Minister Zhuwao to explain indigenisation law to SA investors - but to what end and purpose!

"Newly-appointed Indigenisation minister Patrick Zhuwao will next week headline the Zimbabwe Mining and Tax Law Market Briefing 2015 in South Africa where he is expected to clarify the country's empowerment laws," reported Bulawayo 24.

On the face of it, one would think the Minister will be in SA to assure that country's investors they will have nothing to fear from Zimbabwe's obnoxious indigenisation laws. They will want to know why they are being told this for the umpteenth time and yet the laws still remain on the statute book? The investors in SA and the rest of the world have shied away from Zimbabwe ever since Zimbabwe started the lawless and often violent seizures of white owned farms in 2000.

When the Mugabe regime passed its indigenisation law in 2008 forcing foreign owned businesses worth $500 000 or more to sell 51% of their share to local black Zimbabwean(s), this was the regime extending its seizures from farms to businesses.

Ever since his appointment two months ago, Minister Zhuwao has insisted the indigenisation laws will stay and even augmented with a further 10% levy on all foreign owned businesses. Is the Minister is going to tell the would-be South Africans investors this close up and personal? He can be as belligerent as he please, of course, but to what end and purpose?   

Zimbabwe's deepening economic crisis is exposing Mugabe's lie that he has economically empowered the black Zimbabweans.

35 years of economic mismanagement, corruption and lawlessness have taken a very heavy toll on the national economic and right across the board no one has been spared from public sector, cooperate sector down to the individual. Other than fixed assets like houses, most of which are in a sorry state of decay and rot anywhere, most Zimbabweans have lost everything else of value. This is why the nation has to look to foreigners and the few Zimbabweans in the diaspora for new investments to kick start the ruined economy. All local Zimbabweans can provide is their labour.

If the national economy had continued on the growth trajectory it was on soon after independence many Zimbabweans would have accumulated enough wealth and assets by now to graduate from being workers to being employers in their own right.

Thanks to Mugabe's three and half decades of gross misrule many local businesses have longed collapse. Even well establish multi-national businesses have found it near impossible to thrive and prosper in Zimbabwe's rough economic water, many have since closed. So with no savings, no insurance policies or asset to use as collateral security to start their own business from scratch – even if the economic turbulence had finally ceded, which sadly is not the case - most Zimbabweans have other choice other than look for a job and be a worker.

Thanks to Mugabe's three and half decades of misrule many companies have closed and there have been no new companies starting up thanks to the regime's obnoxious indigenisation laws that have forced would be investors to shy away from Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's unemployment rate has soared to dizzying height of 90% plus. Where is the economic empowerment in that!

With no resources to start up any meaningful business activity and no formal employment opportunities many Zimbabweans have been forced to eke a living as peasant subsistent farmer or source and sell all manner of goods from oranges, to air-time cards to Chinese trinkets.

 One does not need much capital to be a vendor, an empty cardboard box and that is big enough to carry one's entire stock. A vendor is nothing but an urbanized peasant; they are both poor and they live from hand to mouth.

One of the most shameful things the Zanu PF regime has been doing is chain out thousands of University and College graduates every year only to condemn 95% of them to the unemployed heap, be a vendor or worse! These young men and women constitute a lost generation; what kind of citizens will they be!

Mugabe and his Ministers can witter all they wish about how his regime has economically empowered black Zimbabweans; the reality on the ground is telling a totally different story. 35 years of corrupt and tyrannical Mugabe rule has reduced Zimbabwe into a nation of millions of millions of rural peasants and urban vendors who are all desperate to find a formal job to escape the life of poverty they now live.

If the millions of impoverished Zimbabwean had a meaningful free vote they will vote for the scrapping of the obnoxious indigenisation laws; they have no wealth to buy any of these foreign shares not that they are naïve to believe they would get anywhere. They had hope to get some of the former white farms as promised but they are still stuck in overcrowded rural areas whilst Mugabe and his cronies have shared the farms amongst themselves.

The millions of ordinary Zimbabwe will happily welcome the foreign investors under the usual conditions applicable anywhere else in the world. They are willing to start as a worker and rebuild their economic empowerment through hard work. They are a hard-working people and they have never subscribed to Mugabe's short cut to riches by reaping where one did not sow, looting, etc.