Economist, Entrepreneur & Politician Eddie Cross, In Conversation with Trevor

greetings zimbabwe africa and the world welcome to in conversation with trevor brought to you by hstv i go beyond the headlines and beyond the sensational today i'm in conversation with eddie cross an economist entrepreneur and politician enjoy this fascinating conversation [Music] edward graham cross otherwise known as eddie cross welcome to in conversation with trevor thank you trevor eddie you are so many things and i'm looking forward to this conversation uh a life that's inspirational in so many respects you were the chief economist of the agricultural marketing authority the ceo of the daily marketing board the ceo of the call storage commission the md of the bera corridor group you are currently the chairman of cross holdings you were one time quite recently the non-executive director of the reserve bank of zimbabwe you were also a member of the monetary policy committee of the reserve bank of zimbabwe this is a life that has been well lived a life where you've given quite a lot to to the society when you look back 81 years what is life taught to eddie it's taught me to value wisdom and humility i've discovered during my life that intelligence is not enough that you have to have to have wisdom in the in your choices you make and wisdom is far more important than virtually any other human attributes and if you don't have humility humility means you've got to listen more than you more than you talk and you've got to you've got to understand you don't you don't understand everything you don't you're not all-knowing you're not you know intellectual arrogance i found is is a major major problem in our society well in the world at large so i think those have been the main lessons that i've learned the other thing too of course is no substitute for hard work if you're going to get anywhere and i've been an aggressive executive during my life you don't get to where i got before the age of 40 without being a very aggressive businessman and i i think that's essential to life but at the same time it's not particularly attractive which aspects of your life which experiences taught you humility i had a great deal of success i was businessman of the year in 94 i was 38 years of age i handled a lot of big business we had a lot of success and if you're not careful it goes to your head you know you begin to actually think that you're more important than you actually are and that the world is at your feet and then i started a company after i left the buyer corridor group our own family company cross holdings we built it up to two and a half thousand employees we had 11 companies we were doing all sorts of things and we had very considerable success of a very short period of time and then one of our companies where i was a 50 stakeholder went into liquidation and the liquidator sequestrated me why because amongst the eight directors and shareholders in the company i was the guy with the assets so they felt that in order to get the to recover the assets they had to sequestrate me and the company involved that was a huge huge challenge and you know anybody's been through a liquidation a failure like that well no it's a fight it took me four years to pay our debts i eventually paid all the debts of all the companies involved and came out of it clean or i was i was rehabilitated and i was left with three companies still operating and we've subsequently rebuilt that and right now what i'm doing when i resigned from parliament in 2018 i decided i go back into business because i have a family my family are here my grandchildren are here i have obligations the bible says you should provide for your grandchildren and um and i'm busy trying to do that now in the last few years that i've got an active life um one thing that um i found interesting is your decision to write this book a life of sacrifice a biography on amazon manga bio biography tell me what made you do this what made you write this book it's a really strange story when they mounted the coup against robert mugabe in 2017 i was still a member of parliament in those days um i've been part of the process to remove him from power and i was having lunch with friends in bulawaya and i got a phone call from kwekwe a young voice said to me mr cross the president would like to see you and it was emerson mengagua i said well i'm in bulawaya he said well he wants to see you this afternoon you are still a member of parliament still a member of parliament for mdc so we wrote we drove through to quickly and i found four ministers waiting for me they weren't we hadn't been sworn in yet but july moyer and a couple of other guys and uh he was not there he said he'd had to return to harare but they said he wants your ideas on what's wrong with the country and what needs to be done to put it right well what do you do when you're asked to do that of course i said yes so i sat down and wrote a 22 page document which was handed in to the transition team the following friday he read it and on sunday i was told that it was going to be part of the 100-day program and sure enough after the cabinet was sworn in on the ch and and set for the first time on tuesday my paper was in the papers of all the ministers and i then got called by a number of ministers to say what what do we do about this how do we tackle this you say this is the issue and so i spent the next couple of months frankly helping the new government with what i saw as being the critical issues and in the process had to meet a couple of meetings with this man the last time he i'd had any direct contact with him was in 1983 when i was general manager of the dairy board and gokuro hindi had just started and we had had a couple of thousand people murdered at lupani and the catholics in the pani had called me and given me a report on what was happening and i contacted the president's secret the prime minister's secretary charles orteti and said charles this is no good subsequently i sent a report to three heads of states in europe asking them to put pressure on mugabe when i did that when i came back home i got a warning from emerson not to do it again and to say this is none of your business charles of teddy said the same thing to me but i said to charles in 1983 i said charles is going to come back to bite you you can't behave like this and get away with it so then i met this man and i was i was frankly surprised he he genuinely wanted to do the right things and he said to me fairly early on when i tackled him on political issues he said to me eddie you lead the politics to me you deal with the economics so then the election came he won the election and again he turned back to me he asked me eddie would i participate i had retired from politics at that stage and the new minister of finance asked me to be an informal advisor in fact the moment truly arrived in town he hauled me into his hotel room and said right let's get moving and so i found myself really in the thick of things and then out of the blue the publishers contacted me and said eddie would i be prepared to write a biography on emerson monica and i said you know a sitting president all this history i said yes so i was paid a fee uh paid what what what made you say yes i'd been impressed with his attitude um he genuinely i believe wants to put zimbabwe on a new track and i think as a citizen as an african i have an obligation with my history with my knowledge my experience to to play a role if i can and so if you're called to serve i think you should respond you also said yes when he said to you write write for me a number of ideas in terms of how we turn around the economy the 20-page document every time when you're a member of mdc again share with us your thinking process you could you not have said no yes of course yes but why did you say this well with the death of morgan zangarai who had been a personal friend for many years when i was chairman of the employees federation of zimbabwe he was the secretary general of the trade union movement and we developed a relationship which morphed into me joining mdc in 1999 becoming secretary for economic affairs and i spent the rest next 17 years in the national leadership of the mdc with all of its problems you know assassination attempts i had a shooting incident against me i was threatened by the cio you could you name it typical politics and but when morgan died i really i really felt that i i couldn't support the new leadership and because i really felt they were on the wrong track so i retired from politics i said right i'm quitting politics i'm not going to mess around and and i said i'll go back into business so but when he asked me to to help him it was for economic problems and i recognized that if you can't solve the economic problems of the country if you can't put this country onto a new path we're actually going to go nowhere if there's going to be a future for the young people of this country it's going to be on the basis of us adopting proper economic policies and you know from the time i in the rhodesian government i was d seriously critical of the policies of ian smith which were isolationist insular they they didn't build up a competitive economy sure it was self-sufficient but it was based on closed borders it was china pre-deng xiaoping but under a white nationalist government and and i felt if we didn't change those that and then of course we had mugabe we had you know 37 years of of of madness um in economic terms and i felt and he and he and he basically gave me a carte blanche now as an economist as a businessman i thought wow what a great opportunity and then of course from tully and truly has been a friend of mine for years and he arrives and i mean i mean he's he's a vastly superior economist to me he's a real professional but i know the country he didn't know the country i knew what worked here and i knew it didn't work and i remember the first night we had a chat i said to him if you want to really discover zimbabwe call the street vendors from robert mugabe street just across the road from miko's hotel get them in and he did he brought them in there's the money changes and the traders on the corner had a bar set up gave them a drink and talked to them i said to them you talk to those guys that's the real economy those are economies right those and those and those guys are sharp you tell me you you say when after morgan sangurai died you thought that this is not the you couldn't be part of mdc you couldn't support that leadership why can you unpack that yeah look i think jimmy says a sharp guy okay but he's still a kid and um i'm not sure i'm not sure you know the chinese have a saying if you're going to ride the tiger you've got to be able to stay on and i didn't think that he had the wisdom i don't think he had maturity the one thing i loved about morgan's regularized heart for the people never wave it um and he was not a humility human absolute word absolutely all all the all this you know i don't think i don't think he did a great job of being prime minister i was disappointed in that but the man himself i mean there's no doubt in my mind that people loved him you could go with morgan anywhere in the country and and it was just extraordinary it was a great privilege to to work with him and frankly to serve him it was a real privilege for 17 years but the new leadership that was coming up bonzorov you know and look at the mess just look at the mess you know and um and i just simply felt i mean i i'd written the manifesto for the 2018 elections they just ignored it just brushed it aside and i just thought well you know okay they must get on with it new generation let them let them go i'm i was possible i'm the past they're the future what's going to happen in 23 i don't know but um so so new generation they you are the past they are the future you're writing this book um i've read it i've taken time to to to read it and in the introduction you say amazon is set to manage and control the transition to a new dispensation which might just put this country onto a new democratic and progressive path to the future do you still believe that president nangagwa has that capacity he has the will it is in its intention capacity you've seen in the past two and a half three years how the old elements in the zanu-pf party have really been resisting change [Music] you know there are so many similarities between the transition from mao zeitung to deng xiaoping in china first of all the transition was managed by the military it was the red army that maintained stability in china during the transition from mao zedong mao zedong had died of course and nothing happened until he died but it was the red army that then put deng xiaoping in power in many ways it was the zimbabwe army that put emerson munnagawa and and kept him in power there was a time during the coup when mugabe said offered the the leadership of the country to the man who was at that time head of the army and and the young soldiers at cranborne barracks who were running the coup were asked would you permit this and they said absolutely not it's emerson that i we want as president and he then went through a period of time when he you remember the reform statement after after the coup which everybody reacted so positively including me yes i say it i've stood up and you worked at the sheraton that let's give uh emerson naga a chance yeah i believe he's got the will yeah but my question is does he have the capacity well i think he's demonstrating the last three years his capacity this is a tough guy this is a man who can ride the tiger i would not want to like to be an opponent of emerson because i think you might have a rough ride but having said that he's tried to be very careful to build consensus but his post 2018 cabinet of course was a completely new dispensation there's 20 ministers six of them professionals without any political legs and since then you've seen he's appointed the new minister of agriculture as again a man without political legs and that's a problem for him because the problem is that there is now only in zimbabwe is only one center of power and which can't be healthy it's not healthy and it can't it's not sustainable so his challenge for the next period is to build a consensus build a new dispensation back into the power structures of of of the government and i don't think it's going to be an easy task i take it that um reading the book it's been signed by msm nangago i take it that he said he he basically agrees with most of the things that you've said in the book when i had my first interview with him related to the book he told me frankly he was very very cautious you know he said what are you doing right publicity shy isn't it oh yeah very much so for as an individual yeah in fact he told me not nothing about my family please you don't interview any of my children so strictly he was the the one major source of the information about about his own life apart from what's in in the public and what's in the icar archives akka we were given complete access um and so he was very cautious very wary so we produced the first draft only 50 000 words because it's mainly pictorial and he went through it then he appointed an editorial committee including a professor of history guys he trusted and they came back to me and said look these are areas where are sensitive in terms of his role as president you can't say this i said all right i'm prepared to modify those sections i did i rewrote those sections and and i didn't think it it it influenced the overall message of the of the book i thought that it was remained fairly accurate in terms of who he is and and then it went forward then he allowed it to be published so there's a couple of things that surprised me um or rather before i go there what surprised you the most as you're working on this book is there anything new that you discovered well take the title life of sacrifice one thing i really learned this was a guy who started from nothing he grew up in a village in gershovani he herded cattle and goats for his family his family were just peasants he was given very limited opportunities for education but he was naturally intelligent and this natural intelligence is the thing that has carried him right the way through the second thing was although he was very much in my view now having looked back on the 37 years of mugabe and remember i supported mugabe in at independence i was in the transition team at independence i trained the first cabinet at independence i wrote some of the papers for the first donors conference i thought mugabe would usher in a new era for zimbabwe and took me some time to discover that he was a bit of a monster but what i discovered looking at his life was that he had really been the power behind the throne if there was something his power behind the throne absolutely he was the intellectual you know i always thought mugabe was brilliant but the political strategist was this man and for example he ran every election after 1980 he did he was the chief elections agent for the president in every election he was chairman of the jock for 37 years ultimately right up to the five years before mugabe was retired from power it was the jock that basically ran the country we had a junta running zimbabwe and he was at the center of that power and despite that he in in 2014 he approached em morgan with an offer to form a national government to remove mugabe from power through a military coup and to form a national government and discussions took place over three months on a highly confidential basis between the two men very personal in the end morgan said i laid down five conditions for any kind of gnu with the emerson and emerson said too tough and turned away from it now one of the things that impressed me and i i i used the illustration of david and saul yes you do on the back of the book because although david had been had been identified as the next king of israel he remained loyal to saul even when soul was trying to kill him and the parallels there with with emerson's relations to to mugabe are amazing so he supported mugabe and even when he had come to the conclusion after 2013 that mugabe was no longer capable of really running the country that he was becoming geriatric um he remained in public loyal to the president because he was my president and was only when mugabe decided to remove him from first of all tried to kill him and then decided to remove him from power from the vice presidency that he finally did and he went home and on that monday morning he was removed from the vice president nine o'clock he went home at midday and the policeman had been removed from the front gate and the moment he saw that he said he was finished he then he then fled the country interesting that you say he was the power behind the throne that he ran joke that he ran the elections which would mean that he should take responsibility for the minor in which the elections were conducted they were violent joke was basically a repressive junta kind of thing you say in the book or he says in the book that government is a collective no one men can take responsibility for decisions made by the government but in this book you proceed to say that uh gukura wundi murambat and murambaswina where the responsibility should take responsibility for that am i right yeah yeah how do you reconcile that well take one take he was the he was young he was under um his youngest minister in the cabinet he was ministers responsible state security i've got no doubt about it he knew exactly what was going on but he was not running the show it would that kukuru hindi was direct orders of mugabe and um you know mugabe could not tolerate opposition and when zapu was really the only effective opposition in the country i mean i was a friend of joshua cuomo cuomo used to come to my home in bulaware in a desperate state you know i was general manager of the cold storage commission i used to take him out to the ranches we go and look at cattle together because he was in he he i mean i can't describe his his his total anguish of what was happening you know the denial of food the the mass killings i think the i think kurundi the death rate was much higher than which had been predicted i think much higher i think if there was memorial to the people who died during cocoon honey it would contain tens of thousands of names i mean more than 1.2 million people fled the country and you know it was a time of terror but so he is not taking responsibility i think the book in the book but he knew but he knew exactly he knew exactly what when i when i wrote that letter to the three heads of states in in in europe and somehow he got hold of a copy i was suspected was the foreign secretary for norway in some way whether whether his office was bugged or whether the russians made the document available he got the document and when i came back from the trip he i was called in by my minister minister of agriculture and who put the document in front of me and said eddie are you responsible for this and i said yes i said i appealed to these three prime ministers to call mugabe who was prime minister and to say look you can't do this that was in 19 it was 18 20 and 20 1883 just the beginning of good gurundi and but the message from conveyed to me by the minister of agriculture from emerson as minister of state security is don't do it i took it as a warning as a threat but also at the same time as a as hey eddie this is dangerous don't get involved i got the sense that the book is trying to clear him of responsibility of muramba sina of gukura wundi and also of cholocho in a way you know the blames not the blame but you know jonathan moyo is the club you know was was behind was it was behind the plot and one other thing that uh i found surprising is the the there's no shyness about talking