The Sunday News
Zimbabwe’s economy has been besieged largely by the twin evils of economic sanctions and a lack of funding for business, among a host of other challenges. It is against this background that the nation’s economic programmes seek to unlock the country’s natural resources’ worth through the use of local resources to drive economic growth.
The Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset) economic blueprint is alive to this reality and the different clusters are all tailored towards getting the key enablers of the economy working optimally so that industry and even service sectors begin to recover.
At the weekend President Mugabe commissioned agricultural and irrigation equipment worth $38 million under a $98 million loan facility secured from Brazil under the South American country’s More Food For Africa Programme.
The equipment, which includes tractors, fertiliser spreaders and irrigation kits, we are told, is the first of three tranches and we understand beneficiaries under the first phase will be schemes for smallholder farmers who benefited under the land reform programme.
The President has once again reiterated the importance of productivity on farms saying the equipment should be used to improve productivity and consequently the people’s standard of living hence shaming Western countries that slapped the country with economic sanctions over the redistribution of land.
“We are succeeding with the help of those who are our friends indeed. A friend in need is a friend indeed and Brazil is such a friend. Let’s go and be more productive and produce not just for our stomachs but also for export so we can have external earnings coming in,” said President Mugabe at the commissioning.
The President noted that each beneficiary under the programme was expected to repay their loan over 15 years at an interest rate of two percent a year and cautioned the farmers against disappointing the financiers. Food security and nutrition is one of the key clusters under Zim Asset and it is our hope that such funding will assist the country meet some of its economic goals under its blueprint.
However, we would like at this point to emphasise the President’s call that the equipment should go to rightful beneficiaries and it is our hope that the Government has learnt from mistakes of the past in running such programmes. Also, we believe such friendly loan terms should come with targets for the farmers so that we do away with the business-as-usual approach where some farmers who got equipment under the Farm Mechanisation Programme still have nothing to show for it.
We believe the Government needs to capacitate its agricultural extension arm, and even restructure it where necessary, to play a greater role than now in guiding farmers into making full use of the land.
While the equipment helps farmers to be more productive, it should be noted that it is not the equipment that will improve production but the farmers themselves through continuously increasing their knowledge and understanding their land better and putting it under the correct use. Without set targets for different regions for rainfed agriculture and universal targets for irrigation schemes, we may not achieve much since some farmers have over-celebrated ownership of land and neglected the chief responsibility of making that land productive so that it contributes to the growth of the economy.
As the country joins the rest of the continent in marking Africa Day this week, Zimbabwe stands proud as one of the few African countries to have given its citizens land to address colonial imbalances. However, we can make that victory of taking back land thunderous by fully utilising the land in question. We should not only be content with producing primary commodities that are of less value but seek to value-add and beneficiate our products to get maximum value out of even our agriculture.
We hope those charged with distributing the farm implements understand the greater vision of this country so that we do not see any deviation from the proper way. Added to that, we need a strong maintenance programme so that our equipment lasts longer, and this could also depend on whether we are knowledgeable enough to use the equipment properly.
Figures of 15 000 tractors in the country, 30 percent of them non-functional, do not make for interesting reading and should be a challenge to authorities. We learn that we need 40 000 tractors as a country. Planning and proper execution of plans will see us achieve our goals under Zim Asset, where performers should be rewarded with more support and non-performers trained where possible instead of channelling resources where they do not bear fruit.
We are our own liberators. Our friends can only complement our efforts hence the need to put shoulder to the wheel and make an imprint on our land to make our blueprint the success it deserves to be.
