This picture taken on July 18, 2008 in Pretoria shows the South African Government Presidential Guest House that could be the venue of talks between Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
HARARE – Captains of industry are pinning their hopes on talks between Zimbabwe’s political rivals as a chance to stop the rot after a survey yesterday showed investor confidence at a new low of two percent. “Industry will give full support to the agreement signed on Monday,” Calisto Jokonya, president of the Confederation of Zimbabwean Industries (CZI), said at the launch of the body’s annual report on the state of the nation’s industry.
“This will give us a new direction we need as business ... we do not want to go back to what we have been doing (in the last 12 months).” An index of business confidence in the new CZI survey showed a drop from five percent to just two percent in the course of the last year. This year’s report was released in Harare against a backdrop of an annual inflation rate that officially stands at 2.2 million percent, although economists say the real figure is in fact even higher.
The country’s economic meltdown is seen as one of the major factors in Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s agreement on Monday to open talks with the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change despite his re-election last month in a one-man ballot that was widely denounced as a sham. “The business confidence level is still low, with 70 percent of the respondents being pessimistic and those that are optimistic dropping to two percent in 2006,” said the survey.
The country has been experiencing shortages of basic foods for some time and the report said the skyrocketing inflation rate – the highest in the world – would only make matters worse and dissuade the few people who still have jobs from shelling out on bus fares to work. “Food shortages and food inflation is becoming worse, such that more people are absconding from work because of the high cost of living,” it said.
The CZI said that 80 percent of the country’s infrastructure is currently idle due to shortages of skilled workers, power outages and a lack of foreign currency. Once one of Africa’s best peforming economies, Zimbabwe has been in meltdown since the turn of the decade, when Mugabe embarked on a controversial land reform programme which saw thousands of white-owned farms seized by the state.
