A person will have 20 goats and he still has the audacity to tell others that he is a poor person and that he should be able to be dependent on the handouts given by the State. That is the mindset that we want to change. They must realise that they have got assets. Often I am very amused Madam President when in Makoni District, there are a lot of tobacco farmers. You ask one of them what he does and the person will say I am not employed, and yet he is a tobacco farmer delivering tobacco at the Auction Floors.
So, that is the mindset that we want to change. All of us do not think that we can earn a livelihood when working for yourselves and even in terms of our surveys, we exclude all those people who are taking tobacco to the Auction Floors. We tend to regard them as unemployed. It is not correct. Those who are in artisanal mining, we take them as unemployed because we find them having sand all over their bodies and we end up saying they are not employed and yet they are probably richer than some of us. That is the mindset that I think this Bill seeks to change.
We also want people to understand that if you are in the business of rearing cattle, sheep and goats, it is a business and those assets need to be traded. You must never fall into a situation where you cannot pay your children’s school fees and yet you have got 50 head of cattle or you have got 30 goats and you do not pay for your child’s school fees because you do not realise that you can do business from trading in these assets. So, it is very important. I want to emphasise lastly before I respond to specific contributions that all this is because of the structural shift that is happening in our economy.
Personally, I regard it as a good thing that has happened to this country. The collapse of the formal sector had to come because there were only a few people in the formal sector. Let us take for example in the agricultural sector. We were talking about 4 000 farmers. There is no way an economy can grow and expand when a vital productive asset like land is held by one or two people. So, it is important that we realise that because we moved from that ownership of land and now we have the A1 farmers. We distributed that land to about 350 000 households, you can also multiply the number of people who are dependent on that piece of land. Now, that change caused disruption in our productive system. So, initially there was a fall of production, everyone was laughing at us.
However, I cannot see how we could have gone from that skilled land ownership to the current one where it is now owned by the majority of our people, without a transition. There has to be a transition and what we are talking about here Madam President is how to manage that transition from yesterday to today and tomorrow. I am happy to say that we analyse these situations and try to come up with policies that relate to the reality of our situation. We are not doing textbook things; we are relating it to the people. Of course, as we do so, it will take time even for the people themselves to understand that this is an opportunity for them.
Right now our economy is highly informalised. I always give the statistics that in 1999 or thereabout, there were 2 million workers in the formal sector, by the time we reached 2005, because of the revolution in the Land Reform programme, the formal sector collapsed and the 2 million formal workers dwindled to half a million and could be just about less. It is our responsibility to now move that economy from the informal and back to the formal again. That is the transition which we are now travelling. I am very happy with the progress that we are making so far. It is a process and not an event, it cannot happen overnight.
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