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Paramount Exports, Garments and Archer Group Finance Director FD Jeremy Youmans has castigated the booming second hand clothing business in Zimbabwe at the expense of locally made Zimbabwean clothes.
Speaking to TechnoMag, the Paramount Exports Group FD said second hand clothes and bales which mostly illegally reach Zimbabwe via the Mozambican border is, “Good when used for its purpoted purpose charity but never as a business as it is competing with the local industry and killing the very ‘buy Zimbabwe brand’ we are advocating for,” said a calm collected Youmans.
The Secondhand Trade in Garments have many hidden lives and movements outside of high-street rails or Instagram posts, only in the last decade or so has the transparency of the industry been called into question. The majority of clothes are manufactured in third-world countries with cheap labour, transported via ship, sea, and truck and then reach retailers and customers. However, the energy and movements of the trade only increase from then; clothes are donated, sorted, and then travel back to third-world countries to begin a brand-new life. The interplay of numerous contexts and identities of clothing is often limited to the narrative of the first wearer or ‘thrift hauls.’
In Zimbabwe, in the hotspots of Harare, Bulawayo, Zvishavane, and even other African country hotspots like, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, second-hand clothing plays an important role in the lives of creatives, citizens, and post-colonial movements. Each year, 53,000,000 tons of discarded clothing are incinerated or go to landfills according to the Columbia Climate School, what they fail to mention is that most of these landfills are countries in the Global South. Due to American lobbying and worldwide pressure, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique on this side of the equator, as well as elsewhere like Kenya, Ghana including other East and West African countries, receives 70 percent of imported used clothing. The second-hand clothing trade in Africa is extremely profitable for importers and the charities and companies in Western nations that utilize Africa as a waste-disposal. The mercantilist nature of the trade implies that African countries are trapped in the self-fulfilling inequality and exploitation of it, choice and agency are foregone in favor of money, greenwashing, and the world’s recycling.
Enter Harare Cbd in the evening, it’s a hub source of second-hand clothing, located in the country’s capital. Talking to traders and resellers , several of them mentioned their excitement of receiving Zara clothes in bales drowned by cheaper-quality fast-fashion. The golden age of second-hand fashion is long gone. The clothes donations of the West are no longer the well-made and designer goods of the 1990s and early 2000s but the synthetical aftermath of the calamitous over-consumption of late-stage capitalism.
Second-hand garments discourse predominantly tackles two issues. First, the dumped clothing saturates the local industry with an uncompetitive source of textiles, stifling local businesses. This dumping pays little consideration to the fashion trends, economic conditions, and freedom of choice in sub-Saharan African countries. Former first lady Grace Mugabe once took a swipe on this trade but government later took on a blind eye in the hope of harvesting votes from those who survive on second hand clothing.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame like the Paramount Garments and Archer Group Finance Director FD Jeremy Youmans have been vocal since time immemorial making numerous remarks on the trade’s degradation of African esteem, agency, and identity, viewing the reliance on second-hand clothes as humiliating.
Pressed by TechnoMag, Youmans said ,”Zimbabwe used to produce the best cotton.Unfortunately Textile companies like David Whitehead Textiles closed shop and thousands have been losing jobs as a result ever since. If we bring a collective effort as Association Cotton Value Adders of Zimbabwe (ACVAZ), take heed to the buy Zimbabwe campaign and make a living through beneficiating our own cotton then second hand clothes will not compete with locally made products.”
“This means thousands of jobs for Zimbabweans and selling real quality locally made garments,” added Youmans.
Cotton industries across Africa were initially developed by the British, who used forced labor to export to their industrialized factories. While Zimbabwe has been producing cotton since the 19th century, the post-independence era saw the industry deteriorate due to political instability and economic liberalization.Before independence and even afterwards, before the land invasions of the 2000s, Zimbabwe was one of the largest cotton producer in the World producing on average 470,000 bales (185kgs per bale) of cotton yearly, of which 85 percent was for local consumption.
It makes more sense to export [high-quality cotton]. The price of local production is never going to be able to compete against the imported second-hand garments and fast-fashion.Clothing consumption has drastically increased globally due to fast fashion’s ability to provide low-cost and on-trend apparel, but at the cost of the environment and workers. The average American throws away 37 kg of clothing a year, and the average consumer buys 60 percent more than two decades ago, keeping it for half as long. Only one percent of clothing is recycled to make new textiles, as the chemically linked polymers in the fiber of contemporary clothing degrade with washing and wearing.
All Developed countries need to consume and demand less, clothing donations are for the most part, just throwing away garments.In Zimbabwe, some are only having access to bad fabrics that are toxic and investigations by TechnoMag from the corridors of power reveal that some in the government are the secret owners of second-hand and fast-fashion imports and as such, can avoid taxes. Local textile industries are no longer able to meet domestic demand; worn garments now make up over 70 percent of Zimbabwe’s clothing purchases. African countries on average export more than 90 percent of the cotton lint they produce in Zimbabwe we export 70% of lint unprocessed only processing 30% a concern that ACVAZ Vice Chairman Jeremy Youmans has been vocal about, domestic cotton consumption has decreased by a quarter since the 1990s. Second-hand clothing and comparatively cheaper Chinese imports unfairly compete with underfunded, underinvested, and ignored local industries. The gravy-train of kickbacks, bribes, and corruption runs efficiently with the short-term trade in imports and duties rather than the long-term investment in import-substitution.
Due to the inaccessibility of quality textiles, economic limitations and bureaucratic barriers to entry, many have been forced to downsize, “The government have upped the tax for fabrics, and living expenses have gone up. The cost of electricity and frequent power cuts make using machinery unprofitable.”
Smaller clothing manufacturers are forced to use second-hand textiles in designs as it is significantly cheaper and of higher quality than the available textiles.Smaller clothing manufacturers add that it is unprofitable to use new fabrics as the price of their designs cannot compete with the availability of cheap second-hand clothing.
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