Mnangagwa says Zimbabwe should re-examine how it calculates inflation and rates GDP

Third, I am exercised about the unfolding relationship between the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, ZSE, and its sibling, the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange, VFEX. Instead of a relationship of complementarity, I am beginning to sense that businesses are delisting on one to re-list on the other.

This may very well relate to discrepancies in incentives we have attached to either of the bourses.

In an economy which is fighting off negative speculative behaviours, this might not be very helpful.

Again, I urge the authorities to apply their minds on this growing chasm between these two bourses so they complement each other, for the benefit of our whole economy.

Fourth and last, I am far from being convinced that the current size of our economy, which is put at between US$26 billion and US$27 billion, does justice to our real worth.

My hunch is a lot of value remains uncaptured and thus unstated or understated. For instance, how is the informal sector accounted for in this global value?

Equally, how complete is the inventorying of our real estate economy? Even on-farm developments appear to fall outside a reading of our GDP! Yet this is one area where the Zimbabwean economy has been particularly outstanding.

Overall, we need and have to re-imagine our economy as it transforms for the better.

More important, we must reckon with the fact that it is no longer a racial enclave economy it used to be under settler colonialism; it is now a people’s economy whose real scope and value must aggregate the gainful activities of its entire citizenry.

Anything less will suggest nyika haisi kuvakwa nevene vayo vese, but by a privileged few in the formal economy. We need a new template for a new, ever transforming economy!

By President Emmerson Mnangagwa for the Sunday Mail

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