Buy Zimbabwe has urged Zimbabweans to focus on local productivity and competitiveness so as to export local products saying opening up of boarders and trading with the United States dollar is not a solution to the current situation facing the country.
In an interview with 263Chat,the Group Chief Executive Officer, Munyaradzi Hwengwere has urged the government to invoke local content policy saying that will ensure that Zimbabwean companies enhances the local content.
“The solution in our view is not to open up boarders or to say lets trade in US dollars,people needs to focus on local productivity competitiveness and then use that to export the product.
“We have an unusual situation but the problems are very clear, we are importing a lot and we are exporting less and therefore as a country we have a trade deficit.
“As Buy Zimbabwe we totally understand the reasons that have led the government to do this. We cant deal with a country with shortages. There were serious deficiencies in the Statutory Instrument 122 in the sense that a number of companies took advantage of it to create fake made in Zimbabwe products.
“A number of companies took it as a means to invest in local productivity and our primary concern is the manner in which it was done,” Hwengwere said.
“Our hope was that the government was going to in temporarily suspending the SI122, they were going to invoke local content policy which is a policy meant to ensure that Zimbabwean companies enhances the local content.
“Hopefully they would have put up a fund to ensure that for instance in the cooking oil industry,you say companies that take their inputs from cotton ,maize or soya beans those are the ones that are going to be prioritized in the allocation of foreign currency,” said Hwengwere.
He added “Our view is that we need to urgently convene an all stakeholder meeting to say how do we ensure that the agenda of creating jobs in Zimbabwe does not suffer from an open boarder policy.
“For local companies as well it is important to take advantage of the fact that the US dollar is difficult to get and a number of products are now less expensive than imported products.”
