The products that have been allowed in duty-free for the
last 10 months, and on which duty has now been reimposed, are: cooking oil,
maize meal, milk, sugar, rice, flour, salt, bath soap, washing soap, washing
powder, tooth paste and petroleum jelly.
All these products are produced in Zimbabwe, or in some
cases at least packed in Zimbabwe, by several manufacturers and most brands are
available most of the time, with the local brands dominating shop shelves and
very few imports available, so the May concessions last year are now largely a
dead letter.
The repeal of the duty-free status was gazetted yesterday
by the Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion,
Professor Mthuli Ncube in Customs and Excise (Suspension) (Amendment)
Regulations, 2024 (No. 272).
The original intention of the May suspensions of customs
duty and import VAT were to put a lid on the maximum price rises that local
manufacturers and distributors could impose, by ensuring that retailers and
private Zimbabweans could import substitutes.
Local manufacturers could not charge more than the imports,
whose price would be pushed up a bit by the higher transport charges.
At that time there were rapid price changes with several
Zimbabwean suppliers using forward pricing, black market exchange rates and
other undesirable measures to accelerate the price movements.
The duty free imports were one of the several measures
taken by the Government to tame the exchange rates and what was termed “price
madness”.
The main one was the switch to using the banking system via
wholesale auctions of foreign currency to set accurate market-based exchange
rates.
Other measures clamped down hard on the creation of local
currency, the main one being the Finance Ministry taking over from the Reserve
Bank of Zimbabwe the management of Zimbabwe’s debt and the purchase of the 30
percent of export earnings that exporters are compelled to sell at the official
exchange rate. Herald
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