Big dreams for Special Economic Zones
AS IS now public knowledge, our regulations were published on the 17th of August, 2018. These are the legal instruments that allow us to discharge our mandate to licence — which is to designate areas, attract investors in those specified zones, (and) administer the zones we would have established.
We have been pre-occupied with building the institutional framework.
It has really been about building the institutional framework, but further to that, if I can add, we have also been building the institution itself from the ground up, starting off with my appointment four months ago, and we have been working with a fantastic team of deployees from various ministries.
But it has also necessitated that as an organisation, we begin the recruitment process to populate our organogram and we have been busy doing that.
We have also been busy developing various plans and at this stage, I wouldn’t want to go into the various plans because they must go through the due processes, but we have been developing the various plans, including spatial distribution plans.
Spatial distribution plans look at where you are going to position zones.
And these are based on competitive advantages of each province.
So, you have heard the President, His Excellency, talking about Bulawayo, Victoria Falls, Beitbridge, Mutare and other areas and we are busy putting those declarations into actual legal-designated areas.
We will be publishing those very soon.
Also, we have been busy developing the processes because to be able to say this applicant has qualified for a license or not, we have to have a process; we have to have a very sound and robust technical process for us to be able to do so.
We have come up with those processes and now they are in place.
We have been looking at the backlog in terms of those that have applied and trying to clear that, but going forward, we are, as we speak, now busy going through the applications.
The applications have different levels of information, some of them are very bare, some of them are just letters, some of them — 50 percent, some of them are almost there, towards licensing.
But for us, the key issue is that it is really about establishing the areas first and designating those areas, and applications will then be placed into each zone.
Regulations
In very layman terms, the regulations specify what needs to be done for different processes.
Let me give examples. The regulations specify how you approach land owners as an investor, how you approach an application and the requirements for that application.
The regulations specify the issue of gazetting of land, they specify the different types of investors we have.
In Special Economic Zones, you can have land owners with no money to develop — those can apply as land owners then partner with developers.
Developers will come with the technical and financial muscle to work with the land owners to develop infrastructure.
Then after the infrastructure is developed, there are what we call users.
Users are the plethora of investors that can come in and use a factory, use a medical facility that has been put in place, use an agricultural hub, the logistics hub or any of that.
Then there are operators. These are, in essence, estate managers like Old Mutual.
So, in terms of the land owners and developers, they tend to be very few, but we are talking of over 30 and that is a thumbs-up figure. In terms of users, we have a lot more, I would hazard a guess at more than 50.
Lastly, the regulations are very specific in terms of the fees.
The key issue being that the fees, considering that Zimbabwe is open for business, are very minimal and the process of paying those fees is very easy because we want to make the process less cumbersome.
The regulations, in a nutshell, are the legal instruments guiding people on how to approach designation, investors, administration, pay fees and work with Government departments.
Investor interest
The predominant sectors in terms of investor interest have been in manufacturing, agriculture and agro-processing, mining and the energy sector, particularly solar.
In terms of application, you must remember that licenses come in various forms, including land owners, developers, the infrastructural people and then users.
Some of the applications are just letters expressing interest, but for an application to be considered, you need to provide information like your directorship, where the money is coming from, your business plan, your marketing plan and so on.
A lot of applicants, as we speak, do not have that and we are busy engaging them for that information.
There is a lot of interest in the SEZs. Applicants can be in three forms — in the private sector, Government and local authorities.
Time-frames and targets
The plan that we have is that by end of next year, we should be talking about an industrial park. By the end of the next five years, we should be talking about two industrial parks, maybe one in Harare and one in Bulawayo, but attracting a lot of users.
When we are talking about industrial parks, we are talking about mini-cities that focus on certain value chains. We are not talking about a single factory, it is on a vast scale.
Therefore, in an industrial park, you could have 20 to 100 users.
For the next 20 years, it is for us to dream as a country. We are talking about 10 industrial parks, we want to go into every province of the country.