How to kill the economy

via How to kill the economy – The Zimbabwean 28 January 2015 by Magari Mandebvu

The current efforts of ZIMRA, ZINARA and the cops to boost their income, with possible, but not certain, knock-on effects for government revenue, reminds me of a fairy tale teachers used to tell us when I was small.

The story told of a small peasant farmer in a poor country in Europe. After he had harvested his crops and put enough grain for the winter in his barn, he had about half-a-dozen sacks of wheat left. He took them to market with a list in his pocket of useful things his wife told him to buy. His wife waited anxiously for his return. When he arrived, she asked what he had bought and he proudly showed her a goose. She said he had been swindled, but he only said this goose was special; she must wait and see.

He said no more, so she had to wait. They gave the goose a box to nest in and straw to make it comfortable, and waited all night. In the morning, the man told his wife to lift the goose off its nest. It had laid an egg; no ordinary egg, but one made of solid gold. He told her that, as long as she kept it well fed and protected it from the cold in winter, it would lay another egg like the first every day, but no more than that however well it was treated.

They soon bought all their winter provisions – tea, sugar, salt, soap, and you can imagine the rest of the list – by selling those golden eggs. They bought some nice furniture and started building a bigger house.

Everything went well for a while, but some people are never satisfied. They began to want more. They tried coaxing the goose to lay more eggs, but failed. They tried threatening it, with no success. Eventually they decided to try to find out what made this goose so different from every other bird in the farmyard; “just a small cut to look inside” they told themselves, but the result was disastrous. The goose died. You can imagine their disappointment and the way they blamed each other for their greed and excessive curiosity. But that made no difference. There were no more golden eggs.

When I see the uniformed youths sent out by the police, ZINARA and ZIMRA to extract more money from us all, I remember that story. They seem to be competing to kill the goose that is our economy and claim they are trying to increase the output of golden eggs.

There are many ways of killing a goose; you can cut its throat, wring its neck, choke it or starve it, but the result is always the same; a dead goose.

ZIMRA has been making noises about squeezing more money out of any company that makes a profit. That’s a sure way to prevent them from buying the goods and equipment they need to keep producing, so those companies will be bankrupted.

They threaten “presumptive tax” on informal traders, quoting sums for small driving schools and backyard hairdressing salons that would drive those operators out of business.

Blocking the flow of traffic on Cripps Road at 9am every morning, even if they don’t collect any tax, bribes or whatever they call it, is a sure way to choke industry to death. People trying to earn a living are kept for hours in the traffic jams caused by these youngsters in yellow jackets, so their work suffers and their productivity and income drop.

Those collectors are too young and uneducated to understand this, but the hospital staff who detain impoverished patients because they cannot pay the fees, which the law still says the poorest people should not pay, and continue charging for every extra day the patient stays, are old enough to know better. But even if we can educate them, Zanu (PF) will find other ways of killing the goose. It’s all they know.