about tribalism within the party yeah the fact that he was stopped for a long time uh to to become uh president because he was karanga and that the zuzu is within the party uh were fighting again against him talk to me about that well let's let's let's take first the issue of of of of um chulocho i have been briefed in great detail by the actual participants in the geological meeting it was stuff that i felt i could not write okay okay but the one thing that came out of that was that the men who gathered at chilocho felt that emerson was the next legitimately the next president of zimbabwe and if anybody was going to replace mugabe and zanu-pf it would be emerson monica and they and emerson refused to attend the meeting he refused to be associated with it that i do know and that's accurate it's not not conjecture it's not from the newspapers but the one thing mugabe could not take was any kind of succession um he he would just simply not tolerate it and it's a problem of africa you know throughout you look at the after mandela relinquished power in south africa the struggle for power ramaphosa was his chosen successor but other elements in the party wanted him becky and then zuma and now it's ramaphosa i think i think that tribalism played a great role at a huge role i think mugabe was a tribalist what i did find fascinating about emerson's background was the relationship between the karanga and the individuality which i had i knew that kalanga had been subjugated by the underbelly and virtually integrated into the independent nation but i didn't realize that his grandfather had been the head of an mp mm-hmm you know and you can't be more involved so that the the karanga and the india belia the rosary you know the king the king they they were very much in charge and um and you all know the rhodesian army was mainly made up of karanga and individually soldiers and in the struggle of course you had the zipra army which was likewise what what would be your response uh eddie first said i get the sense that this book is more of a purer job than anything else what's your response to that no no no i i tried to be very honest look he's a sitting president that's a big statement that okay there are some things you can't write yeah so why did you take it then if it's going to compromise you because i felt he needed understanding okay because i genuinely feel and look at look at the track record the last three years look at when when truly was recruited to become minister of finance do you think he wanted to come home he was sitting in switzerland in a huge job with a massive salary his family didn't want to come home his wife didn't want to leave switzerland his children did not want to leave europe on school i actually gather and correct me from wrong that when truly was appointed uh he actually wanted you to be his former formal official advisor and i declined you declined i didn't want to wear a suit okay i burnt my suits trevor yeah and i didn't want to be in an office and i didn't want because they talk about being compromised then you're in the system you get a salary and so on you've got to basically i i like my independence okay now but when he appointed um tully i wanted to emphasize this as minister of financing he gave him he said to him right i want you to put the economy right and truly told me he said he's got a mandate from now until he has no political legs he has no power base so he's totally dependent on the president but you look at the tsp the tsp was written before the election so the president was totally in charge at that stage it was then at the first cabinet meeting like my paper in in 2017 julie's tsp was in front of every minister they implemented 80 of the tsp i was astounded despite this look at what they did they devalued the dollar they introduced the new the new currency they took some tough decisions they reduced the expenditure on salaries from 97 of all income to forty percent or back to where's down at thirty five percent at one stage i mean those are tough decisions it's not the act of a populist president that's the act of a man who knows we've got to take the medicine if we're going to put the economy back on and look at the results today zimbabwe is growing strongly i would suspect zimbabwe today is this fastest growing economy in the world wow you're very positive when it relates to uh the way the economy is is performing um how do you justify that sometimes when i hear you talk or when i read the stuff that you write i'm like this man doesn't live in the same country where i live talk to us now about your assessment of our economic prospects right now um the the the forex management um as far as you know economic growth is concerned uh agriculture rebound industrialization and so forth where what are the key pillars and how are we doing on those pillars well right the the the economy is a machine it's an engine okay and the main drivers of of of power in the engine are mining agriculture commerce industry tourism you know those are the main drivers and um the the blood of of the whole system is the currency we've had a problem for many many years i mean adopting the us dollar was a was it was an act of desperation [Music] i was in parliament when chinamasa announced those key reforms 15 minutes no exchange control no restrictions on gold marketing adoption of the hard currencies as means of exchange and i went up to him afterwards and i said that was the most courageous thing i've ever heard in my life and he just looked at me and he just sort of smiled rather sickly because what he was doing was like a kid jumping off a swimming board with his nose just eyes closed into the water but the results were dramatic anybody who doesn't think that the zimbabwean people work hard that we're an innovative enterprising people just look at what happened in the first one month after that statement february the 17th 2009 we went from no fuel we had five years i had not been able to buy fuel from from any filling station my fuel came from drums in back backyards the supermarkets were empty tm supermarket in borrowdale 45 till points one was operating two shelves there was some cabbages some you know i you couldn't believe it and in 10 days supermarkets were there were no shortages of fuel supermarkets were filling up in six weeks this was a normal economy i was queuing for at with my wife and i got to the till and looked at all these till operators queues and i said to the till operator i said hey what's happened and he looked at me and he said bubba cross john garay they gave morgan the credit yeah but it wasn't morgan it was chinamasa it wasn't bt it was chinamasa and all they did was let us free let us go and the next works in the next three are people in the next four years trevor our economy grew by seventy percent not seven percent seventy percent per annum in terms of the revenue to the state first year 280 million u.s second year 900 third year 1.7 billion by 2013 the economy has 4.3 billion what are the lessons of that experience for where we are right now that economic and political program is inex is inescapably based on freedom freedom of choice freedom of of of selection of leadership freedom of movement freedom to decide on prices market-driven economics and you know we we're close