eBusiness Weekly
Last Word
The Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) opens again next week, and while Covid-19 precautions need to be taken, it will be closer to the real thing than what we have seen over the past two years.
So a lot of people in industry and commerce will go to Bulawayo, to join the large group who already live in that city, rooms in hotels and the better class of lodge will be full and there will be the usual extensive networking at the fair and in the bars afterwards.
So it will be, by the standards we have set in recent decades, a success.
And yet this is no longer enough.
Most Zimbabwean businesses outside Bulawayo treat trade fair as the equivalent of the Harare agricultural show and make up their stands in a similar fashion, more to be on board than anything else.
We still get a lot of exhibitors seeing it as part of public relations, with a great swathe taking the opportunity, as they should, to connect with the public even though they are not into trade.
So we will have popular police, army and Air Force of Zimbabwe (AFZ) exhibits.
We can expect to see Zesa and Zinwa, who admittedly will have their new power station at Hwange Extension and their new pipeline to Bulawayo working before next trade fair and so have something to shout about, plus many others.
But none of them are traders and public relations and trade, while both important, are not the same thing.
Part of the problem was the decision in the UDI era to combine the old Bulawayo agricultural show and the new trade fair. The sanctions, the international scorning of the UDI regime and many other factors contributed.
Even the people who were still prepared to do business with Ian Smith wanted to do it in the dark and without witnesses since even if their Governments looked the other way they were still committing criminal offences and were going to face increasing consumer pressures not to deal with the man and his ever more odious regime. So coming to the trade fair was not really on their agenda.
After independence the same organisation was dealing with the fair, and even when the organisation was commercialised as a private non-profit company this was largely a rationalisation rather than embarking on a new path, or returning to the old concept of a real trade fair.
A lot of stress is still placed on the number of international exhibitors, roughly the same number as turn up for the Harare Show, and the entertainment and the need to deal with the Bulawayo public still dominate in fact, if not in theory.
Yet when the Central African Trade Fair was launched in May 1960, after several years of intense preparation, the dream and the concept was different.
It was deliberately separate from the Bulawayo Show, which like most agricultural shows was several months later, and it was intended to be the international shop window, and in particular the manufacturing shop window, for the old Federation, which was starting to crumble even as the first trade fair opened.
Bulawayo was chosen as the host because, despite the movement of far too many head offices to Harare during Federation and the consequent decline in Bulawayo growth, the city was still the industrial centre of Central Africa, where more than half of what was made was made.
The relative decline in Bulawayo’s economic contribution to Zimbabwean wealth that started in the 1950s has continued, but that does not make Bulawayo the wrong place for a trade fair.
The fact that the city cannot rely on Government and buildings full of civil servants earning salaries to survive, and instead has to live or die on business alone, does concentrate minds.
And the active work now in progress to revive Bulawayo businesses, along with fixing the two fundamental disasters of a lack of water and power, will make the city attractive once again for new industry.
Even in this present age of poor urban councils, Bulawayo’s reputation for higher standards of efficiency, far better town planning and an infinitely better inherited housing policy are big pluses.
And Zimbabwe needs a shop window, and Zimbabwean industry especially needs one.
Free trade is coming to Africa, slowly and carefully as so much work has to be done to turn a political decision into the nuts and bolts, or more precisely into the high piles of paper recording the rules and regulations, of a functioning African Free Trade Area.
But as it comes we need to be among the producers and the sellers, not so much among the buyers. And when we sell we need like any market vendor to have a counter where we show what we make and where we meet our customers, get feedback and make things better, make more items and generally try to please those ready to buy.
So the time has now come to return the original concept. Bulawayo, its business and service communities and the farmers and miners of the Matabeleland provinces need to be able to interact with the public, show what they are doing and the like, but the Bulawayo show is the obvious place to do this, with all the entertainment and the general semi-holiday atmosphere that a decent regional show in a big city can generate.
The trade fair needs to be something else, far more specialised and in many ways far more serious. A fair swathe of industrialists, especially the medium-sized businesses who do not go to trade fair from the other towns and cities, need to be there and preferably be grouped into sectors.
The service sectors need not be nearly so prominent; they can do their PR and publicity at the Bulawayo show.
Hotel rooms should not be full of people coming down for a jamboree, but have far more people from neighbouring countries and other parts of Africa coming in to see what Zimbabwe makes and establish the contacts they need both for suppliers and for contractors who can make other specialised requirements of the required quality and price.
Local retailers are also welcome of course, since they need to know just what is made locally and no doubt have their own ideas of what can be added to ranges.
A lot of this sort of work can be done, these days, on-line but as we have stressed several times we need an industrial portal that includes almost every industry, with searchable data bases.
This does not preclude links to company-specific web sites, but must be inclusive, a sort of “Zimbabwe makes this” portal.
The trade fair will then be the required adjunct to that portal, the place where buyers can handle and feel the items, look under the hood to use a car buyer’s expression, and meet the designers and production experts as well as the salesmen to sort out their specific needs and the required quality certification.
We sometimes forget that the production engineer is the person a buyer really wants to see, rather than the marketing manager. The sales staff are contacted when the product is physically existing.
The return to the pure trade fair concept will mean that the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair has to become a national organisation.
Obviously the Bulawayo show and other city events will want to use the venue and the facilities, and getting maximum use of the venue will keep costs down, but they need to be apart organisationally.
The trade fair organisers will be running the industrial portal and organising the specialist trade fairs and conferences, and Bulawayo is an obvious place for all this work with the infrastructure, which includes the database servers and the cabling, now being put in place.
But as we stress it needs to go far beyond Bulawayo and token presence from the rest of the country. The “Z” in ZITF needs to be the most important word along with the word “trade”.
ZITF could, as Africa free trade becomes a reality, move back into its original mode as a regional trade fair. People coming down from West or North or East Africa might well want to see what the whole bloc of Zimbabwe, Zambia Malawi and Mozambique make and do and we tend to complement each other.
South Africa and its other four neighbours tend to operate together with their common customs union and monetary area, and we should combine our muscle to do the same.
The colonialists had some good business ideas, it was just the politics and the imperialism where they were hopeless when not evil; but we can keep the good ideas while we bury the rubbish.
In the meantime we now need to rebuild ZITF as a properly and fully functioning national trade fair, not just an extended Bulawayo Show, and this switch and separation needs to start as soon as possible.
We can have both the trade fair and the Bulawayo Show, the national business exhibition and the event that brings together the west of the country.
