MTHANDAZO NYONI THE Securities and Exchange Commission of Zimbabwe (SecZim) acting chief executive officer Gerald Dzangare on Wednesday said the country’s legislative framework was making it difficult to attract capital.
The SecZim chief, who presented a paper during the inaugural Annual Investor Forum organised by the Zimbabwe Independent and PiggyBankAdvisor under the theme “Capital Markets for Zim’s Sustainable Development”, also bemoaned lack of transparency and accountability regarding statistics in the country.
“The key issue that is required for sustainable development especially when you are looking at the issue of capital markets is we need legislative agility,” Dzangare said.
“One of the constraints that we have as a nation is that our legislation is not agile. It does not catch up with time,” he said.
“We need legislation to move fast with development.
“A legislation that is passed a year later is a law that is unsustainable. The environment would have changed, the bus would have gone and the boat would have sailed. We are competing for global capital. We are not the only ones and those we are competing with (have agile) legislation,” he said.
Dzangare said by the time the country enacts a piece of legislation, it would already be behind. He said global standards were key for sustainable development.
“Capital market laws need to follow global standards. You will realise that because we are becoming a global village, if as Zimbabwe our laws are not changing fast enough, it means we are behind global standards. Investors will go to a destination that has global standards,” he said.
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“Technology is the new frontier and as a country we need to have our capital markets up to speed with what is happening globally. Bear in mind that the others are developing. We are just trying to play catchup but as it is, we are behind and we need to move fast.”
Dzangare said the key to sustainable development was a conducive environment for sustainable investment.
“How do we have this environment? It is based on trust. The trust is based on two pillars; that’s transparency and accountability. So one of the things we need to do as a country for sustainable development is to be transparent. Transparency in statistics and transparency in everything we have,” he said.
“Transparency will lead us to accountability which is a key enabler for sustainable development. We must be accountable to the resources that we have; we must be accountable for the performance of the resources that we have. Accountability and transparency are very key,” Dzangare added.
