The Sunday Mail

Zimbabwe we want vs Zimbabwe we have

Provisions of the new Constitution of Zimbabwe, which could be said to suggest values for guiding the Zimbabwe Agenda for Socio Economic Transformation, include Chapter Two which is entitled National Objectives: Objectives to guide state and all institutions and agencies of government.

Section 13 requires the State and all its institutions “to promote private initiative and self-reliance” and to “bring about balanced development of the different areas of Zimbabwe, in particular a proper balance in the development of rural and urban areas.”

Section 33 provides that “The State must take and promote indigenous knowledge systems, including knowledge of the medicinal and other properties of animal and plant life possessed by local communities and people.”

Although it is compromised by its translation of African thinking into English, Section 16 on Culture is also important:

(1) The State and all its institutions and agencies of government at every level must promote and preserve cultural values and practices which enhance the dignity, well-being and equality of Zimbabweans.

(2) The State and all institutions and agencies of government at every level, and all Zimbabwean citizens, must endeavour to preserve and protect Zimbabwe’s heritage.

(3) The State and all institutions and agencies of government at every level must take measures to ensure due respect for the dignity of traditional institutions.

While the good intentions behind these provisions are appreciated, the language used betrays the attitude, even ignorance and bias, of the drafters in several ways:

It is therefore not surprising that there is little economic research in Zimbabwe which focuses on the rural population and economy.

Most economists and journalists resisting the creation of a national currency assume that the urban minority speak for the rural majority on such matters.

When he was still Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai put the neoliberal pseudo-modernist view crudely, saying: “We can’t build a national economy on peasants. Having everyone going into farming is not sustainable. We have to move people from the farms to industries rather than removing people from the industries to the farms because I don’t see that working.”

Setting aside the demonstration of ignorance about the way industries are built and about the exact location of the Zimbabwe economy, what is also implied in Tsvangirai’s speech is that the socio-economic transformation in Zim Asset is the same thing as “transition” in neoliberal and opposition jargon and it means peasants cannot create change or transformation. They must transit from being peasants to being industry employees in cities. But are urban workers the highest level of evolution for the Africans?

Indeed, in such a view, peasants are not drivers of the transformation intended in Zim Asset. At best, they have to be driven from the land to the imaginary industries of neoliberalism before there can emerge a national industrial economy.

Yet the demand for “Zimbabwe neupfumi hwayo hwose” came from peasants and children of peasants; and yet the only real transformations to have taken place in Zimbabwe in the last 40 years have been driven by peasants.

These are, first the transformation of colonial Rhodesia into modern-day Zimbabwe; and, second, the transformation of white Rhodesian land monopoly and colonial land tenure into the current land ownership scenario through the African land reclamation movement and the revolution in land tenure which took place specially after 2000. People remember the role of Svosve and Nyamandhlovu in that revolution.

Yet the African peasant base in unhu is viewed in neoliberal economics and regime change politics as primitive baggage which must be cleansed out of the African population before Zimbabwe can “industrialise” and fit “international best practice.” That is why all the major Zim Asset workshops must be conducted in jargon and jibberish that is incomprehensible to the majority; that is why all the main Zim Asset “training” sessions have to be conducted in air-conditioned hotels by alienated bureaucrats whose sole qualification is that they know how to administer a bureaucracy which is consuming more than 70 percent of the national budget in US dollars!

President Robert Mugabe took a practical approach to Zim Asset by providing seed and fertiliser to resettled and peasant farmers, by-passing bureaucrats, by-passing the usual technocrats and NGOs.

The result is that the Ministry of Agriculture and Mechanisation has been caught off guard because the silos deteriorated during the lean years of drought and economic crisis.

The Grain Marketing Board (GMB) is uncertain how to collect, store and preserve all that locally produced maize and how to pay all the farmers for the maize on delivery using an almost non-existent US dollar budget.

Those farmers who delivered maize to the GMB in May to July 2013 are just now receiving their payments in late March 2014, not through direct Treasury funding of the GMB but through a loan offered to Government by CBZ Bank. There are three broader points to observe about the 2014 bumper harvest.

A 10kg seed packet of sugar beans cost US$30 in the 2013-2014 planting season, when it should normally costs US$5 to US$8. Similar prices also applied to other various inputs and chemicals required to grow tobacco, cotton, soya beans and groundnuts.

This means that both the President and the individual farmer were severely restricted by the local price-structure based on the expensive and mostly inaccessible US dollar. This limitation also arises from the highly skewed wage structure based on the US dollar.

The President would have purchased four to five times the quantity of seed and fertiliser for the same resettled and peasant farmers if liquidity had been in the form of a national currency.

The farmers would have doubled or trebled their hectrage for the 2013-2014 cropping season in response to the increase in affordable inputs or they would have used their own funds in local currency to match or treble the President’s contribution.

We should in fact challenge our economic planners and technocrats to quantify the deflationary costs of the expensive US dollars used in Zimbabwe, together with the costs of the absence of a national currency.

There is at least a double impact, first because the US dollars are more expensive to obtain here than in the rest of the region; second, because the expensive US dollars reaching Zimbabwe make South African imports into this country feel like “dumping.”

In the same way, the profit margins for tobacco farmers would be much wider if input prices here were based on a local source of liquidity instead of the expensive US dollars.

Much wider would also be the profit margins for diamond, gold, and platinum mining.
It can therefore be demonstrated that use of the US dollar as a substitute for a national currency has become a clear and present obstacle to the economic boom which is waiting to happen.

In this situation, it is important to go to our Pan-African heritage now for guidance. Booker T Washington is one of the founders of Pan-Africanism. This is what he had to say against Africans who always yearned for external rescue, Africans whose disposition was to escape from themselves:

“A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, ‘Water, water; we die of thirst.’ The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Water, water; send us water,’ ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ A third and fourth signal for water was answered, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from (the gulf of) the Amazon River.”

For Madzimbahwe, the bucket means indigenous knowledge and values, technology, the techniques, the science, the skills, the literacy, the education and all the other resources which we possess. The maize story in 2014 means that it is the peasants who know best how to use that bucket! For too long, our institutions have viewed themselves as training corridors for channelling the best and brightest professors and Group A students to the Anglo-Saxon world who, through aid projects, would then send some of ours back under the guidance of expatriates who would then draw up blueprints or amend what we have drawn up to suit so-called international best practices. Even worse are most of those who were trained in the western universities and physically returned home to Zimbabwe but have not actually come home.

When they think of the Zimbabwe economy they cannot see beyond the unreal numbers produced by urban-based trade unions with no trade; the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries with no industry; schools of Strategic Planning and Business with neither a relevant and original strategy nor a thriving business; and departments of economics who have produced no original research on the land revolution, on the rural majority, on resource nationalism, on diamonds, platinum, coal, lithium or on the impact of illegal sanctions on their people.

If we take Booker T Washington’s illustration, the question of a national currency and liquidity in Zimbabwe today, for instance, is similar to the falsely perceived lack of fresh water in the gulf of the Amazon River.

The peasants have produced two million tonnes of maize but the Grain Marketing Board is waiting for a budget in scarce US dollars to repair silos built with Zimbabwe dollars using local brick and cement 20 or so years ago.

While these newspaper stories point to an obviously urgent situation requiring immediate action, it is important to point out a few glaring contradictions: