Zimbabwe legislator says you cannot celebrate surplus amid poverty and joblessness

Now, we are celebrating stability because Government managed to reduce the budget deficit, fair and fine. We need to balance our books but like I said, we have to qualify this balance. You cannot celebrate a surplus amidst poverty, joblessness, when hospitals have no drugs, nurses are on strike, doctors are not adequately paid, teachers are not going to work and the children are out of school. These are qualitative socio-economic issues that you have to balance, not just the matrix because development is not about just matrix or number crunching.

It is also about what is behind those numbers in terms of the quality of life of the people. So, whereas the books have been balanced, it has happened at a very huge socio-economic and humanitarian cost. I think in the development discourse, we must place the people at the centre of our development trajectory, not numbers and figures. When we talk of stability and referring to the surplus, let us qualify it and take into account these other issues.

The second indicator of stability in the TSP is the inflation. I hear everyone saying prices have stabilised and so on. Madam Speaker, I must put it on record that Zimbabwe’s inflation is hyper-inflation. So, we cannot celebrate stabilising at a hyper-inflationary level and what do I mean by hyper-inflation?  According to international financial statistics and definitions, any rate of inflation which is above 50% is called hyper inflation. So, when our inflation is still in the region of 400/430%, we are over and above 50%. We are just in a hyper-inflationary mode. So, yes we can celebrate that prices have stabilised but we are still in a hyper- inflation situation. We need to work hard to make sure that we reduce inflation to a single digit figure from the 400s and so on. That is when we can celebrate the stability of prices when we reign in hyper- inflation to below 50% and we eradicate hyper inflation.

The other measure of stability and I am talking of stability because it has been referred to in the SONA. The other measure of stability is growth.  You cannot have stability when the economy is registering a negative growth rate.  If there is no productivity in agriculture, mining, manufacturing and even tourism, it means you are not able to grow the cake.  The cake is growing a negative rate.  Therefore, it is compromising your ability to provide for the nation because you cannot collect enough revenue from a shrinking economic base. Whereas you can say the deficit is alright or inflation is stabilised, but the economy is not growing and growth is the basis for sustainable macro-economic stability. Let us grow the economy.  Let us attract FDI.  Let us promote domestic investment.  Let us do everything in our power to make sure that the economy is ticking – it grows.

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