The Sunday Mail
Tonderai SJ Makoni
In the 1970s, my Economics studies forced me to ask: “If capitalism and democracy, as propagandised by the US and Britain, were the two major sources of rapid economic progress, why was it that the USSR was ideologically, politically, militarily, technologically, organisationally, scientifically – if not economically, too – a super power at par with the United States?”
I was consequently compelled to look at what could be gleaned as some common factors attributable to the world might of the Soviet Union and US from 1945 to 1990, which witnessed America and Nato states foment the successful collapse of the USSR.
Background
In the two super power countries existed highly competent, ideologically committed, hard-working, technologically, scientifically, organisationally and professionally savvy people dedicated to realising their nationally set objectives. The staff were knowledgeable and highly skilled.
They knew what was to be done, by whom, why, how and when to achieve quality production on time, especially in armaments and spacecraft enterprises.
The second common denominator was ready existence in both countries of industries that manufactured capital goods to make desired consumer goods.
I designate that to be the Tripode Industrial System (TIS) that consists of: (i) The capital goods industry which fabricates capital goods for; (ii) The capital goods industry which produces capital goods for; and (iii) The consumer goods industry engaged in stocking, marketing and selling consumer goods and services.
TIS demands personnel with technological and organisational competences to service it fully. Availability of such skilled people is indispensable to successful sustainable industrialisation of Zimbabwe, for example.
Given availability of supportive socio-economic activities, sustainable economic progress is certain.
Besides the two, in Zimbabwe was the additional need to have people with actionist creative minds in Government, the private sector and at large.
Fourthly, such creative people – especially in areas of organisation, inspiration, technology and science – needed imagination and dexterity to replicate mechanisms.
Fifthly, they should also pay attention to how indigenous science and technology can be utilised to enhance national defence and economic advancement. Sixthly, to an extent that we think it viable to attract foreign investment, we should purposely approach external appropriate companies engaged in fields important to bringing about fundamental industrialisation of our national economy.
Zimbabwe’s economy today faces balance of payments deficits because of high imports of industrial raw materials, processed goods and capital equipment plus the propensity of international traders, especially bulk goods transporters, cross-border traders and foreign domestic-owned big, medium, small shops.
Deficits are exacerbated by smuggling and efforts of such businesses to exaggerate import prices while understating export earnings in order to build up abroad; foreign exchange.
The deficits are most likely to be reduced by growth of capital goods industries and industrial raw materials; both of which engineer building of domestic technological competences, employment and income.
Steam and revolution
In 18th century Britain, James Watt perfected the steam-engine which had capacity to evacuate water from underground and to power locomotives with steam for long land and sea distances.
Companies in European countries imported such engines. Their prime interest in the engine was to develop in their workforces competences to replicate and improve its performance.
They consequently instructed their relevant workers to:
l Dismantle the steam-engine;
l Make a technical drawing of all its makeup and parts;
l Name all steam-engine parts in the particular European country’s indigenous language
l Figure out how the particular company and country could replicate, that is reproduce the engine and where possible, manufacture better quality and higher productivity steam-engines; and
l Reassemble the engine and start using it in productive activities.
European companies’ response to James Watt’s steam-engine was to master how to reproduce the same on their own. That capability led to industrial revolutions in their economies.
Consequently, European strategy of first mastering for self, technological, scientific and organisational competences enabled them to reproduce by self whatever was made elsewhere; whatever was scientifically-discovered or what was technologically and organisationally done in other countries.
Non-replication in Europe, Japan, the US, the Koreas, India and China will not necessarily be the consequence of inability, but the product of other considerations such as excessive and expensive capital, intensity skills limitations, population size, inputs and imports unavailability or level of competition.
Private and public focus on setting up full capital and consumer goods industries led to both agricultural and industrial revolutions in respective countries.
Despite African countries being endowed with raw metallic and non-metallic minerals and forests, wildlife, livestock and agricultural crops, no single country has ever focused on building up the TIS to make capital goods that manufacture industrial consumer goods.
We, instead, have been programmed by these enslavers, colonisers and neo-colonialists to be the poorest of the poor. Capitalists have always been dedicated to under-developing and squeezing wealth from Africa through smuggling, under-pricing of our raw materials and semi-skilled exports of manufactured goods, overpricing our imports, tax avoidance and evasion plus corrupting civil servants, politicians and businesspeople.
They invent disease and introduce them among Negroid people for experiment.
In the case of Zimbabwe, imperialist countries have, through pro-white economic sanctions, seized some of our export receipts and prevented us from accessing credit from the IMF, World Bank, African Development Bank, the Paris Club, the US and British white Commonwealth countries.
We have been squeezed to face low prices for materials and the few manufactured goods we export.
