(ZIMPAPERS) Tafataona Mahoso: Audit impact of sanctions on Zim, Sadc
COMMENT - Some hard questions about the lack of acknowledgement of the economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. Economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe in December 21st 2001 caused the start of hyperinflation in the year 2002. No analysis of Zimbabwe's economy means anything unless it starts with the analysis of the effect of economic sanctions. Hyperinflation is what ruined the Zimbabwean economy, and hyperinflation was caused by ZDERA. See here for proof and links.Tafataona Mahoso: Audit impact of sanctions on Zim, Sadc
Saturday, 26 February 2011 15:07 Blogs
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona Mahoso
The editorial for The Financial Gazette for February 24 2011 opens with this euphoric paragraph: “February 18 2011 will go down as a momentous day in the post-independence history of the country.
“On this day, Zimbabwean leaders from the private sector and Government . . . agreed . . . it was time to get the former bread-basket rising again on the strengths of unity and hard work . . . This rare resonance across colour, tribe, creed, political persuasion and gender is testimony that Zimbabweans are serious about turning the corner, opening a new chapter and taking on the world . . . after a decade of bickering and fighting, there is now commendable and productive dialogue between Government and business.”
The claim to have discovered national unity of purpose is like the praise of mother’s milk. No one should doubt or question it. But if the milk is in a can, the vigilant scientist may want to test it and see if indeed it is mother’s milk and whose mother might have donated it.
For a fact, too many big workshops and conferences recently mounted on Zimbabwe have had an unspoken objective: To blame the current state of the economy on everything and everybody else except illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions and to hide the depth of the damage caused by those sanctions which should be the basis of a comprehensive reconstruction plan.
Any reconstruction plan and prognosis which ignores sanctions means that the country’s future reconstructed diplomacy and international relations will also ignore the realities of US-EU attitudes, practices and relations toward Africa. It would be as if the new state of Israel would have international relations which are totally oblivious to anti-semitism.
It is also not correct to say the last 10 years of Zimbabwe’s history consisted of purposeless bickering and fighting when in fact in those 10 years Zimbabwe and Sadc scored victories against imperialism and racism.
The Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education in mid-February 2011 lunched an important project entitled “Research and Intellectual Expo 2011: Unpacking Knowledge Excellence!” It was significant, however, that among the scores of research papers, projects and presentations in the three-day programme there was not a single one which dealt directly with researching, documenting and analysing the impact of the illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions against Zimbabwe. If the universities do not dare to do that, then who will?
The impact of illegal sanctions is a subject which can be researched and analysed from many disciplines: history, politics, finance, economics, economic history, sociology, international relations and diplomacy.
Instead of being told that the nation needs a land audit, or a civil service audit or a special audit of Chiadzwa diamonds alone — Zimbabwe should have been told long ago that it needs a comprehensive audit of the impact of illegal sanctions on all sectors of the economy from 2000 to-date. That is the sensible basis for strategic reconstruction. Among those at the Nyanga conference were leaders who fear any objective audit of the impact of sanctions and prefer a haphazard economic recovery at the end of which the West may still remain dominant in our economies.
The illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions are unique in international relations because it is only white Caucasian countries who imposed them upon a small African nation. It is mainly Anglo-Saxon countries which agitated for them and persuaded some non-Anglo-Saxon white states in the European Union to join the embargo reluctantly.
In 1989 the Commonwealth Committee of Foreign Ministers sponsored and published a study called Apartheid Terrorism which was written by Phyllis Johnson and David Martin. As complex and as huge as the problem of apartheid terrorism was, the report succeeded in quantifying the damage and prejudice inflicted by the apartheid regime upon six Southern African economies.
What one would expect on the Zimbabwe case today is a much more focused study on the impact of illegal sanctions on just one economy, Zimbabwe, of course with some references to neighbouring economies and summaries of how these may also have been affected.
Otherwise how are the people of Zimbabwe supposed to mobilise against the illegal sanctions and to plan for long-term reconstruction without an accurate estimation of the extent of the damage?
