eBusiness Weekly
President Mnangagwa has stressed at both his inaugurals, the one in November last year when he was sworn in to finish the last few months of another’s term and the major event last weekend when he started his own five-year term with his own mandate, that he wanted to be a listening President and a servant President.
Obviously businesses, individually and through sector associations, can take this as an invitation. But before they start pounding the ears of the President they should first think just what roles the President performs and thus just what he wants to hear, and needs to hear.
Most of our readers are in business and many either run companies, report directly to the people who run companies, or at the very least help prepare the briefings and proposals for people who run companies. The President in his role as Head of State can in this context be thought of as the chairman of Zimbabwe Inc, setting the big picture. More importantly in his role as Head of Government he can be thought of as the CEO of the Government.
Most of us are aware that competent CEOs do not want nor need some tear-stained individual wringing hands in their presence. Neither do they want airy-fairy power-point presentations that are short on fact and long on wishful thinking. What they want, and need, are accurate briefings are what is going right, what is going wrong and practical proposals to fix the problems and grow the organization. CEOs can then do their job of assessing the information, co-ordinating the ideas so that, for example, production and marketing units are on the same page so the stuff that is to be sold is made on time, and that all this is done within financial restraints. Presumably the President is in the same position.
For a start his time is limited. This is why all sectors need proper associations that can group facts, ideas, proposals, criticisms and plans. And the emphasis needs to be on fact and reality.
We need to remember that the Government itself does not create wealth: it does not make things, it does not grow things; it does not mine metals. What it does do is help create the environment that allows industrialists, farmers and miners to do the actual work and intervenes to a greater or lesser extent to enable those who do produce to do their job.
To take a practical example, agriculture. Land reform and other programmes have created a large number of family farming businesses. This has required a rethink of many inherited policies. Private sector contract farming has managed to cope with tobacco, moving from a couple of thousands of big producers with bank loans to tens of thousands of smallholders working on contract. But it took 18 years to create the system that now sets new production records.
Command agriculture, which the President pressed hard when Vice-President against considerable opposition from colleagues more interested in power than empowerment, was an obvious path to short-circuit that slow growth. Among the points we will be debating is how to expand this scheme and how to bring in the private sector; there are limits to Government’s working capital.
Here we have a lot of sometimes conflicting interests. Bankers like high levels of security and need to know their customers, but many farmers cannot offer much more than the crop they want to plant and in any case a banker cannot spend millions of dollars on checking out smallholders. Big agro-businesses want assured production and delivery before they venture in wholesale borrowing to provide inputs and also need to know who is trustworthy. And then there are all the potential disasters that farmers face: drought, floods and elephants to name but three.
So the Presidents needs to hear, and wants to hear, practical ideas from farmers unions, the banking sector, the big agro-processors and his own Agriculture civil servants how a combined scheme could work. For a start we could set up some sort of credit bureau listing the farmers who have benefitted from Command Agriculture, grown the crops and delivered them. Such families are obviously a decent bet for others to lend to. But a more complex and larger inputs scheme will rely on a major co-ordinated effort from several sectors and presumably the President wants to hear what is needed and how a raft of private concerns and the Government can co-operate, rather than just have a tirade of excuses for doing nothing.
The new administration has moved fast in untangling the legislative and administrative mess mining was falling into, and to tackle the lack of new investment. There were some legal changes, amending the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act for start, but a lot of ad hoc decisions such as the one concerning our largest platinum producer.
But that particular decision, finding an acceptable solution to the twin requirements of unlocking unused reserves while still guaranteeing an existing investor adequate and generous access to required resources for the life of a mine, could well form the basis for a new off-the-shelf policy to attract new investors.
Again the President needs sensible input from the Chamber of Mines, investment agencies and others before he crafts a new formal Government policy. And all this input needs to go beyond narrow interests but instead concentrates on the need to be fair to those who invest while opening opportunities for more investment.
So our advice to those accepting the invitation from a listening President, is to have something worthwhile for him to listen to, and to be properly briefed so that the inevitable questions can be answered with fact, not vagueness.
