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The partial protection given to some Zimbabwean industries this year as a by-product of the steps taken to reduce imports to levels where they can be sustained by exports saw industrial capacity use rise 13 percentage points, from 34,3 percent to 47,4 percent with some sectors now using as much as 70 percent of their capacity.

This was useful and allowed Zimbabwean consumers to continue buying a full range of products, albeit without a full range of competing brands, while also being able to buy fuel and other essential imports as less was being spent on importing those goods where Zimbabwean manufacturers can cope.

But even more important for the long-haul was the $600 million invested in industrial production, including new machinery and new technology. It is essential that Zimbabwean industrialists use what is likely to be only a modest pause in competition with other regional suppliers to upgrade their businesses so that they can take on the best in Africa and win.

We all need to remember that Zimbabwe is a founder member of the PTA and of Sadc, both groups seeing themselves as future free trade areas and both part of the initiative to combine all preferential trading areas in East and Southern Africa into a huge free trade area at some stage.

As free trade develops, Zimbabwean industrialists have to be able to export into regional markets and compete with the best in these markets. They are wise if they are using the breathing space provided by SI64 as an opportunity to rebuild their businesses with the best equipment and technologies available.

We need to remember that when Zimbabwe totally protected local industry from UDI in 1965 right up into the 1990s everything worked fine for a while and then under-capitalisation, lack of upgrading and a growing group of industrialists who thought they had a right to produce low-grade products at high prices, smashed that experiment.

The problems of the inflationary era and then competition from imports did not ruin our industry; they simply hammered something already half dead.

The growth in manufacturing we have seen this year has come from those industries that survived because they had something worthwhile and from new industries and companies created by innovative and technically savvy Zimbabweans. We must encourage these and sometimes let the useless companies die.

We also must look at what builds success in large free markets. Germany is the largest and best economy in the EU. It has a few giant companies, but its incredible success is built around thousands of middle-sized companies, often owned by a single family, making some of the finest engineered products in the world and backed by an educational system that produces first-class engineers and a large number of technicians and exceptionally skilled technical workers.

Zimbabwe shot ahead in Africa in the 1980s with universal education. Others are now catching up. We can stay ahead with the present Government policy of stressing engineering and technical education and encouraging our people to start building new industries and new companies.

We have already seen this. In the late 1990s the mobile phone industry was established. It was set up to provide services at a profit and make money.

One of its most incredible by-products and it was a by-product not an original priority, has been to create employment for thousands, from high-earning super technicians to lowly airtime sellers with hundreds of companies providing support services and a flourish retail trade.

National wealth, more employment and other desirable things are a by-product of ensuring that hard-working well-educated technically competent people can turn their own private dreams into reality. That is why the present breathing spell is important as we start. But we must remember that it is not for all time.