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Friday, March 29, 2024
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Great Zim – a trillion dollar economy

We can indeed build one of the richest economies in Africa because we have everything we need to do so.

Michael Hammer and James Champy’ s book “Reengineering the Corporation” gives great insight into how corporations can invent new processes and leadership in order to thrive.  The authors share how to survive the next four decades.

Emirates

Engineering is critical because “At the heart of business reengineering lies the notion of discontinuous thinking, which involves abandoning out-dated rules and fundamental assumptions that underlie current business operations.”

I would rephrase it to say “at the heart of reengineering Zimbabwe must be discontinuous thinking, where we abandon the old political and economic paradigms and their fundamental assumptions and replace them with a fresh and new narrative.

This new narrative must say that Zimbabwe is great country (Great Zimbabwe!), whose potential remains largely untapped. Zimbabwe has all it needs to rise, whether in human or physical assets. I want here to cast a vision that Zimbabwe can be the Singapore, Taiwan or tiger of Africa with a trillion dollar economy in 30 years’ time. We need to believe in that idea.

Grand vision
Henry Ford was asked how he could have built such an enormous enterprise from nothing.

His reply was that he did not start with nothing – everything we need is already there. I believe that when it comes to Zimbabwe.
I think we have all learnt that we can no longer abdicate our responsibility in creating the Zimbabwe we desire to others and it is now time we start to fashion a grand vision for our country.

We must do our best to ignore the contentious politics that continue to suck our energy with no tangible results. In its place we must cast a compelling national vision beyond politics. We must reinvent and re-engineer Zimbabwe with audacity and hope – understanding that we have gone through the worst and the best is yet to come.

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Last week I started a conversation with some of my colleagues in the Diaspora. We want to cast a new vision that says Zimbabwe can be a trillion dollar economy with full employment in 30 years’ time, if we begin to imagine it now. I have no doubt in my mind that it is possible.
We have millions of talented people out there who can begin to make it happen.

We want aid
What is important now is not the how, but the what. In other words, what do we want, what does it involve, what can we do now?
This is something we Africans continually fail to do; we neither dream big enough nor believe that we can succeed on our own. We want aid and loans from others and when that happens they set our economic and social developmental agenda.

We must realise that unless and until we crash the old and re-entrepreneur, (thinking of the next great possibilities), re-engineer, be creative and rebrand ourselves, we cannot innovate our market value on the global free enterprise market place to tap into capital.  This capital is not from other governments but in the free market.

The bottom line is that we can indeed raise our own adequate capital through free enterprise engagement and cut off the old dependency paradigm of foreign government aid and “loans”. We must offer value as a country. We definitely have the assets to do so. We just have to rebrand and re-imagine ourselves.

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Self-belief
Now this needs a new mentality and a re-awakening of our self-belief. We cannot expect politics to move in that realm nor can we expect other nations to think for us and drive the developmental agenda as they have done in the past. This to me is the total empowerment of Africans that we speak of.

For example, we must start to build consensus to access $60bn for Zimbabwe’s fast-track massive industrialisation capital and the genesis of growth of central and southern Africa. The multiplier effect alone, local and regional, will build adequate momentum for the future, thus creating enough economic activity to drive us towards the vision of a trillion dollar economy in 30 years.

In order to get there, a definite and precise engineering process has to be established to make all those things happen. We have thousands of engineers out there whose skills we must now use to develop our country.

Let’s forget the politics. That is a side show merely designed to satisfy short-sightedness and the selfish ambition of both the local and international predatory cabal with little interest in creating sustainable societies in Africa. – Vince Musewe is an economist and author based in Harare. This article is in collaboration with Hannington Mubabiwa, a Zimbabwean based in America. You may contact Vince on vtmusewe@gmail.com

Sourcewww.thezimbabwean.co

 

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Nigel Mugamu is extremely passionate about the use of tech in Africa, travel, wine, Man Utd, current affairs and Zimbabwe.

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