Zimpapers Logo

Jeffrey Gogo Climate Story
There was some expectation that Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa would speak about the economic impact of a recent raucous ban on polystrene-based packaging when he released a review of the 2016 National Budget on Thursday.

He did not.

Instead, he spoke about several things unrelated to the ban, including accelerated Government action to curb hunger following a severe drought in 2016, and how state power utility Zesa Holdings Ltd went on to “blow” $190 million importing power during the review fiscal year.

We will get to the electricity conundrum shortly.

First, the Environmental Management Agency’s (EMA) incongruous policies that have left manufacturers, traders and users of kaylite, a packaging product widely used in the food industry, on tenterhooks – and then off again.

EMA’s apparent bombshell on July 13 outlawing food-related use of kaylite left a sour taste in the mouths of those that use it most.

Feeling hard done, they wasted no time to grovel, and also, in their humility, to scream loud. The regulator buckled.

No sooner had EMA imposed the ban than it was lifted, albeit temporarily, for a further 90 days, to allow those that had stockpiled the material to switch over to acceptable options.

But the Environmental Management Agency gave polystrene-based packaging manufacturers, retailers and users short shrift, blaming them for a lack of urgency in aligning to a law enacted 5 years ago, but was iced for industry and commerce’s benefit.

The brick-bats flew back and forth, a frigid tenseness that has come to define the relationship between business and the environment here in recent years, as regulators seek to assert their authority over a business community that cares little about its environmental footprint.

The 2014 stand-off between the Ignatious Chombo-led ministerial committee on water pollution and corporate water polluters; frequent resistance by new and old businesses to conform to the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs); and the uproar over a ban on selected plastic packaging a few years ago immediately come to mind.

Now in activating a law that’s been in hibernation since 2012, EMA says it had been prompted by the findings of a new scientific study by the University of Zimbabwe, which blamed kaylites for causing a range of health and environmental complications, including cancer.

Two things to take home from this. The first one is that EMA is acting based on science.

The regulator did not one day over tea simply decide to make things ungovernably difficult for businesses

Already EMA was informed on the “negatives” of polystrene-based packaging.

Hence the 2012 law. It only needed local scientific research to back it up. Fair enough.

But I have checked the University of Zimbabwe’s online research repository and could not locate the research that forced EMA into action that shocked even some of Zimbabwe’s respected environmentalist.

EMA spokesperson Steady Kangata did not help matters either. He did not respond to requests for a copy of the study.

It is clear the ban on kaylites was influenced by concerns over sustainable growth, the buzz-phrase in global economics today.

However, what remains unclear is whether kaylite is actually guilty of the broad health and environmental charges laid against it.

Since this study hasn’t been made public, we don’t exactly know whether the study has been exposed to the rigour of peer to peer scientific review to validate its claims.

Nonetheless, there is a some consensus in some countries like South Africa that have scaled down polystrene use for the same reasons brought forth by EMA. The jury is still out there.

Double standards

Secondly, manufacturers of kaylite have spoken on the potential economic impact of the ban, where Minister Chinamasa kept his peace.

After pumping in $6 million into polystrene production machinery, ostensibly with EMA’s support, one of Zimbabwe’s only two makers of kaylite food containers, Planas Investments, feels cheated.

“Although this ban was talked about years back, we thought we were working together with the relevant authorities and even came up with a waste management plan,” Melody Frank, a spokesperson for Planas Investments, told the Business Weekly, Zimpapers latest publication.

It could be argued that it was not a very smart idea for a business to invest in products facing a ban.

But if the Environmental Management Agency encouraged this investment by accepting the company’s waste management plan, and even going as far as certifying the project as environmentally-friendly, through EIAs, then EMA’s double standards are shockingly deplorable.

It comes as little surprise then that EMA went about implementing the ban the wrong way.

Evidently, there wasn’t sufficient consultation. Implemented in like haphazard manner, what are otherwise thoughtful economic interventions effectively loose appeal, achieving the opposite of what they originally intended.

However, regardless of the regulator’s short-comings, let no one question green growth as a viably effective model for building economies and for driving new capital investment.

Companies are beginning to realise that eco-friendly products can improve their competitiveness (and) profitability as well as improve access to both domestic and foreign markets that are increasingly demanding products produced sustainably.

Electricity imports

Separately, the Finance Minister Mr Chinamasa revealed on Thursday that Zesa Holdings last year spent $190 million buying electricity from South Africa and Mozambique, to plug shortages from domestic generation that had been hit hard by drought.

That’s an increase of 493 percent from the $32 million spent on power imports in 2015.

A shortage of water at the Kariba hydroelectric power plant, which accounts for over half of local power supply, had cut generation by about two thirds of the 750 megawatt capacity when the drought took its toll for the better part of 2016.

To this day, Zesa Holdings still imports up to 350MW of electricity, the utility says on its website.

In view of Zimbabwe’s precarious foreign currency situation, power imports were a necessary expenditure going the wrong way. Ordinarily, it would be an abuse of the word ‘blow’, using it to describe the somewhat measured interventionist efforts by a power utility to save a desperate situation.

But let’s contextualise these for the greater good actions.

With the $190 million electricity import bill, Zesa Holdings could have built to completion the 100-megawatt solar power plant planned for Gwanda, without asking third party contractors, and could have remained with some handsome change too. How much amount of darkness must amount to light, really?

God is faithful.

[email protected]