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Africa Moyo

Deputy News Editor

The newly formed Economic Empowerment Group (EEG) has expressed displeasure at the level of economic sabotage going on in the country, which has seen an unprecedented attack on the local currency.

Speaking during the EEG’s national executive meeting recently, one of the founding members of the lobby group Mr Scott Sakupwanya, called for an immediate end to the sabotage as those involved would soon be exposed.

He said there was need to continue uplifting marginalised communities to ensure the full realisation of Vision 2030 of an empowered and prosperous upper middle income society, as envisaged by the Government.

“As an economic empowerment lobby group, we are very disheartened by the level of sabotage that is happening across the entire economy, which is hampering economic progress despite the fact that the Government led by President Emmerson Mnangagwa is a listening administration that is open and is always ready to support the citizenry,” said Mr Sakupwanya.

He said the EEG would rally behind President Mnangagwa’s anti-corruption stance, adding that they will not hesitate to name and shame individuals and organisations engaging in corruption and sabotage.

Mr Sakupwanya’s remarks come at a time when wholesalers and retailers were increasing prices of goods and services in line with the fluctuating parallel market rate for foreign currency.

Some retailers are also pricing some products such as cooking oil exclusively in US dollars despite the fact that they were produced locally, with the manufacturers accessing foreign currency from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe auction system.

The arbitrary price adjustments have forced the Financial Intelligence Unit, an arm of the RBZ, to summon manufacturers and retailers for crunch talks tomorrow “to put a stop to the practice (of wantonly hiking prices)”.

FIU director general Mr Oliver Chiperesa told our sister paper, The Sunday Mail, that tomorrow’s meeting would be followed by “an intensive blitz where the FIU will partner with law enforcement agencies to identify and take legal measures against the culprits”.

Under the Exchange Control Act and the Bank Use Promotion Act as read with Statutory Instrument 118A of 2022, pegging prices at the parallel market rate is illegal.

EEG vice president Ms Saliwe Njolomole called on all citizens to be patriotic and desist from engaging in economic terrorism.

“Going forward, our efforts will be streamlined towards ensuring there is patriotism in the actions of economic agents and we envisage a situation where we pride ourselves in ethical operations and drive our economy towards the objectives that President Mnangagwa has set,” she said.

On Friday last week, President Mnangagwa told the business community during a meeting in Kwekwe that there was a lot of “mischief” going on in the country.

He said when Government barred lending by banks recently, “we discovered the rot in the banks” and “out of the 16 banks, only four passed the test”.

“Others were in deep corruption,” said President Mnangagwa.

He explained that after the rot was discovered in the banking sector, there were two possibilities; one being to expose them and the other to punish them.

However, the Government did not punish them publicly fearing that depositors would rush to withdraw all their money resulting in them shutting down.

President Mnangagwa added that some of the policies being adopted by the Second Republic were aimed at protecting consumers “from mischievous individuals and syndicates sabotaging the people’s way of life”.

While the global economy is not doing well at the moment arising from the Eastern Europe conflict pitting Russia and Ukraine that has affected supply chains resulting in shortages of a number of products and high prices for the few products available, it has been found out that economic sabotage was worsening the situation in Zimbabwe.

Some beneficiaries of funds from the auction system are understood to be feeding the same money into the parallel market, and not channelling it towards production.