OVER the next four months, around 178 000 Zimbabweans will be coming home from South Africa as their special Zimbabwe Exemption Permits expire with President Mnangagwa, while not underestimating the strains of relocation, seeing this large group as a huge resource to accelerate Zimbabwe's development.
To understand his optimism, we need to think just who these 178 000 are. They range in age from small children to people of retirement age, but most are skilled adults in the midst of their working life who are earning a living legally in South Africa.
Even more critically, they are honest and hard working. Our border jumping criminals and the like never won the special permit. Another group were able to get the employer-sponsored residence permits so they can stay.
So the adult earners in the 178 000 are the middlers, in South Africa legally, staying clear of crime, probably paying taxes and generally a credit to their country.
Most left when our economy was under-performing, and they needed to earn a living somewhere else, and in the circumstances at the time South Africa gave these special permits, but that was about all the assistance this group received.
They were not eligible for the special programmes or special employment openings created for South African citizens, or for that matter bank loans and the like when they arrived there.
So we can further. Besides being in general skilled and hardworking they are also innovative and were able to see openings in South Africa they could fill.
They had to start up in a new country and earn their keep, building their skills and in many cases must have become self-employed or at least special contract workers.
So in one sense they are prepared from this previous experience for their return, ready to once again start afresh in another country and continue building their lives and working to support themselves and their families.
They do of course need the environment to do this. They left because there were close to zero opportunities in a declining economy.
They are returning to a quite different country, with a booming economy and a lot of new openings, especially for the upper levels of the skilled self-employed and those running their own small businesses.
As President Mnangagwa noted over the weekend, now the Zimbabwean economy is growing properly the opportunities exist for skilled people, or people with the basic skills who are quickly trainable in what we need.
So an influx of skilled hard-working and honest people cannot only be absorbed, but can be quickly contributing to their homeland.
Of course there will be some, as he noted, who will need special help since they are not skilled, or at least are under-skilled, but the Government is gearing up to give these people the chance to learn how to support themselves.
There will be strains, at least at first, for accommodation and the like, although we need to remember that the 178 000 are not moving into one town, or one district or one city but come from all parts of Zimbabwe so will be fairly spread out on their return, and in almost all cases will have fairly close family somewhere in Zimbabwe. So while many will need some help with relocation, this is not something that is unmanageable.
Even if their sort of business or skills need some sort of urban setting, they can still be spread out. During Covid-19, tobacco deliveries and supplies were decentralised, and those small stagnant towns across the tobacco belt suddenly started booming.
This year we are expecting bumper harvests in other crops, and so we are likely to see the same in other small towns as a lot of farmers suddenly have money in their pockets.
The Government is sending down a team to South Africa to start putting together the statistics we need to help the returning thousands.
We need to know what they are now doing to earn a living, so we can help move them into a place or position where they can do the same here. We need to know their skills, along with their experience the vital addition that turns a person recently out of training into someone who is really useful.
We need to know where they are likely to be moving to, and how many children they have, so we can make sure there are school places nearby and the children can move from say Grade 3 to Grade 3 in the middle of the year.
We need to know what sort of assets they have. Some will have vehicles, some will have the tools of their trade, everything from computers and ancillary ICT equipment to the tool boxes mechanics and others carry around.
Here it would useful if the Government could speed up some of the processes, and make them one-stop. While a returning resident can import vehicles, work equipment and household goods, there can be the odd problem that some have not been away for long enough, so an exemption is needed, plus the sheer procession through tax, police and vehicle registration offices to register an imported vehicle.
A one stop centre for that would help the returnees, and incidentally could be kept for those already living in Zimbabwe.
There are other things, some in the tax line, like being able to come home with their mobile phones duty free and have the Zimbabwean settings done without that extra tax. There will be a lot of these sort of small exemptions and changes in our regulations to make life a lot easier.
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Perhaps the South African and Zimbabwe Governments could work out a low-cost solution to the actual moving of furniture and household goods, and even make this free either for all or at least for those without much money.
Our banking system needs to make it easy for returning people to open bank accounts and either move their money north or at least be able to access their South African bank accounts from their Zimbabwean bank.
The President is correct in his focus on looking at how the returning Zimbabweans will benefit the country and fill skills gaps we have as the economy grows ever faster.
He has also made it clear that the Government will be assisting everyone coming home to relocate here, and while this will need some money, we will get it back as the returnees start earning a living back home and pay taxes, even if it is only VAT on what they buy in the early stages.
The rest of us need to be willing to make our returning fellow citizens feel welcome, and be willing to help them settle down.
They are not strangers, they are us. And we all need to remember that these were people who were hardworking honest people, whose permits expired rather than being pulled after they committed some sort of crime.
So they will be soon earning their living back home and building their own country.
