Recently I came across an article moaning about Zimbabwe having to buy maize from Zambia. The article mentioned that Zimbabwe used to export maize and other goods to Zambia.
The article blamed Zambia for not being more sympathetic to Zimbabwe, as well as claiming that Zimbabwe exports to Zambia were destroyed by sanctions.
Let us tell the whole truth not just part of it. Zambia has never ever sanctioned Zimbabwe in any way.
Zimbabwe's exports to the region were ruined by poor policies and idiosycrantic monetary controls during Gono's heydays as 'Your Governor'.
I lived in Malawi from 2000 to 2002. When I first went there supermarket shelves were jam-packed from wall to wall with Zimbabwean goods.
After a few doses of Gono's policies, the last time I visited Malawi around 2005 the shelves were now jam packed with South African goods.
The situation is likely to have been the same for Zambia.
Even now we have a distinct geographic advantage, in terms of access to markets. Harare is less than 600km from both Blantrye and Lusaka. Gauteng is more than 1800km from both.
It is about $3000 cheaper to transport goods from Harare to both cities than it is to transport goods from Gauteng.
The only reason why Gauteng is the preferred source of goods by countries to the North of us is corrupt, ignorant and pompous behaviour by our officials, including senior ministers. It takes a week for a truck with goods sourced in Zimbabwe to get the papers processed at Chirundu.
The same truck with goods sourced in Gauteng takes less than a day to have exit papers processed at Beitbridge and maybe another day or two transit Zimbabwe and get into Zambia.
If they use the Botswana route it takes 30 minutes to have exit papers processed at Martins Drift. The route is longer than via Zimbabwe but hundreds of trucks still prefer it because of the quick processing. The only delay is because there is no bridge at Kazungula and they sometimes have to wait weeks when one of the ferries is broken down.
The smaller 8 ton trucks which don't have to queue at the ferry almost exclusively use the Kazungula route. Guess what, most of them are driven or owned by Zimbabweans. Even for us Zimbabweans it is simply far much less hassle to avoid the corrupt and pompous Zimbabwean officials.
Pomposity, corruption and ignorance of trade and commerce dynamics, is costing Zimbabwe billions in trade opportunities.
That is a fact.
The people to blame for that are government officials, and their management which means ministers and The President.
Lastly on the issue of low maize production in Zimbabwe. That is incorrectly attributed to the restoration of land ownership to black Zimbabweans.
In their drive to higlight their insulting insinuation that we blacks need whites to grow food for us, most analysists leave out to mention that the restoration of land to its correct owners, was also accompanied by price controls, movement restrictions of produce and other not so clever policies that completely wiped out maize production as a commercial agricultural activity.
Even small scale farmers who used to produce 70% of Zimbabwe's commercial maize before land reform, abandoned the crop, because of bad policies, producing only enough to feed their families.
The only reason anyone would plant bumper maize crop between about 2005 and 2009 was for charity, not for business. Maize production has since not recovered from those ruinous policies.
The bottom line is that Zambia does not owe Zimbabwe anything. It is up to our officials to come up with intelligent well researched policies to take the country forward.
Stumbling around doing things such as being told by a school dropout (less educated than themselves) that pure refined diesel flows out of a solid rock does not amount to intelligent policies.
Luck does not also amount intelligent policies either. The current ruling party were lucky that they faced an opposition led by an even more ignorant leader. Luck, eventually runs out, so one should never count on it being there forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment