While our comprehensive skills audit revealed serious deficits in almost all areas of science and technology, we have not gone a step further to create avenues and mechanisms for plugging these gaps through skills residing in our diaspora communities.
We have to have avenues for that to happen, bearing in mind the burden to make our skilled citizens want to come home is that of both government and the private sector.
We need a comprehensive policy and strategy for that to happen soonest, including embedding these important skills in our tertiary institutions, our industry and in our innovation hubs and technology incubators. Indeed our Research and Development Policy must tap into Zimbabwean citizens living abroad.
My interaction with Zimbabweans abroad, too, revealed that many of them have made contacts and built gainful business partnerships in host countries. These contacts and partnerships are a solid springboard for transforming this key community into an investor community back home.
There is a clear readiness to do so, as indeed I saw in UAE when I was confronted by a Zimbabwean specialist physician who fervently asked for land on which to build a hospital in Victoria Falls Resort City.
Why should land for such a key and strategic investment not be availed to our own people free of charge?
It got me to wonder whether our mantra, Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo, seriously addresses and responds to the needs of Zimbabweans living in the diaspora, especially those seeking to invest back home.
The Diaspora Bond which our Ministry of Finance and Economic Development is setting up must be expedited so there is a secure and mutually rewarding avenue for diaspora participation.
The Victoria Falls Stock Exchange must make this possible, with government going all out to provide and publicise friendly instruments for diaspora participation.
The yield for such a bond should be attractive enough and in foreign currency.
In equal and urgent measure, our Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency, ZIDA, must step up its activities to target Zimbabweans abroad who may want to set up shop back home.
These must be facilitated in all ways possible, including by availing industrial stands or factory shells built to purpose for free, or on concessional rates.
After all, more jobs will be created and greater value created in our Economy.
Because of the cross-cutting nature of investment activities which attract Zimbabweans in the diaspora, I am directing that a working committee on diaspora affairs, led by relevant ministers is formed without delay.
Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade should chair it, deputised by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development.
The ministries of Home Affairs, Industry and Trade and that responsible for Lands and Agriculture, should be part of this working committee which must report to Cabinet.
Other ministries can be co-opted as and when issues relevant to their portfolios emerge.
Continued next page
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