Lip service will not help us

INDUSTRY and Commerce minister Sithembiso Nyoni this week toured tuckshops in downtown Harare and discovered what was already a public secret that the bulk of these enterprises are owned and run by foreigners.

For the past decade or so, these tuckshops, which are in fact massive grocery shops and warehouses, have become a major threat to the country’s formal retail businesses in many ways. Chiefly, they have been slowly pushing formal businesses out of the game, yet they are hardly contributing to the fiscus because many of them being illegal, do not pay taxes.

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