JUICE Zimbabwe requires an enabling environment for citizens with entrepreneurial skills to flourish and do business with no hindrance aside from standard laws that protect workers, communities, consumers and our ecology. Click above picture for your own copy. Zimbabwe needs to create a friendly environment for both domestic investment and for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) of the sort that ensures job creation through genuine capital investment (not fly- by-night speculation or cronyism as has often been the case) so as to rapidly increase the productive sector’s capacity utilization. Zimbabwe needs policies that promote capital formation, including more appropriate financial markets, given the degenerating state of some of the crony-style banks. Zimbabwe needs greater integration with regional and global markets to facilitate sustainable growth. But this must be in a manner that does not compromise our national interests and self-sufficiency, or load us with more untenable foreign debt, as happened during the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). Zimbabwe needs a comprehensive program that provides for the delivery of good-quality social services such as education and healthcare, in a way that is affordable to all, and underpinned by a healthy economy which pays for it through taxes. Zimbabweans need opportunities to pursue happiness, achieve social justice and nurture our natural environment in a democratic society without state bureaucratic hindrance. The Jobs, Upliftment, Investment Capital and Environment (JUICE) economic blueprint that was launched by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai today sis based on the following features of JUICE: 1. That at the appropriate times in their working lives, every citizen should be an actor in whatever capacity they choose within the formal and informal economies, and enjoy the right to participate in the economy as enshrined in the Constitution. 2. Citizens have a right to pursue wealth creation and enjoy prosperity. 3.The immediate imperative of the Zimbabwean economy is to create decent jobs for all while meeting the society’s needs and sustaining our natural environment. 4.To achieve these, it is critical that we increase both FDI and local reinvestment so as to ensure capital formation, a well-functioning financial system with growing savings and credit, and infrastructure development, consistent with ecological restoration and conservation. 5. An MDC government will create a friendly business environment conducive to domestic reinvestment, FDI and capital formation. Macro- economic stability is essential to this environment, and the MDC will continue policies which, from the time of the MDC’s entry into government, defeated the world’s highest inflation rates and introduced predictable interest rates and a stable currency. 6. In relation to our natural resources, Zimbabwe needs a new Mining and Minerals Act that ensures finite, non-renewable resources benefit us all, recognizing the greater sovereign right of the state. In this regard, after full consultation with mining investors, a sovereign wealth fund similar to other successful resource-rich jurisdictions (e.g. Norway and Alaska), will be created and financed from mining proceeds, so as to create a reserve for redistribution of proceeds to all citizens as well as to future generations. 7. In addition to orienting the economy to job creation, this program will focus on developing and modernizing the country’s infrastructure in areas such as energy, roads, rail and ICT. The policy focuses on rural development and ending the traditional problem of economic ‘enclavity’, in which a ‘dual economy’ appears to shut the majority of peasant and informally- employed urban residents out of wealth enjoyed within the enclave. 8.The program will put resources into education of the citizen as a primary pre-condition for sustainable human development. 9. JUICE will also ensure the equal and effective participation of women and youth in developmental processes. 10. The MDC program is therefore fundamentally opposed to a politicized indigenization strategy based upon clientelism and patronage. The current policy is premised on a narrow model of transferring shares from companies to the few black elite who can afford them, and therefore does not amount to genuine wealth creation and equitable distribution. 11. This program will empower Zimbabweans by re-establishing and extending formal individual property ownership rights to ensure that ordinary citizens can use marketable assets as collateral for bank loans. This will permit the country to benefit from their innovative ideas by promoting their engagement in long-term planning and by ensuring they will have access to finance and the needed security of tenure. JUICE is in contrast to Zanu PF’s ‘indigenization’ policy because if we consider a variety of strategic approaches to our economy’s development in the coming years, we will not be served well by the continuation of existing trends, including the ‘dual economy’ whose worst features are being amplified by crony capitalism in the form of indigenisation. The indigenisation strategy contains all the features of mismanagement we have come to recognize since 1980. Our unemployment crisis will worsen as local and foreign investors restrict capital and as confidence in the rule of law falls further. Our ability to generate surpluses to direct to infrastructural and social programmes will be limited. And the illusory benefits of increased asset ownership will be limited to a well- connected few. The people of Zimbabwe have for long been oppressed, depressed, alienated, and abused. Over the years, we have experienced both acts of systematic dislocation at the hands of Zanu (PF) and a worsening of structural deficiencies within a dual economy. Be it the Gukurahundi era of 1982-1987, the ill-thought Economic Structural Adjustment Programme from 1990-1996, the violent land reform program beginning in 2000, Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, price controls during 2008-2009, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s quasi- fiscal activities of 2003-2008 or the June 2008 violence, these acts of destruction will soon be a thing of the past. JUICE and other MDC programs provide an alternative, and show beyond reasonable doubt that a better future exists amongst all Zimbabweans. The MDC is determined to implement sound and decisive policies that will transform this country. It’s possible to build a ‘First World’ social democracy with a sound economy, rule of law and constitutionalism, popular participation and environmental protection as foundations upon which social justice and economic prosperity are achieved.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 10:32:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015