The Sunday Mail
Special Correspondent
“The first step in making something meaningful is to define it”
The concept of empowerment
Many use the term “empowerment” without understanding what it really means.
Society has found that it is easy to define empowerment by its absence but difficult to define in action.
What is empowerment?
How can we recognise it? How do we evaluate it?
Many definitions have been used to explain the concept of empowerment:
· “a transformation process by which the individual gains power and control in order to make decisions and meet his or her own needs”; or
· “a process that challenges our assumptions about the way things are and can be. It challenges our basic assumptions about power, helping, achieving, and succeeding.”
This instalment seeks to demystify empowerment through exploring its elemental concepts.
At the core of the concept of empowerment is the awareness of power.
The possibility of empowerment depends on two things. Principally, empowerment requires that power can change. Empowerment is, therefore, possible and conceivable only if power can change.
Additionally, the concept of empowerment depends upon the idea that power can expand.
Power has many definitions which include:
· “ability to make others do what we want, regardless of their own wishes or interests” (Weber, 1946);
· “traditional social science emphasises power as influence and control, often treating power as a commodity or structure divorced from human action” (Lips, 1991); or
· “control and domination”.
While power tends to be understood differently by people who inhabit various positions in power structures, contemporary research, members of grassroots organisations, racial and ethnic groups and even individuals in families have converged on a focus that power is characterised by collaboration, sharing and support (Kreisberg, 1992).
In terms of “power to”, empowerment refers to the moment in which the individual becomes aware of his or her own interests, how these relate to others’, and how the union of all of these interests can achieve greater influence over decision-making.
A second pillar of empowerment is transformation process: When viewed as process, empowerment implies a continuous evolution in which the individual moves from one stage to another, becoming aware and taking control over his or her decisions and, in so doing, transforming his or her own role within society.
A third pillar at the core of empowerment is decision-making capacity which is only possible if the following enablers are available:
· Resources: These are the individual’s human and social material conditions.
Human resources are moulded individually and include values such as knowledge, trust in oneself, self-esteem, and creativity.
· Contextual Structure. The capacity to make decisions depends on the presence and functioning of the formal and informal institutions.
These include laws, regulatory frameworks, and social norms which govern an individual’s behaviour and determine access to resources.
· Social Inclusion and Participation: Active social organisation is a key tool to pressure, facilitating change, and making decisions.
As a general definition, therefore, empowerment is a multi-dimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives.
It is a process that fosters power (that is, the capacity to implement) in people, for use in their own lives, their communities, and in their society, by acting on issues that they define as important.
This process can be conceived as a cycle of reflection and action which feeds empowerment.
Zimbabwe during the colonial era
The immediate post-colonial economic scene across many African countries was characterised by deliberate disempowerment of the indigenous by the colonial master.
While the severity of the constraints has varied from country to country, it is against this background that the empowerment of economies of newly-independent African countries began in the early 1970s.
In Zimbabwe, local people were held back by many factors after the end of colonial rule in 1980 as the pre-colonial laws deliberately discriminated indigenous people.
This discrimination was manifested in the following Acts passed:
· Public Health Act No. 19 of 1924 (Chapter 328) – The Act was designed to protect the established white businesses, while black small businesses were subject to harassment for failure to meet the standards required.
· The Land Apportionment Act (1930) – The main purpose of the Act was to formalise separation by law, land between blacks and whites, and this was after the deliberations and recommendations of the Morris Carter Commission of 1925.
The fertile high rainfall areas became large-scale privately-owned white farms.
· Factory Act No. 20 of 1948 – The Act was designed with stringent conditions for registration to exclude blacks.
· Native Land Husbandry Act (1951): The Act was meant to enforce private ownership of land, destocking and conservation practices on black smallholders. (The law was scrapped in 1961 after it met mass resistance and fuelled nationalistic politics.)
· Companies Act No. 47 of 1951 – This Act had stringent company registration measures designed to exclude indigenous entrepreneurs.
· The Tribal Trust Lands (“TTL”) Act (1965) – The Act was devised to change the name of the Native Reserves and create trustees for the land. High population densities on TTLs made them degraded “homelands”.
These laws passed during the colonial era point to the genesis of poverty amongst the indigenous Zimbabweans and to the source of marginalisation and racial inequality.
Government of Zimbabwe – Empowering people through removing barriers and limitations
In 1980, the birth of a new political era created a lot of anticipations, especially among the black population who were looking forward to the reversal of the colonial inequalities with respect to access to resources, social services and social amenities.
Government adopted the following Acts as a way to address the colonial imbalance and empower indigenous people by providing the capacity for them to gain control over their own lives:
· The Communal Land Act (1981): The Act was designed to change TTLs into Communal Areas which resulted in the shift of land authority from traditional leadership to local authorities.
· The Land Acquisition Act (1985): This Act gave Government the first right to purchase large-scale farms for resettlement of indigenous people.
Largely because of financial constraints, the Act had limited impact on the resettlement programme.
