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Midlands Correspondent
INDUSTRY AND Commerce Minister, Mike Bimha says key players in the productive sectors of the economy would have a say in determining businesses to be issued with import licences through the setting up of import committees.

The move is part of government efforts to protect the local industry from cheap foreign products that continue to flood the local market thereby squeezing out domestic goods.

Addressing captains of industry at the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) annual congress in Gweru yesterday, Minister Bimha said the government was finalising modalities on the import committees.

“We’ve decided that we can’t have everyone involved in importing and what we’re putting in place are import licensing committees. What we’re saying is that we would want import licensing committees that comprise people who are stakeholders in as far as those products are concerned,” he said.

“Products like sugar, cooking oil, cement and others should have stakeholders in the committees because we believe that if you’re talking of cooking oil, you want the oil processors and all those who want the oil to come together to say how much are we producing? What’s the gap that’s lacking? Where do we import and who should import?

“As government we’re comfortable in having the producers themselves importing rather than having people who aren’t players in the sector importing. Therefore, we’re now in the final stages of putting together the terms of reference of these import licensing committees and we’ll get input from you.”

As part of efforts to protect consumers from cheap imports, which have flooded the local market, the government has enlisted the services of a French company, Bureau Veritas, to regulate imports that come into the country as well as products that are produced locally.

Minister Bimha said the National Quality Standards Authority would take over the process once the legal framework was in place.

“We still face cheap, fake and substandard imports coming to Zimbabwe and there is a need to protect consumers from these. What we’ve done as a ministry was to put together principles to set up the National Quality Standards Authority, which will regulate imports that will come into the country.

“Any product that doesn’t meet our standards and those standards set by the World Trade Organisation will not be allowed in,” said the minister.

“Because the process takes time in the interim we’ve sourced the services of a French based company, Bureau Veritas, to carry out consignment based conformity assessment and we’ve had approval for that.”

The government will soon start the implementation stage starting with the awareness programmes before going through a transitional stage, which is more of a pilot test.

Minister Bimha said by October the process of regulating products would be fully operational adding that any sub-standard products, local or imports would be taken off the shelves.