The Sunday Mail
Public discourse on the economy is important.
It is imperative for both indigenous economic stakeholders and foreign economic agents who may find interest in a particular economy.
From an analytical perspective, when I study a given economy I personally choose to focus on the predominant narratives found within that country’s discourse. This applies for any economy, not just Zimbabwe. For instance, I am not worried about Greece’s economic future in the long term.
What I can learn from their public discourse on economy is that Greece is a country with the right narratives to enable problem solving, and ultimately emerge stronger from crises!
How do I go about making such a conclusion? Since the global recession exposed fragilities and imprudence in Greek fiscal management, the country has known where to place its national pride. At no point has Greece inwardly, or outwardly, concealed its contributions to present circumstances.
As a society, fiscal mismanagement has been embraced and firmly understood as playing a causal role to current day calamities. This has been a solid foundation for the country to move forward knowing exactly what needs to be fixed within its economic structure and policy-making.
Secondly, having understood and taken ownership of its own shortcomings, Greece has consistently been in a position to advance dialogue with counterparts from a position of credible knowledge.
Thus, what should be admired in Greek discourse is how its economic proposals to counterparts are derived from an understanding of its own economic facts. Greek discourse focuses on understanding how the economy works. For instance, Greece has been able to argue with the IMF over the difference between fiscal consolidation and austerity — an argument it has consistently advanced with identifiable economic justifications for more government spending.
Thirdly, I am optimistic about Greece’s future because public discourse has empowered all economic stakeholders to take part in economic recovery. I suppose democracy fanatics have emphasised the referendums and votes of confidence that Greece has done over the past few years.
However, besides these oversold aesthetics, the virtue of inclusive participation in Greece is that it has enabled ideas to compete! In an economic context, ideas inform strategy. Ideas critique economic systems. Ideas ultimately design how best to achieve economic objectives.
These three narratives are very lively in Greek public discourse and they make me very optimistic about the country’s long term prospects. While it is encouraging that in Zimbabwe we have taken an interest in the Greek story, I am not sure we have chosen to take the correct lessons from it. Sure, parallels may exist in certain scenarios such as IMF default and exacerbated debt burdens.
However, while we can adopt familiar impressions, fate can be very different without adopting proper narratives to discuss these impressions. Perhaps to illustrate this point we can contrast the aforementioned Greek narratives with our own.
Unlike Greece, Zimbabwe has failed to identify its own contributions to our present economic circumstance. While we have belaboured to inform ourselves on the inequitable global financial system, which to a certain extent contributed to our economic strife, we are ignorant to our own very flawed fiscal structural design.
Ignorance seems precise because while fiscal mismanagement has caused economic harm for a number of years, today our national agenda is still set on over 800 percent of our national budget — quite inconveniently at a time we have decided to press on with contractionary fiscal policy.
Even within an equitable global financial system, gross fiscal miscalculations such as these confine an economy within inescapable perpetual debt cycles. What one can tell from our public discourse is that Zimbabwe has not embraced its own economic shortcomings, or is in denial altogether. Unfortunately, this hints that we are not positioned well enough for effective economic problem solving.
This also explains why our economic discourse as it relates to counterparts such as the IMF has been inconsistent and often argued from a position of weakness. The fact of the matter is that because we do not understand, or are in denial, our own economic shortcomings, our stance towards finance counterparts lacks credibility.
Outside of a political context, it is very hard to identify any alternative economic models of our design that we have put forward to justify our stance with counterparts. For instance, we overtly refute IMF structural reforms, yet we lack any reform proposals of our own design — unless we are saying that we do not need any at all, which would be an economically inept notion.
While Greece can advance economically justifiable proposals which explain how it intends on fostering growth, we have no policy strategy to reinforce our preferences on credit interaction.
In that light, I struggle to be captivated by our narratives on creditor aggression or foul play because while we constantly endorse anti-capitalist and western financial governance disquisition, we have come up with no credible economic alternative methodology and approach that we prefer.
It becomes no surprise then that we have developed a culture of cheering on loud complainers, not solution proposers.
Perhaps the greatest cause of our deficient economic creativity, however, is that our discourse does not encourage ideas! Because we never expand beyond the few predominant narratives within our country, ideas are not put up for debate, especially within political economy.
This is why you will find that we have had Zim Asset for almost two years now, yet there has been very little debate on which economic systems or economic models are conducive to achieve its objectives.
I have consistently stated that Zimbabwe’s greatest challenge has been pursuing desirable socialist objectives within an increasingly competitive capitalist world. The space to discuss economic systems and preferred methodology is one of competing ideas — unfortunately in Zimbabwe this remains a vacuum within our public discourse.
Hence, economically we are in a state of inertia. We know what objectives we would like to achieve, but we have not created a space to discuss how to go about it. There is this popular phrase that says “As Zimbabweans we always talk, but we fail to implement.” I disagree! Yes, we talk, but we talk about the wrong things, and that is why we cannot implement because our talk offers no pragmatic solutions that can only be found by competing ideas!
There is a lot to learn from occurrences between Greece and its debt situation. The most profound and relevant being that as a country, Greece has the right narratives leading discourse.
