The Sunday News
Dumisani Nsingo Business Reporter
GOVERNMENT is making concerted efforts to ensure that the Zimbabwe National Productivity Institute comes into operation as it moves to improve productivity and competitiveness of the country’s industries, a Cabinet minister has said.Speaking at the Institute of People Management of Zimbabwe (IPMZ) Annual Convention and Exhibition last Friday, the Minister of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, Cde Nicholas Goche, said in an effort to support Labour Law reforms there was a need to thrust concurrent measures to make the Zimbabwe National Productivity Institute operational without further delay.
The convention was held under the theme: “Transforming the Human Resources Profession for High Performance and Ethical Leadership”.
He said: “The institution can play a major role in supporting an industrial relations framework that is informed by properly defined, objective productivity and competitiveness benchmarks.
“The institute would thus serve to make the process of collective bargaining as provided for under the Labour Act more meaningful, serving to better correlate workers’ remuneration with enterprise and sustainability.”
A National Productivity Centre (NPC) is a statutory organisation that provides training, consultancy and undertakes research in the area of productivity in a country.
It promotes enhancement of productivity culture and its prime goal is to facilitate industry to enhance competitiveness both locally and internationally.
The facilitation can be done through training, systems development, productivity reports, total factor productivity and resource information.
In Zimbabwe the idea has been on the cards for the last 12 years and when it was mooted it was to be wholly financed or in part by funds from the Manpower Development Levy to which the private sector contributes a substantial amount.
“While there are significant funding needs for the resuscitation of the institute, I am happy to inform you that there is consensus within Government to revisit this issue with the urgency and seriousness it deserves. Indeed, the operationalisation of the productivity institute is one of the explicit Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation targets,” Cde Goche said.
IPMZ president, Mr Marshall Pemhiwa, said the country was facing a mismatch between productivity and what was being demanded as remuneration by employees.
“We need to generate income because you can’t share a cake that is non-existent, you have to build on something. I think as a country we need to recognise that productivity is a key variable. Firstly we need to drive people to achieve certain goals before they demand things that are non-existent,” Mr Pemhiwa said.
He said the country could take a leaf from countries such as China and Japan’s working culture which largely centres on measure per person than the one measure by the country.
“Some of the countries that are advanced have also set up what is called a NPC. For Zimbabwe we lack such data that gives us a direction on what we need to do. I know the NPC issues were discussed but we need to revive some of those organs so that we talk about national productivity issues and also begin to change our cultures and mindsets if we are to actually compete with the best in the world,” Mr Pemhiwa said.
However, Industry and Commerce Minister Mike Bimha is of the view that focus should be directed to fighting the collapse of industry by availing money before looking at issues such as competitiveness.
