Zimbabwean assets are the biggest and best buy in Africa
for investors at the moment while property rights are very secure, Finance and
Economic Development Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube has said.
In an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest, Prof Ncube said
Zimbabwe, through various austerity measures, was focused on economic revival
for the prosperity of its citizens and investors.
“Zimbabwe is open for business already,” he said in
response to a question on the rule of law. Zimbabwe is easily the biggest buy in Africa right now on
any asset. You talk about rule of law, this is about property rights at the end
of the day.
“Property rights are secure in Zimbabwe. We have a
judiciary that works, we have contract enforceability conditions that work, we
have rule of law that works,” he said.
Professor Ncube told Quest; “We have a list of other
institutional reforms that we are putting in place including improving the ease
of doing business conditions and putting in place one-stop-shop (centres) to
make it easy for investors to come in. Clearly, Zimbabwe is the biggest buy in
Africa right now.”
Prof Ncube said investors had every reason to believe in
the new dispensation led by President Mnangagwa.
“In the new dispensation we have said we do not want to
focus on politics,” he said.
“We are focusing on economic revival. That is why we have
launched this Transitional Stabilisation Programme as an enactment programme
for our Vision 2030. We are focusing on the economy, determined to put it on
the right path for prosperity and for investors to profit as long as they work
with us,” he said.
“They should believe in us because we are walking the talk.
For the first time, we are doing everything we said we will do. We are very
results-oriented.”
He said austerity measures being implemented by Government,
including the 2 percent tax on electronic financial transactions, were bearing
fruit.
“My approach there has been two-fold,” he said.
“One is obviously budget cuts in terms of wage bill
rationalisation and on that front, President Mnangagwa is leading from the
front. He cut his salary by 5 percent. We all cut our salaries by 5 percent as
Ministers to show leadership in terms of cost containment, in terms of
austerity,” stated Prof Ncube.
“We have also expanded the revenue base by following on the
informal sector which has expanded by the way. The economy is 40 percent bigger
than we thought. In order to expand the coverage, we introduced a 2 percent
financial transactions tax. Those two together have worked for us very well in
terms of fiscal discipline and fiscal consolidation. You will be surprised that
in the last month of October, we balanced the budget. In fact, we have a
primary surplus.
So we are making
progress after only three months in this new Government,” he said. For the
first time in many years, Zimbabwe achieved a budget surplus of $29 million in
October.
Prof Ncube said Zimbabwe’s debts needed to be restructured
to open the country for investment and international credit lines. “We are
engaging and that is a two-step procedure.”
“First of all, we had to get our economic reform programme
which is enshrined in a document, TSP, accepted globally. We have done that. We
have sold it nationally and we will really move into the first phase, which is
to clear the debt arrears for the African Development Bank and World Bank. We
are determined that in the next 12 months that is done and then we move on to
the third phase which is the Paris Club negotiations with the bilateral
creditors.”
On corruption, he said: “We are dealing with corruption. We
are becoming more transparent, we have zero tolerance policies on corruption. A
lot of people have been locked up. We are desirous to engender transparency
everywhere.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment