Zimbabwe Finance Minister laments he has no money to spend as $97 out of every $100 he gets goes to wages but he is not adopting South African rand

So, I want us to remain on track.  Yes, there is underfunding, but we understand why we are in that situation and we will work hard to improve those conditions.  We should not carry very easy comparisons like comparisons which were made here with Ghana.  Ghana has no level of education that we do here.  We are supporting thousands of university students in this country, which is what Ghana is not doing.  All the university students, we are supporting.  So, we need not do comparisons which are not quite helpful.  We have a situation, we have a problem.  Let us work at it and not in a miraculous way because miracles do not happen.  Step by step, we must work to get us out of the situation that we are finding ourselves in.

I have already started a process to deal with auditor’s reports.  My handicap was that I did not have the staff to comb through the voluminous auditor’s reports.  We had to negotiate with the Public Service Commission so that we create an establishment solely dedicated to reading auditor’s reports and responding to those reports and I believe we are almost getting there.  You cannot respond to all those auditor’s reports unless there is some team dedicated to ploughing through all those reports and disseminating or rather discriminating what may not be quite true and what is true and correcting the mistakes which are pointed out in those reports.

He was of course not right, Mr. Speaker, unless one is expecting dramatic things.  He says the economy is not improving.  From where I stand I know where I stood in 2013, whether we are talking about the gold sector, whether we are talking about the tobacco sector, whether we are talking about any sector and I can show, when time permits, how we have moved.  In terms of gold we have moved from 12,5 metric tonnes to 23 metric tonnes last December.  That clearly is an improvement.  We can talk about tobacco, how we have moved even under very difficult circumstances.

So, we need to acknowledge those steps.  Let us not say all the negative things which basically kill the spirit of those who are trying to make things work.  We must try to encourage each other basically, to turn around the fortunes of this economy and it can be done.  You talk about chrome.  It went down.  It collapsed, because the price was so low.  Now is the moment to get it back to production.  We are talking about nickel.  We have seen, although the prices were down, they made up for it in quantitative production and so was the case with platinum.  All those are achievements we need to talk about.

We talk about agriculture.  We have never spent, Mr. Speaker Sir, as much money on agriculture, that we have done this season.  We have never done so in the past and God willing, with the rains which came, I hope things will never be the same again.  More particularly, we have already stopped the importation of maize.  The cotton crop – I had photographs which were shown to me from Chiredzi, Karoi, Guruve, Gokwe and Rushinga.  The crop is looking good, notwithstanding the problems of lack of chemicals and fertilizer and so on.  So, we need to build on the positive developments that are taking place and not to shower negative statements that basically discourage those who are attempting to do good work.

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