How are the reconstruction resources to be prioritised and allocated without a quantifiable basis? Worse still, if certain ministers in the inclusive Government do not believe that sanctions are real and that they have caused long-lasting damage, how can the nation entrust its economic planning to such ministers? In case readers may think that the subject is too vague and abstract to yield any data, let me suggest just a short list of aspects which can be audited:
l The cost to the whole economy of having to pay cash-up-front for imports over 11 years;
l The cost of higher transport and energy expenditure due to lack of credit, restricted access to spare parts and relying on outdated machinery;
l The value of lost export revenue over 11 years;
l The value of lost income tax resulting from shrinkage of jobs and eroded salaries over 11 years;
l The value lost through the emigration of professionals and other skilled workers to foreign jurisdictions;
l The cost of environmental damage resulting from the shrinkage of power generation, power imports, and the shelving of rural electrification programmes;
l The cost of induced smuggling and other corruption caused by rising costs and acute shortages of goods and services;
l Health costs arising from the collapse of infrastructure, the rising prevalence of eradicable diseases, the failure to repair or replace water and sewerage systems and inability to import medical equipment and drugs;
l The cost of hyper-inflation and the collapse of the national currency which wiped out pensions, medical aid schemes, insurance policies, mortgages and savings;
l The cost, in business terms, of the propaganda war which was mounted by the Anglo-Saxon countries and their sponsored lobbies and parties to justify and maintain illegal sanctions; and
l The cost of sabotage activities meant to accompany and intensify the illegal embargo.
In their book called Risk Issues and Crisis Management, Michael Regester and Judy Larkin have this to say about the value of good reputation and the cost of bad reputation, whether based on mere propaganda and perception or based on reality.
“The top 250 companies in the UK, when surveyed by the Association of Insurance and Risk Managers in January 2000 (the same time the anti-Zimbabwe crusade escalated), claimed that damage to reputation was the biggest business risk they faced.
“Over 62 percent of respondents believed that risk of reputational loss would increase in future (because of increased media concentration.) . . . It should be remembered that the longer the issue (damaging one’s reputation) survives, the fewer choices are available and the more it costs.”
The Anglo-Saxon powers against Zimbabwe have intentionally maximised the damage against Zimbabwe’s economy and reputation by engaging in orchestrated rituals of sanctions reviews and sanctions renewals on a yearly basis.
In addition, they have sponsored NGOs, media outlets and journalists to publish books, stories and other propaganda material specifically intended to damage the reputation and economy of Zimbabwe.
On January 5 2006, The Financial Gazette published a false front-page story entitled “African Union joins Zim condemnation” when in fact it was the donor-sponsored African Commission on Human and People’s Rights and not the African Union involved.
On January 17 2003, the world woke up to another front-page Daily News story suggesting that President Robert Mugabe had asked for and had been granted exile in Malaysia.
The month before there was a big document circulating via the internet, especially throughout Europe, which alleged that genocide worse than what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was imminent in Zimbabwe and would most certainly happen by January 2003, that is the same month Zimbabwe’s President was alleged to have sought asylum in Malaysia.
These are the reasons why Zimbabwean patriots say the illegal, white racist sanctions against Zimbabwe amount to acts of war and terror upon the people.
No investor would want to invest in a country where genocide is imminent and the head of state and government is alleged to have accepted asylum in a far away country. These lies were premeditated.
Lies cost money and that is confirmed by business corporations themselves.
The attacks on Zimbabwe in the last 15 years are comparable to the destabilisation of the frontline states during the apartheid era, to the extent that it is the white racist interest which was at stake. Therefore the economic damage can be quantified the same way apartheid's damage to more than six African frontline economies was quantified in the 1980s.
The best ways to explain the sanctions against Zimbabwe
Sanctions must be explained in terms of their type as well as purpose. The regime -hange propagandists have deliberately confused the current illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe with the UN mandatory sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa during UDI and apartheid respectively.
The sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa were different because they were wanted and requested by liberation movements which were anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist but which had no means to impose or enforce any sanctions.
