Nobleman Runyanga
Over past few weeks, some self-hating Zimbabweans have been using the social media to claim that large retailers like OK Zimbabwe are struggling because of a hostile operating environment, which is characterised by a large informal sector and alleged poverty among consumers. While the nation is experiencing some socio-economic challenges, it is unfair and dishonest for anyone to wholly blame the retailers’ circumstances on informal sector players.
When the images of empty OK Zimbabwe supermarket shelves flooded various social media platforms, some netizens were quick to imply without any basis or evidence that the retail giant was on its way out of business. They hastily blamed the informal retail sector for the supermarket chain’s situation. Given the polarised nature of our society, they dragged politics into the whole business affair.
Those who are opposition-inclined were quick to use the OK Zimbabwe affair to blame Government for the country’s informal sector as if Zimbabwe is the only country with a large informal sector. According to worldeconomics.com, the South African informalsector economy is estimated to be 29 percent of that country’s economy, which represents approximately $250 billion at GDP purchasing power parity (PPP) levels. PPP is a measure of the prices of certain goods in different countries and is used to compare the absolute purchasing power of the countries’ currencies. PPP is effectively the ratio of the price of a market basket at one location divided by the price of the basket of goods at a different location.
When self-hating Zimbabweans take to the social media on issues relating to their country, they do so with so much negativity and hate that a visitor would think that they are talking about a foreign nation with which their country is at war. An informal sector is a perfectly normal feature of any economy. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), more than half of the global labour force is employed inthe informal sector. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says 60 percent of all workers, who number two billion, are employed in the informal sector. The Bretton Woods institution further asserts that four out of every five businesses are informal. So there is nothing to get all worked up about Zimbabwe’s informal sector.
In countries, such as South Africa, citizens and businesses strategise around the reality of the informal sector rather than complain about it. This is the reason why South Africans espouse, embrace and support their spaza shops (known here in Zimbabwe as tuck shops) rather than wish them away. Last November, South African media reports indicated that manufacturing and retail giants were working onvarious ways of leveraging the township informal market, which includes spaza shops. For years now,some South African retail giants, like Pick n Pay,have been supporting spaza shops that carry their brand on their signage to cash in on the informal retail sector.
To its credit, OK Zimbabwe issued a statement last Friday assuring stakeholders that its stores remainedopen for trading. The retail player attributed the empty shop shelves to “intermittent product supply challenges during the festive period.” A recent visit to some of the retailer’s shops,, such as Bon Marche branches at the Bond Street Shopping Centre in Mount Pleasant and Westgate in Harare, showed full shelves confirming that OK Zimbabwe may be facing challenges, but it remains a viable entity and a going concern.
This was a slap in the face of those among us who have become so desperate that they are prepared to latch onto anything to fight ZANU PF and Government. If the OK Zimbabwe issue all had to do with the informal retail sector, one would ask why its main competitor, TM Pick n Pay, was not similarly affected given that they operate under the same trading environment.
Detractors were rubbing their hands in gleeanticipating that OK Zimbabwe would buttress their ill wishes for the country by blaming Government for its temporary setback. They were desperately hoping to use the OK Zimbabwe issue to support their baseless narrative that the Second Republic was not doing a good job of running the country – itself a claim calculated to position the undeservingopposition as an alternative to ZANU PF despite the glaring evidence that the opposition-dominated urban local authorities have dismally failed to run the country’s urban spaces for the past 24 years.
The OK Zimbabwe story demonstrates the desperation on the part of some detractors to besmirch Government in the misguided hope of whipping the people’s emotions against the State. During the same week the world witnessed the same people using fake news to paint a non-existent picture of economic doom and gloom by issuing a fake statement purportedly from Zhengzhou Bus Zimbabwe misinforming that the Chinese bus distributor was suspending its Zimbabwean operations. The company refuted the claim and disowned the statement.
The same group of people hijacked a statement from Tongaat Hullet advising of an imminent retrenchment exercise at its subsidiary, Triangle Limited, to blame Government for the company’s circumstances. The world knows that the challenges at Triangle started way back and that they have their origins in mismanagement at the company, which plunged it into a US$640 million debt hole.
Ever the self-haters, realising that they could not score any political points using the formal and informal retailers issue, Government’s detractors turned their guns on the ongoing Taskforce on Business Malpractices. They have sought to nourish their unfounded accusations of oppression against Government by flooding the social media with messages baselessly claiming that the operation is meant to stifle the efforts of innocent citizens trying to make a living through importing goods for resale, but nothing is further from the truth.
The operation is meant to deal with economic malpractices, like smuggling and facilitating the distribution of counterfeit, underweight and expired goods. Government is well within its mandate to roll out the operation as it saves the people from potential dangers of consuming counterfeit, sub-standard and expired goods. It also deals with smuggling which costs the country over US$1 billion annually in lost revenue.
The operation has been so successful that some products like smuggled alcoholic goods have disappeared off shop shelves as distributors cannot replenish their stocks. Bus crews who had become active and key players in smuggling goods mostly from Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia have retreated into holes, exposing those retailers that depended on smugglers to stock up. In Manicaland Province the operation has so far netted over 40 businesses which were involved in or were abetting smuggling.
So far the hostile elements’ negative narratives against Government have failed to gain any traction because they were based on falsehoods. This proves that one cannot go far when fighting a Government which is carrying its people-given mandate.
It shows that instead of fighting Government in the name of cheap politicking, all Zimbabweans should redeploy their energies to working together to redouble efforts to turn the economy around.
