ON BUSINESS Trends today, we will take a glimpse at why this is the right time for businesses to thrive in Zambia, and how our economy presents more businesses with prospects for industrial growth than ever before.
We will also consider how our economic adversities can be an inevitable catalyst for technological innovation or economic development.
To look at this subject we will consider an astonishing lesson that I learnt from my recent encounter with a Japanese business friend.
This encounter culminated into a discussion of how our Japanese friends have learnt to cope with economic, geographical and cultural limitations.
The astonishing thing about our Japanese friends is how the Japanese have harnessed adversities, turned the challenges into opportunities which have benefited not only their country but the world at large.
During my discussion with my Japanese friend, we re-visited the challenges that the Japanese in the early 1980’s were facing as a result of their language and geographical limitations.
Horace, (65 BC) a leading Roman Lyric Poet, once said: “Adversity has the effect of eliciting opportunities, which in prosperous circumstances would lay dormant.”
The fax machine was invented in the 19th century; this was a timely invention which anyone trying to use it before the 1980s would have found very few other individuals to communicate with.
One factor that influenced its breakthrough was that Japanese manufacturers and consumers discovered that it was a suitable medium for communicating pictures, which is essentially what the Japanese written language is composed of.
We learn that before the language challenges, the Japanese possessed the same capabilities and resources in science, technology research and development necessary to get the invention into the commercial marketplace.
They certainly needed to face an adversity that could be painful enough to provoke a paradigm shift in thinking.
If it had not been for the particular problems posed for electronic transmission, the fax machine might never have had the commercial breakthrough.
In short, the fax machine was certainly a good idea but its development was not inevitable until the peculiar problems posed by the Japanese language for communication purposes.
In our Zambian context, we may not have language problems which may need communication breakthroughs the way our friends the Japanese had, but there are other challenges.
These challenges could have telling effects on the cost of manufacturing and subsequently the cost of products.
Additionally, a good proportion of our products are imported which even aggravates the situation.
The free fall of the Kwacha may be a symptom of what various business surveys and researches have revealed that one of the greatest adversities we are facing in Zambia today may be the particular desired growth direction in both the large manufacturing sector and Micro, Small and Medium Business enterprises (MSME’s).
The various surveys have also emphasised the need for Zambia as a lower middle income country to foster economic growth through various ways.
These ways include the need for the private sector to heed the call to invest in technology-based manufacturing rather than resource-based which currently pre-dominates the sector.
The general economic challenges in our country should not be looked at with pessimism but as a thought stimulant and loud call for everyone: potential investors, industrialists, economists and entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, business developers, to take the challenge as personal.
It is not inevitable for some sectors of our society to think of economic development in abstract and blanket the whole responsibility on the public sector or central government to foster such growth.
The development of technology based manufacturing may create uncontested markets for high-tech products as opposed to the current manufacturing trend where most of our local manufacturers are using the same mode of manufacturing.
Using the same mode of manufacture creates congested and unnecessary competition and makes our economy less diversified and also less technologically efficient.
The central government has been seen to be promoting local industries.
The case in point is the recent pronouncement by the Agriculture and Livestock Minister, Given Lubinda to ban or restrict importation of cooking oil into Zambia to promote local Industry.
A review of the economic performance of Zambia in 2010 shows that the country had continued to exhibit characteristics of a factor-driven economy.
The largest share of Zambia’s manufacturing sector Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was generated from resource-based manufacturing which contributed 47 per cent.
This means that in spite of its status, Zambia still remains a fundamentally low income country by its structure and, therefore, needs to enhance its efficiency-based industrial activities.
The study results also show that out of the product list of goods manufactured in Zambia, high technology products are largely missing.
The manufacturing sector has been growing at a slower rate compared to other selected sectors and the activity is largely composed of resource based manufacturing and not technology based manufacturing.
We have so far seen that economic adversity is a necessary evil and we can draw our lessons from the Japanese experience that economic challenges can foster paradigm shift in thinking which could lead to industrial innovation and consequently national economic growth.
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