THE MINISTER OF FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (HON. PROF. M. NCUBE): Thank you Mr. Speaker Sir. I thank the Hon. Member for that question. The implementation of the NDS1 strategy is going well; they are 14 pillars, if I can remind Hon. Members of this august House. There are 14 pillars which we are following religiously. We have developed a results based framework with specific targets, we have crowded members of the development community to work with our Government – [HON. HWENDE AND HON. BITI: Inaudible interjections.] –
THE HON. SPEAKER: Hon. Hwende and Hon. Biti, if you do not agree with what the Hon. Minister is saying, you wait to ask supplementary questions. Hon. Hwende, that is unparliamentary language, withdraw that, including Hon. Biti – [HON. BITI: Inaudible interjection.] – you do understand that you said anonyepa.
HON. BITI: I withdraw Mr. Speaker kuti anonyeba.
HON. HWENDE: I withdraw.
THE HON. SPEAKER: Thank you, just listen and then make a supplementary question. Hon. Minister please proceed.
HON. PROF. M. NCUBE: Thank you Mr. Speaker Sir – [HON. BITI: Haunyepe, you are not a liar.] – as I was about to explain I will carry on. The implementation of the NDS1 strategies is going well. I will be very happy to share the results for the first year of implementation 2021 which was presented to Cabinet and it was our intention to have perhaps a public event to discuss the 2021 results from that implementation process. We have 14 pillars and on every pillar, we have made great strides. Let me give you some examples, if we say with the infrastructure and public utilities pillars, the results are there for own to see. The roads, dams, emergency road rehabilitation programme, even in urban areas where Government has to innovate by invoking certain laws to make sure that they will intervene and deal with those roads which the city councils have failed to manage and develop; that is the first one.
I must hasten to say that we have used Government resources to do this, which really means taxes from our citizens; we have not been having any loans from outside expect for loans here and there but it is largely tax payers’ money. Look at Muchekeranwa Dam, Marowa/Nyathi Dam, Vungu Dam in Midlands have started. Zimunya Dam in Nkayi has started, Tuli Manyange Dam in Matabeleland South has also started. Silver Stream is also being sorted out and Kunzvi Dam is also being looked into.
Let us look at Mbudzi Interchange; it is going to be a world class piece of infrastructure and all of that is from the implementation of the National Development Strategy 1, which is the first pillar – Infrastructure. The second pillar is Agriculture; in the first year of implementation of NDS 1, agriculture did well. We had the highest level of grain output which we have not had in 40 years.
This year, if we fine-tune 1 or 2 things, the winter wheat programme is going to be the best way you have ever heard probably in 15 years. So the NDS implementation is going very well indeed.
Let me move on to the macro-economy; our use of a dual currency has worked very well with industry in the last two years. We have managed to deploy $3, 2 billion for use by our manufacturing sector. We have seen capacity utilization exceed 60% level, the highest levels in many years which even dominate some of the years that we saw under the unity government. So the implementation of the NDS 1 currently is going very well.
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