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(NEWZIMBABWE) Community share schemes: Kasukuwere replies

Community share schemes: Kasukuwere replies
29/01/2013 00:00:00
by Psychology Maziwisa

FINANCE Minister Tendai Biti this week claimed that there is no legal basis for the community share ownership schemes which form part of foreign firms’ compliance with the country’s indigenisation laws. Below, Empowerment Minister Saviour Kasukuwere’s advisor Psychology Maziwisa responds.

JUST because the law is silent about community share ownership trusts doesn’t per se render the schemes unlawful.

The Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act contemplates broad-based empowerment and community share ownership schemes are a means of achieving that. In ordinary life, one would expect a person of (Finance Minister,Tendai) Biti’s background to understand this very simple legal fact but quite evidently, he doesn’t.

Legalities aside, this is just stupid politicking by a party desperate to fix its tattered reputation ahead of crucial elections that will be held this year without fail.

Biti is acutely aware that his party’s record over the last four years has been a dreadful one: corruption in government by its officials, a woeful, and sometimes very offensive, failure to support our small-scale farmers, failure to create even one job in the four years they have been in government, sickening intra-party violence and to top the list, (MDC-T leader) Morgan Tsvangirai’s amoral behaviour.

All of these, cumulatively considered, make it very easy to see why Biti would resort to all manner of smear. It’s a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures.

The indigenisation programme has helped take the poorest of our people out of abject poverty and given them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make something out of their lives. In the process, thousands of jobs have been created.
We need jobs in this country and community share schemes have gone a long way in addressing this situation.

Inevitably, the MDC-T was always going to try and emerge as the champions of employment creation. To that end, they have created a façade of an economic policy, a strategy intended to demonstrate they are concerned about creating jobs in this country. And never mind that they created the joblessness in the first place through ZDERA which Biti himself helped draft.

The MDC-T has the audacity to question the only demonstrable mechanism of creating employment in this country, the guts to claim they are the party of jobs when their record says otherwise?

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They called for sanctions to be imposed on this country, they have privately continued to call for their repeated imposition, have failed to release the money needed for the resuscitation of industries in Bulawayo and, lately, Biti has given a directive for government to stop the hiring of any new nurses.

Biti is a nasty bit of work. He can’t be a member of the MDC-T and feign concern for the welfare of our people. He is part of that cabal which wants to see the lives of our people sent to the gutter. You couldn’t be part of Hitler’s gang in Nazi Germany and claim to be an innocent. Similarly, Biti cannot belong to the MDC-T and claim to be a good man. It’s a bit like being kissed into entering a snake pit by a viper.

By questioning the legality of the share schemes, is Biti suggesting that the schools and clinics that were built in Zvishavane should be destroyed and our people there should continue to be deprived of these basic necessities?

Is he implying that the nearly $1 billion that has been put together in shares for our communities should be remitted back into the coffers of these foreign companies? If Biti really thinks that Minister Saviour Kasukuwere will agree to that kind of retrogressive thinking, then he is really much dumber than I thought.

The fact is that these folks thought the indigenisation programme would be implemented in a haphazard, chaotic and even unlawful manner so they could have something to talk about. Now that they see a completely different picture, they are running around like jilted women.

Labels: COMMUNITY SHARE OWNERSHIP SCHEMES, SAVIOUR KASUKUWERE

posted by MrK @ 12:04 AM