HARARE – Zimbabwe’s Tourism Minister Walter Muzembi on Tuesday urged Harare coalition partners to engage constructively on the country’s controversial empowerment laws announced last week compelling foreign-owned firms to cede controlling stake to locals.

The new set of empowerment regulations have sent foreign-owned firms into panic with threats of imprisonment for foreign shareholders (or presumably their local representatives) who fail to sell 51 percent stake to indigenous Zimbabweans within the next five years.

The announcement of the regulations by Indigenisation Minister Saviour Kasukuwere triggered an uproar from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party which said such policies were supposed to be negotiated under the terms of a September 2008 power-sharing agreement that set up the country’s unity government.

But Muzembi, aware of the damage publication of the regulations has done to his efforts to lure investors back to Zimbabwe’s tourism sector, appealed for further engagement among all stakeholders to come up with an agreed policy.

“Whilst we are aware of the ongoing debate around the investment legislation for Zimbabwe, we believe that all that might actually be required is further engagement on the part of stakeholders,” Muzembi told delegates to the Tourism Investment Conference that opened in Harare yesterday.

“We are confident that clarification on certain aspects of the legislation, explaining areas of apparent contradiction and insensitivity to valid concerns of some stakeholders, will bring about consensus,” said Muzembi.

“Happily, 80 percent of the tourism sector is already in indigenous hands and therefore it has scope for greater external shareholding, as well as for other innovative models that can give comfort to the external investor, than might be the case in other sectors. But for us, the ability and willingness to engage is key.”

Zimbabwe seeks to use the conference – which has attracted 1 000 delegates from across the world, including the World Tourism Organisation, the Regional Tourist Organisation of Southern Africa, and tourism ministers from African countries including Ghana, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon – to drum up foreign investment inflows for the tourism industry.

The troubled southern African country’s tourism image has suffered from intense bad publicity since President Robert Mugabe embarked on his violent farm seizures in 2000 displacing white commercial farmers and replacing them with landless blacks.

Tourist arrivals plunged from 2,5 million in 2007 to 1,9 million in 2008.

Zimbabwe’s business leaders – no doubt driven by a desire to avoid the chaos that befell agriculture – are leaving no stone unturned in their bid to forestall the threatened company seizures.

Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) president Kumbirai Katsande last week said business would lobby the government over the new regulations that Kasukuwere said will be come effective on March 1.

Under the empowerment regulations foreign-owned businesses operating in Zimbabwe will be forced to sell a majority stake to locals by March 2015.

The regulations are seen as a potentially fatal blow to efforts to woo foreign investors to help rebuild the country’s economy shattered by 10 years of political turmoil and acute recession.

By Zimonline