(HERALD) Empowerment Bill: Ideal pathway for Zim
Empowerment Bill: Ideal pathway for ZimBy Mabasa Sasa
ANDREW Young, one of the most influential diplomats in Jimmy Carter’s administration, once said of President Mugabe: "I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible."
This was sometime in the 1970s. At that time Cde Mugabe, along with other luminaries, was orchestrating the struggle for independence from colonial rule.
His reason for dedicating his life to the struggle was that the dehumanising colonial regime that appropriated all land as its own had reduced the black majority in Zimbabwe to a "race of no rights beyond those of chattel".
At this year’s United Nations Summit, President Mugabe addressed the General Assembly thus: "The West still negates our sovereignties by way of control of our resources, in the process making us mere chattels in our own lands, mere minders of its trans-national interests. In my own country and other sister states in Southern Africa, the most visible form of this control has been over land despoiled from us at the onset of British colonialism."
The consistency says a lot about the man.
The Mugabe who Ambassador Young spoke of is the same man who is still primarily concerned with the economic emancipation of Zimbabwe and Africa at large.
This dedication to economic independence is what lies behind the formulation of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill that was recently passed by the House of Assembly.
The Bill has been called many things by many people: racist, demonic and institutionalised thievery, while on the other end of the spectrum it has been hailed as the culmination of Zimbabwe’s protracted battle for self-determination.
The challenge of the post-colonial State has been to ensure majority participation in the economy, a process Ngugi wa Thiong’o refers to as "moving the centre" of national development from those illegally empowered by colonial racist governments to those who were disadvantaged by the same process.
Such a policy is borne out of the realisation that no economy in the world can witness real growth and development while excluding the majority from its day-to-day processes.
People have to be meaningfully integrated in their national economies and this will, in turn, ensure social harmony.
President Mugabe told the UN General Assembly that Zimbabwe believed in such broad-based economic participation and would work to "move the centre" from Western multinationals, their governments and their NGOs to ordinary Zimbabweans.
Such a course of action would be an upholding of basic human rights that entitle to people control and ownership of their resources, contrary to claims by reactionaries that the Bill is racist and vindictive.
He said: "Development at country level should continue to be country-led, and not subject to the whims of powerful donor states. . . Even after 1945, it would appear that the Berlin Conference of 1884, through which Africa was parcelled to colonial European powers, remained stronger than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is, therefore, clear that for the West, vested economic interests, racial and ethnocentric considerations proved stronger than their adherence to principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."
He added: "Mr Bush, Mr Blair and now Mr Brown’s sense of human rights precludes our people’s right to their God-given resources, which in their view must be controlled by their kith and kin.
"I am termed dictator because I have rejected this supremacist view and frustrated the neo-colonialists . . . Instead, it is Africa which is in the dock, facing trial from the same world that persecuted it for centuries."
If a small country defends and upholds its right to independence, it is accused of being a rogue state; if a power launches an attack against a country, it is said that it "liberates" them.
South African President Thabo Mbeki also spoke to the General Assembly on the importance of fanning out economic participation to as many people as possible.
Instead of this happening, President Mbeki noted, the "rich and the powerful have consistently sought to ensure that — whatever happens — the existing power relations are not altered and, therefore, the status quo remains."
President Mbeki will obviously know what he is talking about. South Africa too is pursuing a Black Economic Empowerment policy.
He said: "Naturally, the dominant and the powerful very often respond positively to agreed programmes if these would advance their own narrow interests."
And therein lies the crux of opposition to the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill: there are those who would like to protect their hitherto powerful positions and they will speak out forcefully against any threat to their wealth.
Big business not only opposes such legislative processes, but also harnesses the full arsenal of its lackeys who will, in fact, be more vocal than those whose empires will be indigenised to the extent where opposition MPs walk out of Parliament when they are asked to vote on the Bill.
These opposition MPs would rather frustrate the dreams of their kith and kin than inconvenience a white demographic factor that constitutes only 2 percent of the population.
The Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill simply seeks to ensure foreign-owned firms are 51 percent owned by people from the indigenous population.
The Bill provides for the establishment of an empowerment fund that will assist the financing of share acquisitions from public-owned firms and in management buy-ins and buy-outs.
For purposes of the law, "indigenous Zimbabweans" eligible to benefit are any persons who before April 18, 1980 were disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on racial grounds.
Speaking of it, the Minister of State Enterprises, Anti-Monopolies and Anti-Corruption, Cde Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana, noted: "If a white person wants to start a business he should partner with indigenous persons. We are not stopping anyone from starting a business; it is not racism to correct wrong things.
"Non-indigenous persons can have 100 percent shareholding in small family businesses but if they enter large businesses that are capital intensive, we are saying they should partner indigenous persons."
Cde Mangwana has rightly noted that this step is "more revolutionary" than the land reform programme. And if Zimbabwe has received seven years worth of bad press for land reforms, then we should not be surprised by the demonisation this Bill has already witnessed. The bad press from the detractors will only get worse.
In his influential work "The Republic", the ancient sage, Plato, illustrated the image of a dark cave in which a number of people are chained facing away from the entrance.
These people have never seen the outside world and, indeed, light is an unimaginable concept as they have lived in darkness all their lives.
One day one of the prisoners of the cave manages to break free and tentatively goes outside. There, lo and behold, he sees wonders his unenlightened mind had never thought possible.
Not only is there light, but the light illuminates images that could never have been dreamt of in the cave.
The enraptured escapee rushes back to the cave to tell his friends of the wonders that are outside and to implore them to break their chains and join him in the light.
But they say "no". They would rather stay in the dark.
In the same vein, some of the very people who will be empowered by this Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill are doing their damned best to ensure the fight for economic independence does not come into fruition.
This is the same thing that happened during the land reform programme and it is unfortunate that again some people have chosen to surrender their right to control their own resources.
However, Zimbabwe moves on.
posted by MrK @ 9:34 AM
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