“Entrepreneurs must stop complaining and start producing” – Adriano Maleiane

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“Entrepreneurs must stop complaining and start producing” – Adriano Maleiane

8:27 CAT | 29 Jul 2016

O País / Adriano Maleiane speaking at the CASP conference

The Minister of Economy and Finance, Adriano Maleiane, told domestic business people to stop complaining about the depreciation of the metical against the dollar, since this is an incentive for production.

Maleiane says that it not make sense that entrepreneurs are the first to complain while depreciation allows them to place their products in other countries at better prices. He also asserted that incentives for local production were many, since in the country has labour and land in abundance. In the minister’s opinion, what is missing is the proper organisation of business.

What is needed therefore, he said, is to to establish what the country can produce better than others, and to better organise market and associations so as to identify where the government can provide more incentives.

Speaking at the National Private Sector Conference as guest on a “Challenges of Domestic Production, in a Depreciation of the Metical Context” panel, the minister of economy and finance also suggested the introduction of agricultural tax-free enterprise zones.

According to the 2004 census, quoted by the minister, 1.7 percent of national production came from companies, but only occupied 2.3 percent of employment. It also said that 81.2 percent of companies were family-based and only 2.65 percent were SARL, which means that about 70 percent were linked to agriculture.

In his hallmark academic style, the minister explained why the government considers that agriculture should continue to be the basis of development and a dynamic factor for industry, bringing forward a number of analyses to back up his point.

He began by saying that in 2015, world population reached 7.3 billion and only three billion were working. Of these, only half had a job with a fixed salary. Another two billion people, mostly women, were not working and were not even looking for work.

In sub-Saharan Africa, he said, 15 percent of women are in formal employment – 35 percent in agriculture and the rest in the informal sector. Thirty percent of men are in formal activity, 30 percent in agriculture and 40 percent in the informal sector.

In Mozambique, 300,000 people enter the labour market every year and jobs for these people are needed. On the basis of these figures, the minister argued that agriculture is the proper basis for development, because it is the sector that can bring most income to people.

However, he admitted that one could not speak of increased productivity in the country without first ensuring the quality of the people who will produce, hence the duty to invest above all in quality education, and not just in reading and writing.

The minister says that the country must be sure that what it produces is useful and that everyone is doing their best to move forward.

“If in an area the habit is, for example, eating cassava for breakfast, this area should produce more cassava, enough to eat locally and then export and not otherwise,” he explained,

The main problem, he said, was lack of production, but one cannot fight poverty without first creating conditions for people to be able to produce their own income.

Source: O País