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Minister Chinamasa

Innocent Ruwende Senior Reporter—
Government has assured civil servants that it will not fail to pay them, although it will continue to stagger payments since the country is operating on a cash budget. Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa said contrary to claims by the country’s detractors that Government might fail to pay salaries because its revenue base continues to dwindle, he did not foresee that arising.

Minister Chinamasa was responding to questions from the media at the official opening of a new baking centre by Lesaffre Zimbabwe in Harare yesterday.

“So far, I think we have been lucky that the wages have been capped in a way through consensus,” he said. “We have not had any salary increases, which is a good thing for the economy. The challenge basically is to grow the economy and I do not foresee a situation where we will fail to pay salaries.

“Because we are running a cash budget, we will continue to stagger payments since we have to pay as and when income is made available. I don’t foresee any situation where we can fail to pay wages.”

On Government plans to cut the wage bill, Minister Chinamasa said it was not an overnight process, but he was happy with progress made so far. He said Government must work consistently to achieve the targets it set to achieve by 2019.

“We said by 2019 we should have reduced 55 percent or 50 percent of revenue going to wages,” said Minister Chinamasa. “We are tacking the wage bill through two routes. One is to basically look at the wage bill itself. What savings can we make within the wage bill to reduce it? What redeployments can we make?

“To reduce it, what rationalisation measures can we take? But the other one, which we are also pursuing, is to grow the cake. If we succeed in each step we are taking to grow the national cake, it means the wage bill ultimately will achieve the right proportionate share within a bigger cake.”

Speaking on the economy, Minister Chinamasa said Zimbabwe was not a basket case, but had an enormous potential to grow its economy. He said Zimbabweans needed to understand that there was no miracle solution and the process was not an event.

“Let us take for instance the potential in the mining sector,” said Minister Chinamasa. “We have every variety of mineral you can think of, but as long as it remains underground, it is no good to the fiscus.

“You need to come up with investors with money to exploit and get it out of the ground so that we can sell it and those are the measures and environment that we are creating, so that we have investors such as Lesaffre (Lesaffre acquired 60 percent stake in Anchor Yeast),” he said.

“They bring their money, they exploit our resources, exploit the minerals. When we get the mineral to sell, yes, we can sell. Let us take chrome for example. Its price is now at its highest ever. Now, this is the time to export and we have already taken that decision to export up to 30 million metric tonnes of chrome.”

Minister Chinamasa said the major constraint was that Zimbabwe did not have sufficient capital to fully exploit its resources.