HARARE: Zimbabwe’s import bill has risen to about $18 billion over the last five years as the influx of cheap foreign-made products continues. The Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) says robust measures are needed to reverse the trend, which threatens the viability of local firms and widens the country’s trade deficit.
Since dollarisation in 2009, Zimbabwe has been a net importer of finished clothing, food and automobile products mainly from South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and countries in the Far East.
Liquidity constraints amid low domestic industrial capacity utilisation, has worsened the situation. “We need to look at our consumption level to say how do we use our consumption as industrial leverage. “Cumulatively, Zimbabweans we’ve imported on a net basis $18 billion worth of goods, so every year we’re $3 billion short in terms of exports versus imports,” CZI president Busisa Moyo said.
“We’re a net importer position by $3 billion over the last five years consistently, so if we add those five years and a bit of this year we’ll find the number we get is $18 billion, and that’s a lot of value.
“Zimbabweans are actually consuming, of course there’re questions, where’s the $18 billion coming from because if you’re a country that’s $14 billion in Gross Domestic Product, if you’re spending $3 billion from your economy on a net import basis at some point you run out of cash. “So, we should be out of money right now maybe that’s why we’re feeling the pinch (liquidity crunch) and so on because we’ve continued to import,” he said.
Moyo said the widening trade deficit was an albatross to business growth hence the need to devise measures to strike a balance between imports and exports. He also said barriers such as corruption, lack of convergence and business confidence were real.
“We’ve lost a lot of confidence over the years, the big thing that’s affecting confidence right now in terms of the global outlook and the way Zimbabwe is viewed is our debt problem. “Zimbabwe has an external debt of $10 billion. The pricing of money to the private sector and so on isn’t good,” Moyo added.
