HARARE: A Chinese diplomat has urged Zimbabwe to cut vehicle imports, saying the country should rebuild its own local motor vehicle assembly industry.
Li Yao Hui, an economic and commercial counsellor with the Chinese embassy, said Zimbabwe should follow the Chinese motor industry model, which has enabled the automobile sector to grown into one of the world’s vehicle exporters owing to its robust policies. The Asian country has a number of vehicle manufacturers such as Foton, Chery, JMC among others, which export to several countries, including Zimbabwe.
China adopted a policy in which it partners with foreign and reputable vehicle manufacturers. The policy also promotes only the import of essential parts such as engines, while the rest is produced in China. The vehicles are then launched under a new brand. Yao Hui said the Zimbabwe government could emulate this strategy to grow its own motor vehicle industry.
“You have to make some sort of a survey. How many cars needed for the market and, how all these (imported) cars were circulated and who are the customers? I don’t know why you imported so many vehicles last year and the year before, because it is a lot of money,” he said.
“I understand that if you don’t have it locally then you have to import but the money that you spend has to be considered as well based on the market survey,” he said.
“The way we do it is that we try to make all these vehicles produced locally or as joint ventures. So many parts will be produced locally so that we don’t have to import every part from a foreign company. We only import the very important parts like the engine,” he said.
Currently, Quest Motors, which introduced several Chinese franchise, has been gravitating towards that direction as they are now assembling their own buses, Quest Bus. The assembling plant remodelled the bus to suit the Zimbabwean terrain. They replaced all the fibre with metal sheets during assembling.
Moreover, they are gravitating towards high concentration of local components on the assembled vehicles such as tyres, seats, glass, carpets, springs, exhausts, among others. Zimbabwe has been accumulating a huge import bill from vehicle imports mainly from Japan. Most people cannot afford the cost of new vehicles assembled locally.
But government, which has been importing more expensive, brand-new models from German, the UK, and South Africa, has been criticised for shunning locally manufactured vehicles from Quest Motors Corporation, Willowvale Mazda Motors Industries (WMMI), AVM Africa Limited and Deven Engineering.
Government parastatals, government departments and institutions like the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, the Zimbabwe National Army, the Air Force of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Republic Police continue to import vehicles, ignoring a Presidential Decree compelling them to purchase 80 percent of their vehicle needs from local assemblers.
