HARARE – Nearly 50 percent of groceries seized from tuck shops and vending stalls during the ongoing blitz against counterfeit and smuggled goods in Zimbabwe have been tested to be fake and a potential health hazard, a top official with the country’s industry ministry has told parliament.
Giving oral evidence before Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Industry and Commerce on Tuesday, chief director for commerce in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Douglas Runyowa said the proliferation of counterfeit products in Zimbabwe has reached alarming levels.
“Most of what we have seen in the informal sector is quite shocking, and in our awareness programmes, we are saying it might be cheap but it’s coming at an expense to your health, because we cannot guarantee what is not there.
“Our health authorities have not certified some of those goods safe and fit for human consumption, hence we really need to intensify our efforts through an all-stakeholder approach and its a fight that would also be needed for our portfolio committee to help us intensify, because really what is out there is quite scary,” he said.
Runyowa told the legislators that a recent survey conducted by the ministry revealed that 50 percent of goods sold in informal retail shops do not meet the required standards.
“I would like to, not to scare you, but to advise you that we recently carried out a survey with the Standards Association of Zimbabwe where we went and bought products from the shelf and took them for testing and compared what was written in the results; 50 percent of the products did not comply. You can actually see fake Vaseline, fake flour, fake rice, fake toothpaste, and this is an alarming rate,” he said.
The ministry official said the blitz, which began last year, has been successful.
“You will be aware that over the last quarter, going back to October, there has been intensified blitz against counterfeit goods, against smuggled goods, so much so that even this afternoon we are actually destroying about four tonnes of goods that were actually confiscated during that practice, to ensure that we remove them from the shelves, because we cannot guarantee our people that they are actually consuming safe goods,” he said.
He appealed for parliament’s support in the fight the rot.
“We want to also join hands with you in this particular fight, which we have really intensified from our side as a ministry,” he said.
The proliferation of both informal traders of groceries and the products themselves has seen formal retail shops such as big supermarket chains suffer business losses as locals turn to the spaza shops to acquire their goods.
Some of the retail shops have since closed shop or reduced their operations following competition from the informal sector.