· The Land Acquisition Act (1992): This Act was a follow-up to the 1985 Act and was meant to acquire more land for the resettlement of blacks that were in congested marginal rainfall areas.
· Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (2008): The Act has four pillars which are the founding ideology, the law, the policy and the beneficiaries.
The ideology focuses on the need for indigenous blacks to exercise total independence and sovereignty over their resources while the law emphasises enabling legislation and relevant clauses of the Constitution.
The policy concentrates on implementation and the beneficiaries are the communities.
· Land Reform and Resettlement Programme: The Government decided to compulsorily acquire land for resettlement using the Land Acquisition Act (Chapter 2010).
· The Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset) (2013) – This is a blueprint that outlines the drive for socio-economic transformation that is sustainable.
The blueprint is built around four main clusters namely:
Food Security and Nutrition;
Social Services and Poverty Eradication;
Infrastructure and Utilities;
Value Addition and Beneficiation.
The Government is able to prioritise its programmes and projects through strong synergies and elimination of compartmentalisation amongst these clusters.
Background to indigenisation
One of the integral parts of colonisation across African countries was the planned and deliberate exclusion of indigenous people from the economy.
Broad segments of the indigenous population were not supported but instead, a small elite of the natives were enabled to achieve self-employment and to establish own enterprises.
The legal equality of all citizens was achieved with the end of colonisation and this demanded a co-ordinated strategy in regards to asset ownership by the native citizens.
The importance of transfer of ownership was evident when Nigeria launched the Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decrees (“NEPD”) in 1972 and the second decree in 1977.
In Kenya, the Trade Licensing Act (1967) and the Transport Licensing Board serve the purpose of controlling foreign investment in commerce and service industries whilst at the same time expanding the indigenous business sector.
In both cases, the goal was redressing the imbalances of the past by seeking to substantially and equitably transfer and confer the ownership, management and control of financial and economic resources to the majority of indigenous citizens.
The process is defined as indigenisation.
Other definitions used to explain indigenisation include:
. “the fact of making something more native; transformation of some service, idea, etc, to suit a local culture, especially through the use of more indigenous people in administration, employment, etc”;
. “to increase local participation in or ownership of: to indigenise foreign-owned companies to adapt (beliefs, customs, etc.) to local ways”;
. “the capability to manufacture a product, or supply a service independently within a country instead of relying on foreign manufacturers or suppliers”; or
. “seeking to ensure broader and meaningful participation in the economy by native people to achieve sustainable development and prosperity”.
To understand indigenisation, we will explore more the concept of ownership. The importance of ownership is that it influences security, permanence of control and use of any resource.
It is commonly agreed that to own something, for example, a house, is to have certain rights and duties vis-à-vis other people or juridical persons with respect to the house.
In short, ownership is a bundle of rights and duties. For example, if you own a bicycle, you have;
· the right to ride it,
· the right to prevent others from using it,
· the right to sell it or to give it away; and
· the duty to see to it that it satisfies certain safety regulations.
Ownership, according to the Black’s Law dictionary, is defined as the collection of rights allowing one to use and enjoy property, including the right to convey it to others.
Evidently, ownership is an enormous term which embodies several characteristics.
In essence, these are the ingredients for ownership:
· the right to manage things;
· the right to enjoy or consume them; and
· the right to dispose of them during life or upon death.
The reason as to why ownership is important in the Zimbabwean context is because in late 1800s, Zimbabwe became a colony of the British: the indigenous people were rendered tenants at the will of the British.
This had a significant negative impact upon the indigenous community given that the ownership of land represented more than simply the possession of an important economic asset.
Indigenous people believed that ownership would enable them to participate much more robustly in the political life of the country and in civil society and that such ownership would provide them with a foundation for the establishment of healthy and stable communities.
Indigenisation – Fostering self-reliance and ensuring sustainable foreign investment
Land and resource-related rights are of fundamental importance to indigenous people for a range of reasons, including the religious significance of the land, self-determination, identity, and economic factors.
In 2008, the Government of Zimbabwe enacted into law the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (2008) to provide support for the measures of economic empowerment through economic indigenisation.
As defined in the Act, “indigenous Zimbabwean means any person who, before the 18th April, 1980, was disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on the grounds of his or her race, and any descendant of such person, and includes any company, association, syndicate or partnership of which indigenous Zimbabweans form the majority of the members or hold the controlling interest.”
The Act allows the indigenous population to build capacity by partnering with foreign investors who bring different sets of skills and capital injection.
The locals contribute to the partnerships through raw materials and knowledge of the markets.
Through economic participation indigenous people can now influence what they control.
The current globalisation trend provides an opportunity for indigenous people to equally participate and manage economic globalisation in a manner that benefits Zimbabwean citizens.
Indigenous business entities create an economy that is owned by indigenous Zimbabweans and tends to have local developmental orientation.
This orientation fosters entrepreneurship and raises the standards of living.
In addition, economic independence has provided Zimbabwe with the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without dependence on foreign aid (which often is accompanied by dictation).