we're not there we're close uh one of our one of our one of the big things here is our economy is completely underestimated i mean i laugh at the imf and the world bank i really do because they have no understanding you know and the african development bank you're very critical of those institutions yeah yeah they just don't understand you've got economy here which is maybe 60 70 informalized you can't control the informal economy you know i i don't know what proportion of our imports are smuggled but i think it's it's very high it's very high and any politician here who thinks he can control the economy by clamping down on this or that is is living in a dream well that's what seems to be happening these days are instruments that are all over the place it's the it's the dreamland but also it's based on 100 years i mean the radiation economy was tightly controlled exchange control all these things i used to have bitterly opposed those things i said we needed a weak currency we didn't need a strong currency at independence the zimbabwe dollar was worth two us dollars tell me now talking about uh the currency the dutch auction that we have uh in place at the present moment i want your view of of that because i'm looking the numbers i got yesterday is we're almost 1 to 86 uh on the auction that's the auction rate but i'm told that the street rate is now anything between 130 to the dollar or 162 to the dollar is the oak is the dutch auction working it was a compromise what we should be doing is doing what they're doing in mozambique and in zambia and in south africa whereas that all foreign currency receipts into the country are automatically changed into local currency and the rate at which the market sets the price is the exchange rate which is what happens in zambia and in mozambique what happened here was that when i was pointed to the mpc monetary policy committee we struggled for a year with the reserve bank saying there had to be a market for foreign exchange a genuine market eventually the president called us in a group of us into the state house and asked us frankly we were sitting around the room you might have even been there no no i wasn't okay yeah okay but certainly you were in the president's advisory council and he asked us what what's wrong and what do we do and our consensus was that you have to have a market for foreign exchange a real market for foreign exchange so he sat on it for about two weeks and then he called he called the governor in and said i want the auction now we had tried to get the banks to auction foreign exchange between themselves with complete failure they would not collaborate they would not cooperate with us the bigger banks the banks with international connections argued that it was because of sanctions if they traded with cbz they might be subject to sanctions themselves i think that was fallacious i do not accept that i think what they wanted to do was they wanted to control continue charging very high margins and charge and making profit out of the out of the situation which they continue to do today so the president instructed the governor you introduced a market so it was the governor's decision unilateral but under instruction from the president to adopt the dutch auction system and when we discussed it uh we felt okay that's at least it's a step in the right direction but my question is is it working given the differential given the differential that we have now wait a minute i come onto the differential at the time that it was adopted more than 70 80 percent of the foreign exchange in the country was being traded on the informal market 70 80 maybe even more than that with the auction we suddenly moved a significant proportion of foreign exchange receipts onto the auction the banks would not cooperate so we were forced to take foreign exchange from the exporters and put it on the market initially with first auction 15 million now sitting at about 40 million dollars a week and i would say today that today we're exactly reversed to what we were a at the beginning of the auction 18 months ago i would say today 80 percent of all foreign exchange is being traded at the auction rate and is going into the formal sector okay okay a dramatic shift so the informal sector is now much smaller now the question is what makes up the informal sector the first thing is diaspora remittances all right we have about five million adult zimbabweans working abroad three million in south africa if you taste like the south african one the ex the the transfer system makuru has three million clients in south africa the average transfer last year was 79 us dollars a month that's three billion dollars a year south africa chete okay i believe that diaspora businesses are running at about five billion dollars a year they are by far and away the biggest source of foreign exchange and none of it goes through the banks or very little and none of it goes through the formal sector now for those people sending money into the country to support education health and building building houses there's a huge building boom underway one i think there are nearly 1.5 million houses under construction in zimbabwe it's the biggest building boom in our history it's in i would say it's 70 80 funded by diaspora now when they get their money they change their money in the parallel market and they are delighted with these rates because it makes everything that they do 61.50 oh it's great for them and i think it's almost like a tax on the formal sector in support of the informal sector so if i'm a family in the rural areas and i get 100 u.s dollars and i trade it on the black market at 150 to 1. everything that i buy becomes cheap or at least reasonably priced if i pay my school fees at that price you know it's easy if in medical services even building you could should we be comfortable with that gap is my question no okay the question is who is buying and this is not a pretty story we have a very big gold industry here we are probably amongst the biggest gold producers in the world and 70 of our gold production is by small-scale miners and these poor guys between 500 and seven hundred thousand are subject to exploitation by criminal gangs and traders who buy gold and at a at a discount to the real market price and these guys need u.s dollars in cash and it is these people these guys who are smuggling gold first to south africa maybe some of it goes straight to dubai which is now the biggest gold market in the world and they need u.s dollars to buy gold they're right and they don't mind what they pay for it now what do they do with the gold if it goes to south africa they sell it for iran they then sell iran to to zimbabwean importers at a premium the zimbabwean importers give them local currency at a premium they then buy us dollars and they go back into the market buy gold now this has produced a criminal elite here the murders in the small-scale mining sector are horrific so that's why the rate is where it is the 160-150 i think the other thing that's driving that is smugglers but also the fuel industry yeah if you want to go out today and buy fuel it's not available in local currency i suppose i'm trying to say what's the what should we do to get that market to run in tandem with our option rate i was fascinated this week to see that they for the first time the reserve bank cut off bids at 84. okay that's the first time well it's the second time they've done that but it's the first time in recent months and so the rate shifted from 85 to 86.2 slight devaluation my feeling is we have to have a road map to a more normal foreign exchange market okay that's my feeling and i think once we do there'll be a closing of the gap between the black market always being a black market in zambia there's a black market for us dollars there would be a closing of the gap but at the same time we need to recognize greater stability the private sector has access now to foreign exchange on a reasonable basis at a decent price i believe at 86 the zimbabwe dollar is undervalued we have a balanced payment surplus we have 2 billion us dollars in private accounts trevor we've never had that eddie um let's go back to your childhood where were you born which school did you go to i was born in bulaware and i was raised in a place called umtini near malabara my chief was simon sigolo so when i was a child running around i raised on a ranch there the children of times ago i knew them i'm sure the prison chief in in that area is would would have been known to me i went to north milton school and north lee in baltimore graduated with the matrique and then at the age of 17 i went working i went farming i grew up i did a tobacco season in michonneland and then i went ranching in matabee land why farming i that's what i really wanted to do okay and then i went to gui i got a diploma in agriculture and then i spent three years in the zamizi valley moving the tonga people away from the the the the zambezi river with the construction of caribbean yeah we moved 30 000 tongas which organization were you working with with native affairs okay okay and uh so i was at what they call a land development officer and i moved we had to move thirty thousand tonga people out of the valley up into the sunyati [Music] and into the goku area nimbudzia all those places i did that and then i realized that i was getting a bit bush happy and i if i didn't get a degree i wouldn't get very far so i then went back to i went to university i went to university zimbabwe did a degree in maths and mathematical maths and economics and graduated in 67 and i joined the ama as a junior economist ama that's the agricultural marketing of authority huge organization at that time perhaps the biggest employer in in the country 25 000 employees a turnover annual turnover nearly three billion dollars a year massive what what you would uh where you would uh and compared to what ama is right now how does it compare oh no comparison at all the ama today is a joke in fact i don't really think it should exist i don't think it has any realistic reason for existence the ama consisted of the four big state-run parastatals and grain marketing board coal storage commission dairy board and the cotton marketing board cotton marketing board was actually formed when while i was an economist with the ama and they were remarkable organizations comparatively efficient um doing a good job run as a business the board of the ama was i would think a collection of the top business people in the entire country so what what happened why is it where it is right now compared to what it was when you were running chief economist the big the big problem with paris titles today is that their boards are appointed by politicians and the issue of patronage tribalism so it's it's not a question of a meritocracy if you listen to chinese leadership today the one thing they tell you about the reason why china has succeeded is because china at its core is a meritocracy in fact the other day one of the leaders in the politburo made the remark that no american ambassador no american president in the last 10 years could have qualified for chinese leadership and it's true because you know their guys they they're absolutely at the top it's the french system you know which produces these superb um civil servants and i think here that has been the main problem um and mediocrity has crept into our parastetals take it over yeah taken over yeah and then corruption corruption become a huge issue in my days corruption was a problem let's not think that the rhodesians were clean clean the africanas were not clean i can tell you that for sure from my own experience but it was not pervasive whereas now in many parastatals before i go on to the daily marketing board which is a a very inspirational story in many respects and your role there there's a part of your life which is interesting to me your father was an alcoholic yeah um talk to me about what that did to you what that experience did to you right he was a very clever man with a photographic memory he should have been a professor of history but his family are relatively not able to put him through university in south africa and so he came up he joined an oil company and he rose through the ranks very quickly and then in 1930 he was told to come up to bulawayo and take over the operation of bulawaya which he did and he rose through the ranks there and by the time he married my mother in 1939 he was a relatively senior executive and basically social drinking cocktail parties and so on and and it just by the time i was five he was gone he was god he was a raging alcoholic and he lost everything what did that do to you well my mother had to raise four kids by herself she was a remarkable woman canadian born in canada very limited education but a very very good looking woman and naturally intelligent a bit like emerson i mean emerson's education history is just extraordinary you know and just shows plain guts in her case when my dad became an alcoholic she had to go out to work and she taught herself shorthand typing became a short entire examination determination and then became a pa to a foreign company here a british company and was very well paid so she raised us as children and put us through school and so on and then about it was about 10 years after that that my father woke up to where he was and in fact stopped drinking and and he rejoined the family but at that by that time his career was shot so he became he worked worked for the railways he went to zambia he was secretary general secretary of the zambian railways prior to independence and then after independence in zambia they nationalized his position and he returned to rhodesia and he couldn't find a job and he became a member of staff at the university of zimbabwe he ran he ran the administration there for professor craig who was then the chancellor the vice chancellor he loved that he loved the environment he loved being at university and so on and so he was rehabilitated yes yeah completely yeah and then he was injured in a zunda attack in in 1978 and was forced to retire and he spent the rest next next 17 years living with us i'm a real african i believe in the extended family right i've heard kumbhira katande sit where you're sitting right now and have it in color and i have a lot of admiration for meshec the common denominator for all those gentlemen is that they worked with you at uh the daily marketing board when you're chief executive you are appointed chief chief executive in 1979 and i said to kumbi rai why is it that dairy board has been able to produce these amazing professionals who've gone on to be entrepreneurs and uh kazan is sitting right where you're sitting say trevor i think it's in the milk explain to me why the dairy board has been so good at producing these professionals who've gone on to be amazing leaders and entrepreneurs well when i was appointed chief executive by the rhodesian government i go with the zimbabwe rhodesia government i recognized that the transition was underway i mean i was politically active even though i was not allowed to be and i recognized that i would have one term and during that term i had to leave behind me black professional management at that time every manager in the dairy market ward was white there were no black executives at all so what i did was i went out and i i i found what i regarded as being top class young blacks students graduates who i felt we could nurture and i brought them in as executive trainees and and it was a great success i put them through the mill they had to do everything yep but i mean kumbhirai and inhabit they do talk about their experience that it wasn't easy it was tough yeah but they are what they are right now because of that toughness which you were part of yeah and i believe hugely in the german approach to skills adoption where you've got to actually bring people into working in business environments and and teach them how to operate and i maybe i was lucky i was very lucky with kumbara i of the of the young of this team of young executive trainees kumbro was my choice as my successor and i was i was very fortunate that he was in fact appointed when the president took me from the dairy board and put me into the csc where there was a crisis and um and he was able to smoothly take over and and i think the the record of the dairy board is is one of comparative success both in terms of its privatized entity and prior to that also i have great integrity well you know katsandi well and today he's one of the top businessmen in the country absolutely i have so much respect respect for him you you and the family uh took a treat a six-week trip to europe and you said when you came back you decided to have a diary and you made a decision as a family that you were africans and you talked passionately about um a third generation revolution could you talk to us about the being the awareness of white privilege growing up as a wide religion you were privileged and and and your passion right now that there is a band of young uh zimbabweans both black and white who are going to take this country to to a different place altogether talk to me about those two well one thing i discovered very early on when i was a white manager recruiting black young people students and graduates and putting them into position of responsibility i discovered very quickly that if they did not have a reasonable history of educated parents if their parents had been peasant farmers then the cultural baggage carried by these young people was often too big for them to manage and so i adopted a deliberate strategy of recruiting young people who had educated parents in some form or another yeah and what i see now i see now a third generation we we're now this is the third generation after independence they don't know anything about the liberation war they don't know the struggles that went on but they've been well educated let's face it the first five years of mugabe's rule was awesome for education oh we built up we built a primary school every day every day we opened a primary school we built 80 district hospitals i mean it was amazing to be it was very exciting to be involved in that and it gave this whole generation opportunity to get an education we became the best educated country in africa maybe almost in the world the highest rates of literacy i mean even the united states 30 percent of students coming out of school in the states on can either need read or write it's pathetic you know and when this american education system is is in my view is is apart from the elite elements as is catastrophic but here we have this generation and now they their children are now many of those young professionals left the country because of mogami and they not only got a good education but now they've got experience now many of those young people and and what's happening now is very exciting to me is the grandchildren are coming home and back they're coming home and when they come back they're coming back with knowledge background and experience and they are starting to transform this this economy i mean you you have a look at let's have a look at agriculture we've got now probably a couple of thousand young people farming here and they are doing amazing things um i mean you know look at tobacco look and look at uh look at look at the blueberry industry um it's suddenly it's all taking off look around you go to pomona outside harare here and just look at all those new factories all those new businesses i see them all third generation they're coming back home they're coming home they're picking up in some cases businesses which were just mediocre and they're transforming them i mean i broke my arm three weeks ago nine o'clock in the morning ten o'clock i was in hospital two o'clock i was in surgery under a world-class medical doctor who's come home and five o'clock i was in recovery the following day i was released i got world-class treatment trevor and this is the third generation and you can go into businesses here you know i i just look for example let's look at zim platz you know five and a half thousand employees 2.5 billion dollar company totally 21st century top technology top results three whites no expatriates every chief every executive in there is a black zimbabwean third generation so you you're very positive about where this country is going look that's the that's the future my big concern now is that we are not maintaining our education standards we're not spending enough on education and i think that there's a real danger that the gains we we made from the early days of independence are being lost right now um and i think that we've got to be very very careful about that i think we've got to pay much closer attention uh to education that we're doing at the moment and skills transfer but but i think trevor the foundations have been laid for very rapid growth here i think zimbabwe could become i really love to hear that a real example in africa tell me so we've received a bill on dollars u.s dollars from the iamf um two issues that i i want to ask you what's the best way that this money ought to be used how do we deploy it first question secondly where do we deploy it rather and how do we use it and secondly accountability transparency what measures ought to be in place to ensure that there's confidence from the private sector and the citizens that this money is not going into private pockets first of all trevor it's not a lot of money okay the imf and the world bank might think they're the big boys in the game they're not okay it is big in terms of africa we got three times the allocation to zambia and that might be a little bit of the imf feeling guilty because last year they denied us our money so that's the point number one point number two is i'm completely satisfied that the team at the ministry of finance