United Refiners boss threatens to blacklist retailers hoarding cooking oil

United Refineries boss Busisa Moyo has threatened to blacklist retailers hoarding cooking oil but he was told that his job was to produce and not to regulate the market otherwise he would be behaving like the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front government which wants to control things.

Moyo said his company distributed 300 tonnes of cooking oil, about 150 000 units, in Bulawayo and surrounding areas but was concerned that retailers were withholding the product or had bundled it at the till point.

“We will be blacklisting errant retailers for the next round of deliveries,” he said.

Zimbabwe has been experiencing shortages of cooking oil since the beginning of last month when the government announced new monetary and fiscal policies which sent a signal to the market that the bond note and the United States dollar were no longer at par and prices skyrocketed.

One of Moyo’s twitter followers going by the name of Vin Diesel told Moyo: “Simply triple production, have shifts and work on weekends. Your job is to manufacture even if people buy to throw away its none of your business, yours is to make money. demand is higher than production right now.”

Moyo disagreed, saying: “In our country companies are citizens. In the old capitalist models we wouldn’t care. Shareholders are not our only stakeholders.”

Ndimukoma told Moyo: “Flood the market, noone hoards.”

Moyo replied: “If someone uses this phrase just one more time… .soya takarima shoma ende nyika hayina forex. You need a flood of forex before you can flood the market…musataure sevanhu vasina kudzidza.”

Tendai Hove supported Moyo but had reservations about his last sentence. “U should not be worried about hoarding or whatever keeping pushing the product unless u having production bottlenecks.”

Moyo said the problem was forex. If his company were given enough forex, $3.5 million a month, he would saturate the market in seven to 12 days.

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