Firstly, we want to stem the baneful rural-urban migration which saps growth from the African countryside, transferring it to towns and cities.
The colonial model where the youths desert their places of birth in search of livelihoods in alien environments of towns and cities, have kept the countryside as backwaters.
That debilitating model must now give way to a Zimbabwean model where one’s place of birth is also one’s place of bread.
We have made salutary head starts. Most schools are already there in our rural areas. More and more tertiary institutions, including vocational training centres, polytechnics and universities, are being sited and set up in rural areas.
Through Rural Electrification Agency, REA, the national electricity grid has penetrated many rural areas.
We already have several growth points, each of which is gradually turning into sprawling semi-urban settlements. At the back of all these, we are developing several irrigation projects from dams we continue to build in each province. All the factors and infrastructures for rural industrialisation are slowly but surely falling in place. We will do more on that front, until everything needful is in place.
Secondly, we aim change and spread the geographic or spatial location of value chains and value addition activity nationally. In essence, Devolution Policy rejects town- and city-centric models of growth and development, for more geographically dispersed and geographically even models. This is much more than geography; it is social justice through evenly spread economic activity that leaves no one, no community and no demography behind. The colonial models where Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru, Masvingo, Mutare and to a lesser extent Chinhoyi, Bindura, Marondera, Gwanda and Beitbridge were sole nodes of economic activity, all set against vast hinterlands of rural paralysis, should now be a thing of the past. We now need a new and just nexus connecting country and city.
Thirdly and critically, our economic measures have tinkered with peripheral issues. We now need to tackle the core of the national economy.
Clearly, there are structural issues governing and constraining us as a people, issues that have consigned us to the margins of the national economy. We now need to tackle the real economy: that vital strategic space where goods and services are made for markets.
That space where laws of supply and demand should rule; indeed that space where the seller meets the consumer on equal, mutually checking terms. Both the current mayhem in global supply chains, and the volatility we have experienced in our economy, must spur us to do the urgent and needful in the deep economy.
Our economy reveals multi-layered, structural disequilibria both at real and financial levels.
This is what spawns repeated cycles of instability and volatilities, whatever the state of our fundamentals.
Indeed, this is what makes us a comparatively better earning economy yet one that suffers repeated bouts of imbalances.
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