Implement GPA reform and end all dictatorship or accept coalition and keep the dictatorship

Youth and Empowerment Minister, Patrick Zhuwao, says he will go ahead and impose a new 10% indigenisation levy on gross income which only foreign companies who have not sold the 51% shares to locals will pay.

"The levy will be distributed through 61 registered community share ownership trusts established country wide,” the Minister said. “From our calculations, each community trust will at least receive $1.5 Million."

Yes Minister Zhuwao, let us kill the goose that lays the golden egg so we get ALL the golden eggs and share them out. It is all nonsense of course as common sense will tell you kill the goose and you will get one or two reasonable size eggs and the rest are no bigger that pin heads.

The thing is Zimbabweans has not been empowered in any way by the regime’s 2008 indigenisation law forcing foreigners to sale 51% of their company shares to locals; Zanu PF Chefs have not only kept the two reasonable size eggs of that goose but have kept the pin head size too!

The world over investors, be they foreign or local it does not matter, are welcomed because they help produce wealth which is then shared out in the form of wages for the workers, taxes payable government and the rest is paid to the investors as profits or dividends. In 2008 this Zanu PF regime passed an indigenisation law forcing all foreign investors to sale 51% of their company shares to a local black partner(s) over and above all the other traditional commitments.

The would-be foreign investors asked why they were being forced to have a partner. When it became clear the Zanu PF regime would impose who the local partner(s) will be and what would constitute the payment for the 51% shares; investors saw this for what it is – an institutionalized scam to rip them off! Of course, the foreign investors have since shied away from Zimbabwe. 

In 2012 Zimbabwe attracted as little as 4% of the foreign direct investment Mozambique received in the same year, for example. The most notable difference between the two countries is that the later does not have the obnoxious indigenisation Zimbabwe has or anything comparable!

So many Zanu PF Chef who thought they will be the proud owners of controlling shares of foreign owned companies and live is comfort befitting the owner of a multimillion dollar company have been bitterly disappointed. Many Zanu PF Chef are living in total abject poverty. Heroes Acre is filling with Zanu PF chefs who should not be there but are there early because poverty kills.

 If you have your own concession in Marange bringing billions of dollars you live to a ripe old age of 91 years still counting. Mugabe raked in $2 billion from Marange in 2012 alone according to Partnership Africa, a Canadian NGO monitoring the trade in bloody diamonds.

It is not just the Zanu PF Chefs, sick to the back teeth of waiting to rip off these illusive foreign investors, who have cause to be disappointed with this indigenisation law the overwhelming majority across the land are very disappointed too.

Since the foreign investors have shied away there have been no new companies to create the much need jobs, the situation has been made worse by the closure of many existing companies for various reasons included lack of new additional investment. Unemployment has soared to dizzying height of 90% plus and millions of our people now live in abject poverty. People are absolutely desperate for work.

 

The shrinking number of companies and workers has resulted in the fall in collected revenue for the government. The regime has struggled to raise enough money to pay civil servant wages let alone to pay for maintenance, etc. 

There is no doubt that the indigenisation has completely failed to economically empower anyone not even those who were to get the 51% controlling shares; they were empowered in theory but not in practice because there have been no foreign companies to take over.

51% of zero Foreign Direct Investment = zero empowerment + zero jobs + zero tax revenue

That is a mathematical reality that not even Minister Zhuwao can change!

Just when many people were beginning to believe that the penny had finally dropped in the nut-case heads in Zanu PF that the obnoxious indigenisation law must be scrapped because it was empowering no one whilst impoverishing million; along comes Minister Patrick Zhuwao, and he throws the spanners in the works.

Minister Zhuwao is not just another Zanu PF minister, he is Mugabe’s nephew and in a regime where all power rest with one man – Mugabe – those who have the tyrant’s ear wield a lot of power. Grace Mugabe bust on the Zimbabwe political stage from nowhere and babbling nonsense but because she had successfully carried out “a bedroom coup”, as Jabulani Sibanda so gauchely put it, the whole nation had no choice but to treat the nonsense as divine wisdom and suffer the consequences that followed. This time it is Zhuwao whose nonsense we must accept and suffer.

"I am implementing the law and I have not received any instructions from my boss of any idea of reviewing the act," said Zhuwao with finality when he was asked whether the proposed levy would be reviewed.

Zimbabweans know there is nothing to be gained from killing the foreign investor goose that lays the golden egg; they are the ones who have paid dearly ever since the indigenisation law was passed in 2008. The $1.5 million per community is just another political gimmick no different from Mugabe’s promise of 2.2 million new jobs in Zanu PF’s 2013 election manifesto. What matters is we are stuck with indigenisation law and now this levy even though we know that we, the people, will continue pay dearly for this folly; such is the price we pay for having a tyrant for president.

Of course Mugabe rigged the 2013 elections and as long as he can continue to rig elections Zanu PF will remain in power and impose economic policies to gratify the ruling elite’s insatiable appetites for political power and economic wealth. He does not care how much suffering, misery and even deaths these policies may cause of the ordinary people.

If Zimbabweans are serious about ending the economic suffering brought on by the worsening economic meltdown the nation is facing right now then the people must demand the full implementation of the 2008 GPA reforms. We need the reform to have free and fair elections and need free and fair election to stop Zanu PF rigging elections and imposing unworkable policies guaranteed to bring grief to millions.

Mugabe is like Samson in the Book of Judges, just as Samson derive his Herculean strength from his hair, Mugabe derives his tyrannical powers from rigging elections and then pretend the elections were free, fair and credible and he has the mandate of the people. Implement the democratic reforms and he will not be able to rigging the elections and expose the lie of popular support.