Imports from advanced nations cost us 500 to 10 000 percent of the export value of the raw materials we export.
Given economic sanctions, I tended to believe Zimbabwe would be the first African country to catch onto establishing the TIS economy.
So far, we have failed.
Any such initiative does not have to be undertaken on a massive scale.
What is needed is ruthless determination to do so and doing so against those hell bent on bringing down the ant-imperialist country.
China’s strategy
When China first considered allowing foreign investments into its economy, it did not view such investors as engines for developing the country.
Chinese interest in foreign investors was for them to acquire – permanently – competences to manufacture on their own in China what the foreign company was profitably producing elsewhere.
It is China’s ethos that the fundamental economic, scientific, technological or organisational development of China was the function and duty of its own people.
In the 1980s, initial conditions for foreign companies like Mercedes-Benz to invest in China, for example, were as follows:
l The workforce be preponderantly Chinese;
l The company acquaint Chinese workers with the chemical composition of all the body parts that constitute Mercedes-Benz vehicles and how the components are shaped, manufactured and assembled;
l If the Chinese workforce makes improvements in Mercedes’ technology, components or organisation, such innovations be creditable to the Chinese; and
l After 50 years, there would be a parting of ways. The production plant would become wholly Chinese-owned.
Like continental Europeans, China’s focus was to imbibe competences and make all things itself.
Creating capital
It should be possible to negotiate with a principled Chinese company to consider setting up a full capital goods industry for making capital goods in Zimbabwe, made more probable by resurrecting a better quality Zisco.
Products from Zisco could facilitate creation of a Sino-Zimbabwe Railway Corporation to make railway engines, communication equipment and all other possible products.
It could also engage in railway routes surveys; construct and supply railways requirements in Africa to make the Cape-Cairo railway linkage possible.
The joint company could also engage in exporting railways requirements worldwide even as part of China’s One Road One Belt transport system.
Lack of full capital goods industries in Africa is the product of absence of incorrigible willpower in our policy design, statements and their effection failure to prioritise – nationally and materially – importance of owning competences to run capital goods enterprises successfully and lack of determination to fully master engineering, technological, scientific, organisational and operational skills.
Such mastering is being fruitfully done in Asia as was the case in continental European nations and the US.
These capabilities remain unpursued — if not actually dismissed — in economically enslaved, neo-colonised Africa.
Zimbabwe’s key mission is to do for ourselves what successful nations do to advance their own causes.
In the body of this piece, I have articulated how prosperous nations have cottoned onto developing competences to operate the TIS by themselves, for themselves and those who do not care to master the techniques and use them to transform their raw materials into usable goods and services that grow the national economy.
Raw material-less Japan is today a very rich country through mastery and innovativeness in its TIS.
Early on, it concentrated on developing national ability to manufacture capital or consumer goods originating from self or from outside Japan.
This is a competence completely shunned by mentally-colonised Africa.
One genetic British Nazi known as Robert Guest writes, “In Africa, the poorest continent on Earth and the only one that, despite all technological advances that are filling stomachs everyone else, has actually grown poorer over the last 30 years…”
He goes on to say what is utterly false in Southern Africa; that slavery – which to me means the ownership, capturing, buying, selling and bullying of fellow humans for business purposes – was common in most parts of Africa before the Arabs and British instituted slavery and the slave trade in and from Africa.
Thus Guest is quite insulting to African people’s struggles against triumphant US, British, European and Nato racism and imperialism in Africa.
According to his book, “The Shackled Continent: Past, Present and Future”, 40 percent of Africa’s investment is outside the continent.
The World Bank chips in, stating that poverty and civil war, in particular, cause an average of 2.2 percent fall in income per capita; something that partially emanates from destabilisation projects of Anglo-Americans and their Nato allies, exemplified in the overthrowing of Gadhafi of Libya.
What’s next?
The to-be-dones have already been stated. Economic consequences and conclusion from absence of strategic, dynamic and full capital goods industries in Africa have created short, medium and long-term material disasters.
To prevent such outcomes, I appeal to our businesspeople to strive to engage in building up manufacturing industries from their import profits; and to stop externalisation, overcharging, smuggling and excessive greed.
Businesspeople and Government need to invest in capital industries that manufacture consumer goods.
Corruption requires tough measures.
I recommend that the Zanu-PF 2018 election campaign economic policy thrust be geared to effecting our ability to convert raw materials into capital capital goods that produce capital goods, which, in turn, make consumer goods in a corruption-free environment.
Such drive with national unity is central to accelerating sustainable economic progress, which, like war, we must wage with overwhelming willpower to win.
Mr Tonderai SJ Makoni is an economist and was the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s first black banking office manager. He wrote this article for The Sunday Mail
