You have an issue where petrol costs 47 cents and your duties are at 67 cents. So, these are the things that I expect the Commission will not be looking at and saying, what is going to be the impact of saying that if we reduce the duties from 67 cents to 20 cents, what is the positive impact because logistics are going to be lower? It might mean that our exports are going to become more competitive. I think that on all the other issues that are also going to be addressed, one of the things that has been happening in this economy is that now we are having a three tier pricing system where people have different prices for bonds, for US Dollars, for making transfers. It becomes an issue of that Commission to be also saying for example why are we having these issues? How can we be able to address them? It is clear when you look at the functions that they are going to be monitoring all the cost drivers in the business and economic environment. Right now there is no entity and no one who is monitoring all those cost drivers.
What happens is that at the present moment, I think that one of the cries that have been coming out is sometimes; it appears that there is policy inconsistencies. For example if you want to export a certain commodity, like even raw hides out of this country, I have to go to the Minister of Industry and Commerce and he will give me some authorisation. Then the next thing is that I will go to the Minister of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development and he might not give me the authorisation. You will find that it will end up being a situation where some of these Ministries are appearing as if they are competing and there are policy inconsistencies. This is what we are now expecting that such a Commission will be looking at such things and saying that where there are inconsistencies, how we can make sure that these inconsistencies are corrected.
There is also the issue that the Commission is also going to be looking at the structure of industry. Everyone is crying out about all these monopolies and oligopolies that have been set up in our industries. You have institutions like Econet who are basically urinating on the foreheads of the citizenry and basically telling them that it is anointed water from Prophet Magaya. So, I am expecting that you are going to have a situation where the Commission will be looking at such situations where you have monopolies and oligopolies that are basically raping the citizenry, but we want make sure that they have competitive pricing, and do not end up raping the citizenry.
The other point that I will also point out that I am really happy about is that they talk about the fact that they are going to be having a nationwide statistical database. We should actually take this as one of the greatest things that is going to come out of this because for any business to be able to operate…
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