Zimbabwe will be a different country by March- Eddie Cross

What we also failed to see was that he also (unlike Mugabe) recognised that if Zimbabwe was to recover, we had to have a deal with the multilaterals – so now we get a determined thrust – recognition of the right of the former white farmers to fair compensation, recognition that Zimbabwe had to stop doing stupid things – get back on the global playing field and accept the rules for becoming a player. We had to settle our multilateral debt, we had to stop spending money we did not have.

He also recognised that he had to tackle corruption – now so entrenched in the State that it represented a form of state capture. So much money floating around from corrupt deals and arrangements that his colleagues were almost all dependent on ‘brown envelopes’.

All of us need to recognise that while the President was doing all this, he was in every way a minority leader. After he had engineered the dismissal of the Mujuru elements in the party, then the G40 and finally the Mugabe faction, what was left of ZANU? His own group of loyalists is tiny and the political generals who were so dominant in the last 20 years of the Mugabe rule were more competitors for power rather than compatriots.

When he put together his new team after the elections, he took more risks – appointing a majority of ministers from the Midlands and the South. Bringing in 5 non-political technocrats’ and shifting the Vice President out of the Ministry of Defence. The new team, unlike the transition team appointed after the MAT in November, is clearly made up of men and women who are the appointees of the new President. In doing so he has re-established the cabinet as the main centre of power. I believe the next step in this process will be a gradual reduction in the influence of the military in the State at all levels of government.

The emphasis of ‘being open for business’ and the start made in returning to the international playing field has elicited considerable private sector interest and I personally have a list of private sector projects that, if implemented, will involve the investment of US$30 billion and will generate many billions in new exports and hundreds of thousands of new jobs. This was impossible under Mugabe.

I now hear people saying that the resumption of shortages and fuel queues and the sudden emergence of a parallel market for hard currencies means that we are going back into the conditions we experienced in 2005 to 2008. Nothing could be further from the truth, our economic fundamentals are sound, exports and the GDP growing rapidly and once the new team in the Ministry of Finance started to tackle the macro economic problems of the country, they were immediately rewarded by a sharp reduction in the fiscal deficit and we will be in surplus by Christmas. At this pace we will be in a different country by March 2019. Let’s keep our current problems in perspective – if we do, they will not look so entrenched or formidable.

Eddie Cross

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