In case you have been living under a rock and missed it all, the president of Zimbabwe issued a raft of far-reaching changes in a desperate bid to arrest the economic decline that has seen most citizens of Zimbabwe live below the poverty datum line. The rashed speech was in part due to a leaked document by the business and industry leaders under the banner of the Confederation of Industry Zimbabwe who had no kind words for the government’s command economy tendencies. Now the CZI has published their own response to these new measures. It’s a lengthy document you can download freely by clicking on the link below but the short of it all is that the CZI is not impressed for the most part.
You see the Zimbabwean government cannot even bring itself to admit that there is an economic meltdown, to begin with. They have been playing that tired line out in the media for years now with limited success. So why continue to peddle proven lies-even ZIMSTAT’s own data shows Zimbabweans are suffering? The thing is the government knows its audience, while most middle-class urban dwellers scoff at such fanciful explanations the rural popular laps it up as fact. Rural voters are the true crowners. So it’s all politics. In ridiculous confusion sometimes the government admits things are not going according to plan-they often says these things in the same breath as the denials. Where things are going wrong it’s not the government’s fault the line goes-it is the work of “Economic Hitman.”
Strangely however the new measures acknowledge for the first time that the lack of confidence in the current monetary and fiscal policymakers of this country has played an oversized role in bringing about our ruin. CZI seizes on this fact and makes clear their surprise that despite that the government goes on to introduce punitive measures to those who dare deposit their money in the cursed Zimbabwean banks. You now have to contend with a 4% IMT tax in order to make payments. In the warped minds of those who crafted these measures that is somehow meant to bring back confidence.
The CZI concludes pretty much like everyone else who is not on the government’s payroll that the new measures are tangled, burdensome knots of punitive and contradictory measures that businesses and the public have to untangle in addition to the webs of ill-advised rash measures issued below. No arrogant far-reaching policy from our beloved government would be complete without the phrase “immediate effect.” Of course, it’s not actually true that the measures apply with immediate effect, the government actually has to finally gazette the laws that will give life to these laws probably as another. Circumventing parliament is the second republic’s favourite pastime even though they have a solid supermajority and the recall clause means that they can literary pass any Act of Parliament they want. Passing sIs with immediate effect means that they avoid scrutiny and can unleash bombshells without giving stakeholders who are rightly concerned by the government’s reckless behaviour the time to respond, engage them or thwart the economic bombing. But then again the government considers the bulk of most economic actors in this country to be economic hitman, saboteurs and unscrupulous-economic bombing is therefore considered fair.
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