will manage these resources properly there'll be no no no nonsense it'll be transparent it'll be spent properly the third is if we spend that on consumption we are crazy we should spend it on building our productive capacity our industry needs complete transformation if when i used to take visitors around the dairy marketing board in 1980 they'd say to me eddie we've never seen equipment like this still operating this is a museum an industrial museum frankly that's the state of the majority of our companies we need modern equipment we need modern technology and above all i think we have to facilitate the our industry uh getting those getting the new technology and new equipment and i think the pres the minister is going to do that i think a significant proportion is going to go into that and i think the way he's going to do it is very very clever because he's not going to he's going to use the funds on a revolving basis okay it's very clever and and lastly before we go to to books the deal to compensate uh the farmers weighs that deal has it been satisfactory um uh are we in a happy place as far as uh land compensation is concerned look it was always going to be a compromise the 3.5 billion dollars negotiated as compensation for the assets taken is a small proportion of their real value but it was a deal negotiated between the government and the farmers and 95 of the farmers accepted the deal so i think the deal has to be fulfilled and the president agrees with that the president's absolutely determined so it's been extended now and the commitment is to pay these farmers by july next year and that is giving one um julian ruby nightmare okay he doesn't sleep at night over that i think it's going to happen but it's going to take a massive effort on all our parts and the international community and i think it is just it'll be about a less than a million u.s dollars for each family many of those families are destitute today i think one of my big question marks remains what happens to the 300 000 farm workers who are employed by these guys they're not catered for they're not catered for in any way so it's an outstanding issue for me that's an outstanding issue and nobody's addressing it and i think that's a pity because i think that is something which we're going to have to look at in in the longer term but i think it's going to get done we're working hard on it and it'll need a bit of luck and you know in business trevor you need a bit of luck they do you do need some breaks from time to time you know talking of um um are you happy with the state of the relationship between the private sector and the government i get a sense that there's mistrust the government doesn't trust business business doesn't trust government and yet we need to work in concert for us to make a progress as a nation any any man who's plowed with cattle with oxen will know that the two oxen have to work together or else you don't do a good job i think quite frankly the relationship between the private sector and government is a disaster i think that the private sector based on their history don't trust government they don't give government any credibility whatsoever and i think that's a mistake at the same time i think government doesn't understand the private sector very few of them actually come out of the private sector what needs to be done uh eddie this is an important issue i think first of all we need professional organizations okay czei zncc chamber of commerce these guys have got to be made more professional one of the great features of the old rhodesian government was that the commercial farmers union was a very very powerful body and when they spoke the government listened caesar died the same and infraction today they are a shadow of what they were why ah it's partly finance the the the old white farmers used to organize themselves one of the big problems of the rhodesian government was that the black small-scale farmers would never listen to and even today small-scale farmers do not have a voice a real voice they need professional you know we need a we need a we need a an institute of directors which has real muscle i mean in britain today if the iod makes a statement it is listen yeah absolutely eddie you know there's so many things i want to talk to you about we could be here you know for for another day but uh what a pleasure talking to you so much wisdom from your uh experience as you know we love books on this show [Music] we want to tap into you the books that you are you you've read and that you want to recommend to our book loving audiences audience what books have you read that you want to recommend read the bible oh yes i i became a christian when i was 17. i was raunching in mata beta land and i was dating a girl who was a presbyterian i went to boulevard one night looking for him and walked into a baptist church and i became a christian through that experience and i must tell you trevor i bought a bible and i'd never possessed a bible before then and reading the bible it just it talked to me it was an extraordinary experience and i think anybody who's not discovered the the bible has a basic manual for life and to get an understanding of who they are and and where we are in the context of creation is is really really missing out yeah of course there's lots of marvelous books but which other which are to one or two that you'd want to comment apart from the bible and the one that you've just written joe that's a that's a question i hadn't anticipated i'm an avid reader right i read and that's one of the things about morgan swangarai you know morgan wasn't a well-educated man but he read voraciously wow every time he went to see him he had a book next next to his next to his next on his table um i like biographies i've just written read a biography on one of the early settlers of zimbabwe a guy who came here as a as a chemist from cambridge university in before the settlers came in 1893 and became a photographer at victoria falls and many of the famous photographs of the falls of the early life in the falls came from him fascinating absolutely fascinating story any chance of us getting a book on eddie cross i've written there's a book on edocross i've written one not this one no but you'll have to wait until i you're gone i'm posthumous okay i don't i don't dare publish it right but yeah i i think i have an idea of of what it's gonna sound like eddie thank you so much for your time what a what a great pleasure um talking to you thank you so much for for giving us the opportunity to tap into your wisdom and experience thank you so much allow me eddie now to turn to our viewers we are who are in zimbabwe who are in africa and in the diaspora thank you for watching this show thank you for supporting us remember we are a weekly show we are out on mondays central african time at uh 7am to ensure that you don't miss out on any of these quality conversations i invite you to click on this red button and subscribe and if you do you'll get an alert every time we have one of these quality conversations until next time cheers to you all [Music] you

Channel: In Conversation with Trevor

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Id: 56qoQj0vy_U

Length: 79min 31sec (4771 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021