‘If Rwanda could do it, Zim can do it’
When President Mnangagwa went to Rwanda for the African Union Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government last month, he took the opportunity to visit the Rwanda Development Board. Impressed by how the board managed to help Rwanda turn into a darling for investors, the President asked his counterpart, President Paul Kagame, to allow the board’s Chief Executive Officer, Ms Clare Akamanzi, to come to Zimbabwe to interact with his officials. Ms Akamanzi arrived in the country this week and has since held meetings with several Government officials. In this wideranging interview with our Assistant Editor Lovemore Chikova (LC), Ms Akamanzi (CN) speaks about lessons that can be learnt from her country.
LC: What is the role of the Rwanda Development Board and how has it managed to help turn around the economic fortunes of your country? CN: The Rwanda Development Board was created as a single-point organisation for investors. That was a decision made by our President (Paul Kagame) and Cabinet because they wanted to signal in a very practical way to investors that they were taking facilitation of investment very seriously and that they were dedicating an organisation to focus on the key components that investors need. The first impact that we had in the private sector was that we made their lives easier because they didn’t have to deal with many institutions, to interact with them on what they needed. I think a very clear example is starting a business. Before the Rwanda Development Board was formed, it would take you about 12 procedures and it would take you about three weeks and cost $450 on average to just register a business. Today, all of that is done online at the Rwanda Development Board and it’s free of charge. That has made it easy for businesses. Instead of registering just 500 companies that we used to do before in a year, we are now registering over 13 000 companies in one year. So, it really shows that making it easy for investors to register businesses or to even get all the different permits has a direct benefit in terms of how many businesses are formalising and are attracted to finish the process of registering. If you make it difficult along the way, some of them fall off and give up. So, that was a very clear example we made that showed it was really easy for investors to interact with government. LC: You are here at the request of President Mnangagwa and you have been sent by your President Paul Kagame. What mandate did President Paul Kagame give you on this mission? CN: President Kagame responded to the request by President Mnangagwa for us to come to Zimbabwe and he basically gave us the mandate to come and share our experiences on what the Rwanda Development Board is and why it was created and the impact of the Rwanda Development Board and all these reforms we have done around investor facilitation. He sent us here to share that experience with the Zimbabwean Government and that’s why we are here. LC: For the few days you have been
here and interacting with Government officials, what areas have you noticed that can be exploited by the Zimbabwean Government for quick returns? CN: Over the last two days we were interacting with officials in Zimbabwe, it’s just two days, we can’t claim to be experts on what needs to be done in Zimbabwe. I hope you understand that. But what we have observed extremely clearly is that there is a very strong appetite among the Zimbabwean Government officials to reform for business facilitation. I think it was very clear to us when President Mnangagwa came to Rwanda and immediately invited us to come. It was very quick, it was really a very serious issue from the time he came and the time we are here. But beyond the Presidential level, even interacting with the officials, they are asking a lot of questions. They want to know how we made it easy for businesses, what tools we used, the challenges we faced, how some of the challenges were managed. I see a very strong appetite for change and for reform for the better which I think is very encouraging. The second observation is that I see a lot of key elements already in place for Zimbabwe to make it easier for businesses to go ahead. I think when you drive around Harare we see infrastructure, we see a lot of key tools that you need for reforms even physically available in the country. We see economic activity, we see a lot of activities going on. But we also see it when interacting with people. I knew this already that Zimbabwe is one of the most educated countries in Africa, but I can see that when I interact with the people. You have a very high skilled labour force. I think the feedback that we have gotten from the people in Zimbabwe is that they need to coordinate, how to introduce tools like automation, how they need to consolidate some of the services they give investors in order to make it easier for investors to do business. That’s the feedback that they themselves have given us in some of the areas they think need to be prioritised now. Obviously our role here is to show our experiences, to share what we have done and the challenges and it’s up to the officials from Zimbabwe to say of all the things we shared what is relevant, even they have given us some of that as their feedback. LC: What lessons can Zimbabwe draw from Rwanda when it comes to opening up for business and attracting the much needed investment? CN: I think the first key lesson, if I may attempt to give one is: If Rwanda could do it, absolutely Zimbabwe can do it. If you look at the challenges that Rwanda underwent, we came from a very difficult history - the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis. We also came from a baseline of very low levels of key economic indicators. We are a landlocked country. So we had immense challenges, but we were able to work within those challenges to really build a country that has been growing at an average of eight percent for a very long time. We were able to cut poverty from about 80 percent, now we are at 39 percent and we were able to increase confidence in investors. Today we run the second ease to do business. All those indicators I think just demonstrate that it’s possible. You know if a country like Rwanda, with all those challenges, if we could reach where we are I think Zimbabwe is a much bigger country, has a lot of resources, you have a good skilled labour. I just hope this whole process is an inspiration that you could do even a lot more. LC: I understand that part of your mandate is to help Zimbabwe come up with a one-stop shop for handling investors similar to the Rwanda Development Board. What do you think should be done to come up with such a strong institution? CN: It is important to create a strong one key organisation to avoid inconveniencing those who come seeking to invest in the country. When you create such an institution, you need to know how do you empower the organisation. Like in the case of the Rwanda Development Board, we report directly to the President, we present our papers to Cabinet and we have a client charter which helps us to look at how we can bring deliverables to investors within a short period of time. The first key question is what kind of consolidation is relevant for Zimbabwe to create a strong and truly one-stop organisation where all the services investors
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