The Self Destruct Button
In the past two weeks we have seen Zanu PF virtually tearing itself apart and in the process it is sealing the fate of the country. I have never seen the country in such a state of despair and despondency. Last week I was on a plane to Kenya and spoke to a businessman who was on his way to a lodge on the Zambezi in Zambia to spend a few days fishing and relaxing. He said to me that he simply had to get away. He has closed his factory and put it onto a care and maintenance basis as they could not cope with the power outages.
We have a new Minister of Indigenisation and I think he has been smoking Mbanje. He has announced a series of meetings with people to discuss his strategy – he plans a massive “levy” (tax) on business to fund the acquisition of a majority controlling stake in all “foreign” owned business. The new levy, coming on top of a myriad of other levies and taxes, will cripple existing firms who are going to be forced to pay (indigenous firms are exempt) and you can imagine the excitement at the feeding trough as locally politically connected individuals get an opportunity to take control of successful business enterprise at no cost to themselves.
The company owners so dispossessed, will take their money and run, because we are dollarized they will not be as badly off as the commercial farmers have been, but they will still only get a small fraction of the real value of their life’s work and have to start afresh somewhere else. You think I am being alarmist, think again. Whoever imagined that the State here would forcibly and illegally take over some $30 billion in farm assets, without compensation and in the process destroy the leading agricultural industry in Africa? But they have done it.
What is left of the formal economy will simply close down – unable to borrow money because no one trusts the new “owners” and in any event – what sort of security will they have in a politically volatile State where at the whim of a politician, your legal rights can be completely disregarded, assets pillaged without adequate of legal compensation. The Minister will argue that this is legal – it is the “law” even though it violates the constitution and every possible aspect of natural justice.
To compound the problems created by this new drive to implement the original intentions of the indigenisation laws, the advice given to Mr. Mugabe when he paid a State visit to China that he must set up an orderly, planned succession for the post of the President; must change his economic policies because they are “not catching fish”; and must repair his fractured relations with the major western powers, are simply being ignored.