Stark Realities
At a seminar this week, a senior Chinese businessman said that in 1979 he had been in charge of the Chinese project to build the TanZam Railway from Dar es Salaam to Ndola in Zambia. He had finished the project that year and was moving back to his base in China. He described how he had packed his bags with sugar, milk powder and baby food; all basic needs that he knew were in short supply at home.
In 1980 the leadership of China changed and Deng Zhou Ping became the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and launched his campaign to bring China into the main stream of the world economy. He stated that "it does not matter that the cat is black or white, what matters is does it catch mice". Today, 35 years later China has the second largest economy in the world and has brought nearly a billion people out of abject poverty and into relative prosperity. The transformation is breathtaking and the talk of the rest of the world.
The businessman did not have to point out the stark contrast with the history of the past 35 years in Zimbabwe. In 1980 we were a middle income country with a higher GDP per capita than China, we had virtually no debt and a currency that was worth twice the value of the US dollar. We produced 90 per cent of what was sold in our supermarkets and our farmers employed 350 000 people, supplied 60 per cent of the inputs required for our industry, generated half of all exports and provided food at prices that were well below any other country in the region.
Today our GDP per capita is among the lowest in the world with half our population in abject poverty. Only 5 per cent of our population is working in the formal sector, we import 70 per cent of our food and pay higher prices for it than any of our neighbors. Only half of what we buy in our supermarkets is made in Zimbabwe - and even then most local products are produced using imported raw materials. Nearly half our children under 5 years of age are malnourished and we have one of the lowest life expectancies in the world and child and maternal mortality rates that are well above those in all other southern African States.
Our leadership in 1980 included 19 men and women with a PhD or more behind their names. I would have thought that they would have constituted the most highly qualified administration in Africa. Our Prime Minister, soon to be President had 6 degrees, spoke English as if it was his first language and was acknowledged as a very intelligent person. He was also tough and a clever, intuitive politician. Zimbabwe came to life with everything; a good climate, well educated elite, a balanced, mixed economy with abundant mineral resources and the full support of a global community that wanted us to succeed in every way.