesitant and unconvincing hints of improvements in business activity claimed for the first two quarters of 2012 failed to acquire momentum and no signs of productive sector growth are now visible.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis