Don’t be blind to elementary logic Quest employees assemble a Foton Tunland twin-cab at the company’s Mutare assembly plant in this file photo
Quest employees assemble a Foton Tunland twin-cab at the company’s Mutare assembly plant in this file photo

Quest employees assemble a Foton Tunland twin-cab at the company’s Mutare assembly plant in this file photo

Jorum Nyathi
Government recently raised duty for imported luxury vehicle models to between 40 percent and 60 percent. This complemented its circular number 16 of 2011 which requires State-aligned entities to purchase all their operational vehicles from Willowvale Mazda Motor Industries or Quest Motor Corporation.

The two policies have two key objectives: to protect the nascent local vehicle assembly sector and to save scarce foreign currency for critical imports. This is standard practice across the globe, even in the most advanced economies in Europe, Japan and the US. The alternative is for governments to subsidise production costs to promote cheaper exports to earn more foreign currency.

One would assume that this is basic economics. Not in Zimbabwe where human rights and freedom of choice get precedence over the economy.

A local business weekly ran two successive articles in which “experts” claimed the government had decimated the vehicle industry by raising import duty. The experts asserted that Zimbabwe did not have the capacity to assemble vehicles. This was capped by weird claims that “global trends” suggested that developing nations should move away from “manufacturing” vehicles.

Strange as this may sound, nothing was asked about where these developing nations should move to. The “trend” was reported as if it were commonsensical business logic, that developing countries are only fit to import finished products for immediate consumption. (So far Zimbabwe’s import bill has hit $1,6 billion, and forecast to reach $6 billion with a deficit of about $4 billion.)

The experts said Willowvale and Quest did not have the capacity nor enough vehicle choices for our cosmopolitan market whose tastes dictate that they consume only imported vehicles. It was lost on these experts that Willowvale and Quest were struggling to assemble vehicles precisely because of our addiction to foreign things, from drinking water, sanitary pads and cooking oil to washing soap, toothpicks to vehicles.

This is the ailment which the government sought to cure by its decision to raise duties on non-essential imports. It is this disease which the government sought to cure by ordering parastatals and other State-linked institutions to purchase all operational vehicles from Willowvale and Quest Motors.

It’s elementary economics. It is infantile to obsess about “choice” of goods we do not produce when there are local alternatives. To get quality, simple logic suggests that we start from the crude and slowly refine, we begin from lower capacity and gradually achieve greater capacity. You do not build capacity by killing the country’s nascent vehicle assembly industry because some ghost industry expert says developing (read African) countries are not fit to assemble, let alone manufacture, vehicles, all in the name of so-called choice or quality.

The mental attitude informing the stories is more staggering. Quote: “Despite the increase in the import duty Zimbabweans continue buying from outside the country, shunning local manufacturers because of price and choice considerations.”

This is said with gusto, as if, in fact, Zimbabweans were displaying more commitment to “Buy Zimbabwe”.

So if Zimbabweans continue to import, who is complaining about high duty? How does that save the jobs otherwise threatened by increased duty? And shouldn’t it be logical that more investment and consequently increased production capacity at both Willowvale and Quest Motors should also increase choice and improve quality?

There is no attempt to answer these inconvenient questions in the two reports.

Yet these are the same entities and pseudo experts who wail the loudest about the devastating scale of de-industrialisation in the country which began with the advent of Esap in the 1990s now advocating another destructive, IMF-inspired wholesale liberalisation of the economy as an antidote to development.

They are as blind as puppies to the elementary logic that by importing finished goods Zimbabweans are exporting jobs and scarce foreign currency badly needed to staunch further de-industrialisation. It is in part the same imports causing the malaise called foreign currency crunch.

After exporting foreign currency to import finished luxuries, the same experts tell us we need the same countries we buy from to return the same money, now called “investment”. Is it not absurd that while other nations skimp on foreign currency by consuming local we waste the little we earn on luxuries and expect others to lend to us to spend?

Long tales are told of how Ian Smith managed to keep the Rhodesian economy ticking during sanctions in the 1970s. That means the idea of import substitution shouldn’t be arcane science at all.

During those times people were prepared to make sacrifices, to consume “inferior” goods for long term prosperity. They were prepared to adjust to shortages while they equipped their industry and manufacturing sector.

Today we are being told the African’s super-refined palate gets poisoned by consuming what’s not produced in Japan and Europe. We are being told investing money in Willowvale and Quest Motors is “ridiculous” because it deprives Zimbabweans of choice and quality. These pseudo experts are suffering vicariously on behalf of government departments which have had the misfortune of being ordered to consume local — from Willowvale and Quest Motors.

Here is government trying to lead by example and saying let us maximise local assembly capacity and save resources. Imagine the outcry if this profane order had been directed at our hallowed private sector!

There is a tendency to ignore the fact that China’s meteoric rise to be the second largest economy today owes to its decision to kill choice in certain sectors of its economy during the incubation period until the 1990s. Those with foreign appetites to indulge were made to pay a premium.

The problem with Zimbabwe is that things are done timidly, witness the land reform. We should be doing what the Chinese did. Once the process of regional integration starts in earnest, it will be almost impossible to protect local industry. We will be a dumping ground. We are already too far behind in terms of technology but behave as if Sadc owed us a living.

When all is said, it is impossible to imagine an “expert” in the developed world peddling this fatalistic self-immolation as a prescription for national development. It is found only in Zimbabwe. In other countries you consume what you produce or, as Biti once put, what you gather.

This is not to reject well-meaning criticism, or defending incompetence, sloppiness, inefficiency or cronyism where such maladies exist, for that would be a refusal to grow. What is being rebutted is to try to make a prized fetish of imports against Africa’s efforts to beneficiate and add value to its primary resources. The attack comes clumsily disguised as an exposure of an inherent incapacity by Africans to produce anything of quality. That attack on Willowvale and Quest is microcosmic: it tells us that Africa should simply consume, against the whole spirit of a rising Africa.

The Willowvale-Quest story is not an aberration but a poignant metaphor of what is wrong with former colonials — an enduring subliminal inferiority complex often manifesting in the way we bleach our faces and string on our heads all manner of strange synthetics because the skin and hair which God gave us are not of the right quality. Only the foreign is the right quality; it doesn’t have to be subjected to any quality test.

Never mind that millions of top vehicle brands from Japan such as Toyota and Nissan are being recalled every year for various potentially fatal defects. Those are the most popular imports by our connoisseurs of high quality products.

It’s so sad how Botha’s racial slur in 1985 about blacks is daily validated through our modes of thinking and reasoning. Technical superiority is inherent in the white colour. He doesn’t need to perfect his skills through stages of normal human development. The blackman’s mental deformities on the other hand are congenital, they can’t be cured by any form of experience or training. Poor Africa! We are already badly disadvantaged because we are about the only continent which doesn’t manufacture vehicles. Now we are being reminded we are incapable of assembling a quality a vehicle.

Bob Marley and Steve Biko must be turning in their graves at this generation which believes the whiteman carries the burden of the blackman’s redemption.

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