(HERALD) MP urges Govt to indigenise banks

MP urges Govt to indigenise banks
Thursday, 11 August 2011 02:00
Business Reporter

THE Indigenisation and Empowerment process should start with banks because it is the financial sector which drives the economy, legislator and businessman Mr Simbaneuta Mudarikwa has said.

The success of the programme, said Mr Mudarikwa, would depend on the country's national strategy, hence the need to focus on what was the core of the economy.
The Uzumba MP was giving oral evidence before the Senate Thematic Committee on Indigenisation and Empowerment recently.

He had been invited in his capacity as shareholder of Natural Stones Export, a granite firm extracting granite in Mutoko, Munyati and Uzumba.

The committee, chaired by Mutare/Chimanimani Senator Monica Mutsvangwa, had called Mr Mudarikwa to appraise it on what his company was doing to comply with the indigenisation law.

"You can indigenise my company but as long as banks are not, it doesn't help. You should start with banks. When you want to kill a snake you don't hit the tail but the head," said Mr Mudarikwa.

However, the majority of Zimbabwean banks are indigenous owned with the exception of Standard Chartered, Barclays, Ecobank, MBCA and Stanbic while the others have foreign investors who are minority shareholders.

He said there were several people who were holding on to mining claims but could not move in because they did not have the finance and they could not secure funding.
There was need, said Mr Mudarikwa, to amend mining legislation to ensure that local communities benefited from the extraction of minerals in their communities. Zimbabwe, he said, was the only country that regarded granite as a mineral.

He said while it was prudent to have mining firms perform corporate social responsibilities in their communities, the Minerals and Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe, which levies 2 percent for every invoice a company makes for any sale, was not obliged to pay back to that community.

"It's parastatals that are shortchanging the community, MMCZ levies 2 percent for every invoice but when it comes to sponsoring, they go to St John's here in Harare to sponsor golf where their children learn," said Mr Mudarikwa.

He said there was no point for royalties to continue to go to central Government at the expense of the community concerned.

Mr Mudarikwa also castigated the quasi-fiscal term requirement that existed three years ago compelling firms to surrender 45 percent of their foreign earnings to the central bank in return for the Zimbabwe dollar.

"We were losing 45 percent of our income to the RBZ and getting useless Zimbabwe dollars. We were just doing national service," he said.

Turning to the operations of his mining firm, Mr Mudarikwa said it was 80 percent foreign owned and was in the process of regularising it so that it complies with the law.

The legislator, however, slammed some members of the thematic committee for driving to Mutoko on a fact-finding mission. He said most of the information the committee had gathered was false and exaggerated.

Some of the allegations the committee had gathered include tribalism in recruitment, high accidents, failing to pay back to the community and observing safety conditions.
On allegations of employing people who did not reside within the area, Mr Mudarikwa said while he was not a tribalist who asks where people come from, most of the general hands were locals.

"But if you go to a meeting with the people being planted for them to dramatise that I don't belong here it's a problem," said Mr Mudarikwa.

He said some members of the committee were board members of a non-governmental organisation called Streetwise that purported to represent the Mutoko community when it was based in Harare.

There had been complaints from wives of workers at the mine that their husbands were failing to satisfy them sexually because of the hard work they were subjected to.
The committee was also told that 60 accident-related deaths had occurred at the mine.

In his response, Mr Mudarikwa said the world over, there could never be such high statistics of accidents because the mine would be closed.

He said there had been a surge of applications for money for maternity fees, an indication that the allegations by the workers' wives were false.