The same imperialist and colonialist powers who were fighting the liberation movements also controlled the means of enforcing or busting the same sanctions in order to protect the white interest in UDI and apartheid. They were also the main beneficiaries of the regimes and the companies which were supposed to be sanctioned.
This means that at best, Britain, the US, the European Community and their allies were in a conflict of interest situation when it came to imposing sanctions on Rhodesia and South Africa.
This means that the sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa, though perfectly legal and mandatory in terms of international law (the UN), were adopted by the UK, the US and some EC countries only for public relations purposes.
This means that outside Rhodesia and South Africa, the multinational corporations which did the most to defeat those same legal and mandatory sanctions were also based in Britain, the US and Europe. These companies included Mobil Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Union Carbide and others.
Unlike the sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa, those imposed on Zimbabwe beginning in the year 2000 were first required by the British government which asked for the help of the US government. The two governments then approached the European Union for its co-operation.
These forces together agreed to instigate the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) together with the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) and all the other NGOs they had helped to sponsor and fund in Zimbabwe to demand for Western sanctions in the name of the people of Zimbabwe, but they did not represent the Zimbabwean people.
In other words, the people of Zimbabwe did not want sanctions precisely because their relationship with the African land reclamation movement in Zimbabwe was not like their colonial relationship with the Rhodesian and apartheid regimes.
The sanctions were wanted by the Western powers and the Rhodesian lobby who opposed the African land reclamation movement and wanted to reverse it; the powers and forces who opposed Zimbabwe's involvement in stopping Western-sponsored genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and the forces and powers who saw the Third Chimurenga as a total negation of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (Esap) which the Government of Zimbabwe had reluctantly adopted in 1990 and abandoned by April 2001.
The regime change lobby's efforts to equate the sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa with those against Zimbabwe is meant to tarnish the image of Zimbabwe and condemn land reform as synonymous with UDI and apartheid. It is also meant to suggest that the Third Chimurenga will end just like UDI and apartheid. The sanctions against Zimbabwe are wanted by the very same Western powers and agencies who possess the means to implement and enforce them. And those countries are all white.
As such the sanctions should be seen as an instrument of neo-liberal regime change and mass torture as defined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Zimbabweans will defeat the sanctions by examining, understanding and fighting them in a systematic and strategic manner.
How the sanctions operate
The best way to understand the illegal and racist sanctions is to assign each sector to research, quantify and describe the ways in which it is affected and how it has responded. What we offer here is only an overview which is not based on the experience of any one particular sector.
First, sanctions operate at the level of information and propaganda fed into what Robert E. Wood and others call the international economic aid regime. This is the nexus of banks, agencies and transitional corporations through which the veto powers of the United States and its allies has cascaded to the smallest localities since the days of the Marshall Plan of the 1950s.
In addition to the failure to audit the impact of sanctions on Zimbabwe, there has also been failure to explain the white racist nature of the sanctions: why is it that only white states from Norway to New Zealand (passing via Washington and London) have ganged up against Zimbabwe? The answer lies in the end of official apartheid in South Africa and the fact that after 1994 the South African state could no longer play the role of continental guarantor of Western imperialist and white settlerist interests.
In other words, Euro-American and white settler interests after 1994 found that there are certain things which the new South African state cannot and will not do on their behalf in the way the white apartheid state used to be able to do.
This explains US, UK and EU opposition to former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s mediation roles in Zimbabwe and Cote d’Ivoire.
This means that both white settler interests and Euro-American interests have had to turn to the British state, the US state, the EU and the former white colonies of Britain, for assistance in trying to maintain an Anglo-Saxon hegemony in an Africanising region which is pursuing its own relations with Asia. In order to create a semblance of coherence, the British state has been given the lead role in mobilising these white imperialist and settlerist interests.
The US state, as in the days of apartheid and UDI, continues to play the over-arching, overseer, role. In other words, the corporate, cultural, political and ideological interests which were once served by the white South African state (under US-EU supervision) still remain. They have been made even more critical because of the emergence of China, Russia, India, Brazil, Iran, Malaysia and others as new industrial powers.
Yet neither the British state nor the US state can meet all the needs once satisfied by a regional white South African state.
posted by MrK @ 1:50 PM
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