Movers and shakers Quotes | Business Times

 

As 2023 comes to an end next week, Mona-Lisa Dube (pictured above), host of ZiFM Stereo’s popular business show, Business Unusual, who is also the Station’s Programming Manager takes us through what the movers and shakers said in the year.

The Business Unusual runs every Thursday at 1930hrs.

What they said…

 

Marjorie Mpundu – Former World Bank Country Manager for Zimbabwe

We were hoping to start 2023 with a very bright picture on the economy. But looking at it right now it doesn’t look very good, it looks gloomy. Our World bank global economic prospect report is showing that global growth will slow down from 2.9 % in 2022 to 1.7% mainly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, monetary policy tightening to contain very high inflation and the disruptions from the Russia –Ukraine conflict.

In the Zimbabwean context let me step back and look at 2022. The economy last year is estimated to have grown, with a real GDP growth over 3.4%. Our latest projections show that there will be some economic recovery going on in Zimbabwe in 2023. A little higher than what we’re seeing on the global side.

But this is likely to slow down as  we have to watch closely to see how all these global shocks are impacting Zimbabwe including the climatic shocks.

 

Tinashe Mutarisi-Nash Holdings Chairperson

I believe so much in the creative industry. I believe that with the right support the industry can contribute to the National GDP of this country and help address some of the challenges we face on the economic front.

If you look at countries like South Africa, the USA, you see that the music industry has created millionaires and I would like to see that for my country.

We have really talented people in this country and I believe with the right support we’ll get to where we’ll need to be. In addition to support from the government, corporations also need to chip in.

I believe Iam also playing my part with Nash TV. Nash TV is something we created during  the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown when people were just home and didn’t have any entertainment and it’s good to see it has grown to what it is now.

Busisa Moyo- Zimbabwe International Trade Fair Board Chairman

As the current board, our mandate is to modernise  and upgrade ZITF facilities to a 3-4 storey facility with a convention centre, to allow us to have a World Class event.

The Covid-19 pandemic however changed that and made us function in survival mode and working on re-building. This year we have close to 600 exhibitors. Pre-Covid we were around 700 and we would like to go back to those figures and pick up our work and head towards 1000 exhibitors. For the 2023 edition which is our 63th we have twenty-one foreign exhibitors, very few fairs have that sort of flavour of exhibition but we want to grow it much more and have more private sector participation but we can’t do that if we don’t have the space. So as a board these are matters that we are working on.

 

Tafadzwa Chinamo- Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency.

This year, we engaged over 3,000 investors and issued, over 300 licenses  So that tells you that there is indeed interest for people to come and invest here. What we’ve tried to do as ZIDA, with our one-stop services investment center, is that we want to make the burden much, much less for an investor to ensure they don’t have to go to too many places. But then some of the obstacles that they find might be industry specific.

So there are some industries where the permitting, which is also another issue of concern to a lot of investors, that they just don’t want too many forms to be filled in.

So we’ve also reduced that in a lot of ways. How we’ve done that is we’ve signed MOU’s  with key agencies or ministries of government, where a lot of investment is going on.

 

Tinashe Manzungu Zimbuild Founder and Zimbabwe Building Contractors Association (ZBCA) senior vice president after attending a construction indaba in Malaysia.

All over the country we are seeing a lot of movements in terms of construction technologies. Not only construction technologies but also the simple case of infrastructure funding, where you’ll see that the export/import bank of Malaysia is also taking part in developing the world. So Africa is one of the key strategic points. We look forward to further engagements as we have already started to do so.

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