Online Reporter
There is a tendency in Zimbabwe to worship something foreign and assume anything made or produced outside the country is automatically better than any conceivable local product, which must irritate our more innovative businesses.
This attitude is common across consumer markets as well as in the commercial world, and among major entities just as it is among many of the smaller and very small companies.
We would agree that there were in the past, in that long period of high-level protection for local products from UDI at the end of 1965 to the economic reforms for the later 1990s, far too many local suppliers who were selling into a sellers market and developed an attitude of take it or leave it, and to a degree they tended to create perceptions that their more ethical compatriots found difficult to overcome.
There were also problems of capitalisation and recapitalisation, and the adoption of modern technologies, that also helped fuel the influx of imported goods and services in the late 1990s and those supplying overpriced sub-standard products deservedly went to the wall.
But a lot of Zimbabwean business people did grasp the opportunities and have been producing quality products at fair prices, and often undercutting the foreign supplier as they are not hit by import duties, since raw materials and usually components for finished products, are mostly exempt and transport costs are a short truck-ride.
Under the Second Republic there has been a great deal of stress on upgrading the Zimbabwe supply chains, not least in the demand that we gain a lot more benefit from the huge investments we have made in education since independence, that switch to Education 5.0 and its insistence that an examination certificate is not the end point of an education journey, but perhaps just a useful stage to show that the examinee has learned enough of the theory that they must learn to apply.
A lot of this stress was, of course, to make the graduates of our universities and colleges far more useful and able to earn a decent living, either building their own business or joining others to do so or to be more useful to a future employer.
But it did have the extremely useful by-product of Zimbabweans able to do a lot more in the commercial world than they had done in the past and be able to find solutions in Zimbabwe for Zimbabwean needs and conditions.
There had always been some of this sort of research in the agricultural world, where home grown solutions are often the only ones, rather than just the best, and where even if foreign solutions can show promise they still need a lot of adaptation and local input.
But outside this significant if limited field, the worship of the foreign solutions has predominated.
We see this now in the rejection by Harare City Council of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Harare Institute of Technology (HIT), which the university was prepared to supply for US$350 000, and instead wants to pay a staggering US$2,1 million to a foreign company that was offering the same services.
Harare, as is well known, does not have large sums of cash lying around unused, and finds it hard to even buy essentials like water chemicals and garbage trucks.
It has admittedly lost a lot of money since March 2019 when it dumped the ERP from South Africa, with the then Auditor-General noting that some funds simply cannot be accounted for; they may have been stolen or they may just be lost in the financial maze, but the point was no one knew.
Residents and city businesses are aware of the difficulties of getting accurate and up-to-date bills from the municipality, and it is strongly suspected the deficient systems in place open doors to corrupt dealings, and allow quite junior staff to manipulate the systems by accepting payment in foreign currency and changing this on the black market before final receipting.
In any case, a large modern city, and Harare City Council is financially the second largest entity in Zimbabwe after the central Government itself, dwarfing all other authorities and businesses, needs something a lot better than the sort of accounts maintained by a respectable private company with a hundred workers.
For HIT, the upgrade to Education 5.0 was not that large a step. The university is, after all, an engineering and technical university and as engineers continually note, anything done in an ivory tower cannot be called engineering.
While engineers continually need an ever growing knowledge of what might be considered pure sciences, they have always been the ones who apply this.
So there has been a continuous flow of technical and engineering applications coming out of HIT, many with commercial and business uses.
The software for a large municipal ERP is one of these. HIT has built it up in modules, since not every council needs a particular application. Although most need the core applications, the parking application for example might not be much use for a small town or rural district council.
So far 20 councils in Zimbabwe are using the HIT Local Authorities Digital Systems (LADS), which means it can be scaled to suit each authority.
So far the largest is Mutare City Council, which has to run the full range of municipal services independently of any metropolitan big brother, and city residents say they are getting a reasonable service out of their council.
At least they know what they and everyone else owes, where they money is coming from and where it is going, and the council can manage its property portfolio and other assets.
The jump from Mutare to Harare is not large, and conceptually there is little difference, just bigger data bases and more suburban offices but very largely identical services. Harare City Council would have extra advantages, that no other HIT customer has, since HIT is actually in the city so can lay on customer care in a few minutes.
There may well have been one or two modules where Harare wanted more complexity, but HIT would have been glad to lay that on.
After all the university’s business unit is looking at customers outside Zimbabwe as well, at least if it is any good, and being able to market itself as the provider of the services that sorted out the Harare accounts and finances would obviously be a major selling point.
President Mnangagwa, in his continual pushing Zimbabwean forward, has made the obvious point that Zimbabwe is not a backward nation and has a lot of human as well as other assets.
He wants Zimbabweans to have more faith in themselves and their fellow citizens and recognise that in many areas we can be the solution. We have a lot of smart and well-educated people with increasingly ever more practical experience, and those are the three conditions for a problem solver and business innovator.
So we should be looking at what we can do, what we can do better than an outsider who does not know our conditions, and then get on with it.
leeroy mupariri
