Byo industries buckle under the weight of illegal sanctions

ON Tuesday 25 October, members of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) will join Zimbabwe in a show of solidarity against illegal sanctions imposed on our country.

For over 20 years, the West namely the United Kingdom, the United States of America and European Union have illegally set about destroying the Zimbabwean economic and social fibre through illegal sanctions imposed on the country for carrying its mandate of land reform as originally agreed during the Lancaster House talks that brought independence.

Unilateral sanctions are not diplomacy, in fact they are an embarrassment to the countries that have historically and presently espoused the virtues of free markets and free trade. The duplicity is just astounding. In an ideal world, one would have hoped these western nations would have also imposed sanctions on their own perverted ideals and values which continue to permeate and pollute foreign nations.

Zimbabwe’s crime was caring for its people enough to want to equitably redistribute land seized by its former colonial masters. The longterm effect of these sanctions has been felt across all spheres of our society — economic, health, education, infrastructural development, social capital among others that have been compounded by this regime-change tactic.

But as an economist and resident of Bulawayo both as a province and as a city, I am especially concerned at the dearth of the local economy, a local economy that was the backbone of the nation. Once not so long ago, Bulawayo was the industrial hub of the nation, most manufacturing concerns operated viably from the city — National Railways of Zimbabwe, National Foods, Blue Ribbon, Radar, Hogarth’s, Sullivans, National Blankets, Cold Storage Commission, Merspin among many, many more.

A walk in the local industrial sites today shows a very sad picture of a world gone by, a world taken down by the maligning West in their quest to justify their refusal to honour promises made at Lancaster House. In days gone by, entry into this part of the country was met with a cacophony of sounds from the manufacturing firms that defined the city.

At their peak, these companies employed thousands of men and women, youths were able to apply for and gain entry into apprenticeship programs, skills development was among the best in the region and the continent. By and large, these firms contributed a substantial chunk of the national GDP, they built houses for their employees while others were able to get mortgages from building societies to buy properties. Bulawayo was growing into the very centre of Zimbabwe economics.

When the sanctions were imposed on the country, little by little these companies began to downsize, choked by a failure to access markets or finance upgrade and grow in line with modern trends. Eventually, we were left with manufacturing firms that had become too expensive to run which meant their products, once in demand from a “hungry” West, no longer able to sustain themselves or produce even for the local markets — locally produced products became too expensive for the domestic market.

Companies closed down one-by-one until all we had left with were factory shells, obsolete equipment and a very large number of an unemployed people. The sanctions denied many of Bulawayo’s eligible workforce the rights to make a sustainable living. And the ripple effect of this was other value chains also closed downs as a result of the grossly depleted spending power of most households.

Local Government also suffered as revenue became depleted due to an inability by many now unemployed residents to pay their rates. Mpilo Hospital once lauded as one of the most efficient and well-run public institutions in the country began to buckle under the weight of thousands of unpaid bills as did Zesa, among others.

Bulawayo is in dire straits, but not because of poor management or Government’s economic management failures. Bulawayo is in the economic throes because the West decided to play God with people’s lives.

The West claims at every opportunity to be the bastion of democracy, what sort of democracy kills an innocent child of malnutrition all in the name of regime change? What sort of democracy denies people basic human rights like access to water, education and healthcare all in the name of regime change? And what sort of democracy takes away a whole functioning industrial hub and turns it into a ghost town of derelict factory shells, all in the name of regime change?

As we are joined by our neighbours to speak out against this humanitarian fallacy, I ask that all Zimbabweans, especially in Bulawayo introspectively look at what these sanctions have done to the city’s industries and join us in fighting them.

Cde Archibald Chiponda holds a Master’s Degree in Economics and is also the Zanu-PF Bulawayo Province Secretary for Information and Security.