Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube failed to deliver the promised 760,000 jobs, says ZCTU

THE Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) has questioned the Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube over his continued silence on the promised 760,000 jobs made when he launched the National Development Strategy (NDS1).

The NDS 1 was a five-year medium-term economic blueprint, which ran from 2021 to 2025. It was the successor to the Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP) and was designed as the first step toward achieving an upper-middle-income society by 2030.

Despite the government claiming to have scored major successes under the blueprint, the workers organ contends that Ncube is being economical with information on the actual number of jobs created.

A 2026 National Budget Critique paper prepared by the Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe (LEDRIZ), a think tank of the ZCTU quizzed Ncube’s silence on jobs targets.

“Under NDS1, one key policy target was to create at least 760,000 formal jobs over the five-year period, which translates to 152,000 jobs per year. Yet the 2026 National Budget makes no reference to this important policy objective. As widely acknowledged, decent work is the link between growth and poverty reduction, and its eventual eradication,” the paper said.

The labour organ contends that any meaningful economic policy cannot pass the litmus test if it fails to exert the job creation trickledown effect.

The observations come at a time when rapid informalisation has taken its toll on the economy punctuated by the erosion of decent employment in the country.

The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (Zimstat) shows that since the inception of Ncube’s policies in 2019, the unemployment rate soured from 14% to 22% as at the third quarter of 2023 confirming the disconnect between recorded growth and job creation.

Given the tough circumstances, labour feels that there is need for a more explicit approach to promoting decent work, which is synonymous with formal employment.

“One way of ensuring implementation proposed by the ILO is the concept of pro-employment budgeting (PEB). To do so, there is need to move away from a singular focus on stability variables, to embrace employment as a policy goal in the macroeconomic framework.

“This implies the adoption of a dual mandate such that macroeconomic policy managers are both: (a) Guardians of stability- price and financial stability; and (b) Agents of development – full employment,” the paper proposed.

Pro-employment budgeting was also proposed as a measure to mobilize and allocate resources to implement policies to meet the objective of creating decent jobs.

“The starting place is to rethink the macroeconomic policies to ensure coherence through the explicit promotion of pro-employment macroeconomic, industrial, sectorial and other policies, as well as inter-sectorial linkages (employment multipliers).

“Pro-employment Budgeting requires cross-sectional inclusion of employment in all budgetary procedures and stages. At the design level, it is important to check if employment is a criterion for budget allocations,” the paper added.