After the applause, put shoulder to the wheel

ZIMBABWE must whole-heartedly congratulate Zanu-PF on its victory! Returning to the margins of victory of the 1980s, Zanu-PF must utilise the great opportunity to move forward. However, there is a real danger of returning to the past as if everything was okay in the 1980s. Returning to the 1980s has been the promise of various opposition parties.

Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe as a whole must recognise that returning to the 1980s will not take Zimbabwe very far. Actually, the 1980s was only a foundation for future progress. The situation and the challenges have changed.

Zimbabwe's Challenges 2013
Zimbabwe's challenges today include:

    The population has doubled from 7√Ç¬Ω million in 1980 to about 13 million today, and probably 15 million if the Diaspora is counted. Planning and implementation should take this increase into consideration, not forgetting the unemployment rate, which is believed to be at 90 percent.

    The Education and Health systems were better in the 1980s than today, yet the challenges were very difficult in 1980, with only a third of primary age children in school and only 4 percent of the secondary age children at secondary. How did Zimbabwe manage to get better Grade 7 and "O" Levels results in the 1980s than in 2012? How did the Health system provide good health services on a lower budget than today?

    More than 10 million hectares of land have been provided to over 175 000 indigenous farmers. This is an enormous economic and social improvement.  There is now need to stabilise the Land Resettlement Programme.

The issue of land tenure must be quickly resolved, so that more investment and long term planning can be done.

There are already five systems in place: the traditional system in Communal Areas; the Licensing system established in 1980 Resettlement Scheme; the Leasehold system passed by Parliament for all agricultural land; the Offer Letter system; and the Freehold Tenure system which commercial farmers and urban areas enjoyed.

All five systems need to remain, but each needs to be modernised. An immediate step could be to provide leasehold to all resettled farmers without payment for the first 5 hectares, with affordable payments for above 5 hectares. This would mean less than 1 million of the 16 million hectares which originally comprised commercial farm lands.

Payments should be made for further amounts of land, but at affordable costs, such as US$200 per hectare (this was the average price for land in the 1980s' Resettlement Scheme). Commercial farmers can thus afford to buy as much land as they can utilise.

    There is very inadequate investment by Government into Agriculture, particularly into Extension support and funding of the Grain Marketing Board.  For many years, the GMB has not been able to buy the maize grown by farmers.

The end result is that farmers do not earn enough to fund the following year's crops. GMB must be properly funded, and must offer international level prices for maize. Zimbabwe should return to proper funding for GMB and for Agriculture as a whole.

    Government should provide support for industries which support economic growth through the banking system, for example favouring companies which provide agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertiliser, agricultural equipment and machinery, pharmaceuticals, housing mortgages, etc.

Strong support by Government is essential. This should include enabling the banking system to provide lower interest rates for industrialisation. The present interest rates of 15 - 25 percent are obviously anti-development.

    The number of Ministries must definitely go back to its size in the 1980s, i.e. less than 20 ministries rather than closer to 40 ministries. More ministries has proven to be not only more expensive, but also very much more inefficient.

    The number of civil servants has increased exponentially, especially over the last few years.

In 1986 - 87 there were 96 048 civil servants, and in 2011 there were 235 841 civil servants, an increase of 145,5 percent.

This means the number of civil servants has more than doubled, and this number excludes the Security Forces. The civil service has been utilised to create employment, yet this is an unsound way to increase employment, as civil servants develop policies, strategies and provide some supervision, but they do not increase economic growth.

The challenge today is to increase economic growth.  Much more needs to be done by Government to increase economic growth, rather than utilising the State Budget to employ more and more people.

Government should discipline itself, and instead of spending 75 percent of its Budget on salaries, it should spend less than 50 percent. The rest should be spent on economic expansion.

- There has been inadequate investment into infrastructure, yet infrastructure is absolutely essential if Zimbabwe is to grow its economy. In particular, investment into electricity and water has been dismal.

All of us are suffering from daily shortages of electricity and water, and yet even with such shortages, we are being charged enormous amounts for very poor service. Agriculture and industry are severely constrained by poor and expensive services.

Government itself has shamefully provided inadequate funding for Zesa to expand and maintain its capacities. There should be fewer and better qualified staff in these services so that they can be more efficient.  Government should spend at least 20 percent of its Budget on infrastructure.

- Donor dependency has been a serious disease of the post-Independence Zimbabwean system. Donors were providing an average of US$250 million a year to the Government from 1980–2002.

Zimbabwe became used to these "donations", yet very little of these "donations" were used for economic growth. Today Government has done without donor funds for more than a decade. These years of suffering forced Zimbabwe to cure itself of donor dependency.

Instead, Zimbabwe must now depend on funds that it can generate for itself, through wise investments into its economy by both Government and the private sector. Instead of donor funds, Zimbabwe should attract investments, but it should do so by making investment more attractive, for example by partnering with the State.

If the State were to provide joint investment into key areas, and this of course, would mean joint ownership, such as beneficiation in mining or improved technologies in manufacturing industries, this would attract Foreign Direct Investment.

- Last but not least, Zimbabwe's large Diaspora of more than 2 million should be seen as a great human and financial resource. According to the UNDP, the Diaspora already provides about US$1,4 billion a year, but this is not for economic expansion: instead it is for providing food and other necessities to their relatives.

It is essential for the Government and for Zimbabwean private enterprise to attract the Diaspora to invest in their homeland.

There should be hundreds of institutions which can provide attractive projects, and these should be partnered by the State.

"Rigging" of Elections

There was a wind of change in the 2013 elections that took MDC-T by surprise: he (MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai) took the youths for granted without taking into consideration that the young Zimbabweans are eager to understand their own history, the liberation struggle, the key issues, rather than just embrace empty rhetoric. Morgan failed to provide leadership. In fact, I think he failed well before the election got under way. After he became Prime Minister, he became the very monster he claimed to have been fighting.

But his greatest failure was on moral leadership, especially his abuse of power and disgusting attitude towards women.

The West was well aware that Morgan would not win the election. Virtually all opinion polls conducted by their polling organisations indicated that support for Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC had plummeted, while Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF enjoyed unprecedented momentum. And yet, on Election Day, the West expected Tsvangirai to pull off a miracle and win. Frankly, that's an insult to Zimbabweans' collective intelligence.

Luckily, Zimbabweans showed the world that they're smart! There were obviously some inefficiencies and irregularities in the Elections, but the AU and Sadc have both rightly accepted the Elections as "free and fair" and acceptable.

They are correct. The issue of the voter's roll that has created debate is a process and cannot be rectified over night. However, it is important to mention that it can only be rectified in partnership with the electorate. Lots of awareness programmes are required.

-----------
The writers are Zimbabwean politicians and veterans of the liberation struggle.