(NEWZIMBABWE) New Zimbabwe.com names new editor
Take off ... New Zimbabwe.com's new editor Gilbert Nyambabvu
17/10/2013 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
NEW Zimbabwe Media Ltd has appointed Gilbert Nyambabvu editor of the New Zimbabwe.com news website following the departure of founding editor, Mduduzi Mathuthu.
Nyambabvu (Twitter: @GNyambabvu), who deputised Mathuthu (Twitter: @Mathuthu), takes over with immediate effect.
Meanwhile, Mathuthu is set to join the Zimbabwe Newspapers Group-published Bulawayo Chronicle after steering New Zimbabwe.com to be the most read Zimbabwean website on the internet.
Announcing the changes, New Zimbabwe Media Ltd CEO Jeff Madzingo said: “Mathuthu has been an outstanding servant for us and the public face of our news website since 2003.
“He wanted to return home from England and found the offer to edit his hometown newspaper where he cut his teeth in journalism too hard to resist. We wish him well in his new adventure.”
The departing Mathuthu backed Nyambabvu – who holds a Diploma in Mass Communication, a degree in English and Communication Studies from Leeds Trinity and is enrolled for a Masters in Journalism programme with Leeds Met University – to be a success in his new role.
He said: “I don’t know of a better man to come in and keep New Zimbabwe.com top of the pile. I’m a great admirer of him as a writer and I’m in no doubt that he will be a great success.
“People read New Zimbabwe.com because it’s fair and balanced, and for its exciting packaging of news. There can be no doubt that Nyambabvu will carry this winning formula forward.”
Mathuthu said he had given "great thought" to the offer from Zimpapers to join the Chronicle and believed he had made the right decision.
"Zimpapers liked our edgy style at New Zimbabwe.com and they thought I could really add value to the Chronicle. They agreed to go back to a tabloid after the broadsheet experiment and I see an opportunity in what is a great challenge to increase the newspaper's market share," Mathuthu said.
"Anyone who knows me will be in no doubt that I will approach this job in a professional way and in the process I hope to break an unhealthy media taboo that it's not cool to leave the private media for the public media. This polarisation is responsible for the lowering of journalism standards in Zimbabwe."
Madzingo said the imminent launch of a new design for the New Zimbabwe.com website in the next seven days will empower the new editor to grow the website further.
Mathuthu, who holds a Diploma in International Journalism and Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Glamorgan, is set to take over from Itai Musengeyi at the Chronicle from November 1, according to a statement by Zimpapers board chairman Charles Utete.
The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange-listed Zimpapers has also named Caesar Zvayi as editor of its flagship Herald newspaper, replacing Innocent Gore who takes over as Digital Media editor where he is expected to spearhead the development of new products among them BH24, and Sport24.
Zvayi will be deputised by Mabasa Sasa, formerly the editor of the Southern Times, a joint venture partnership between Zimpapers and New Era of Namibia.
Musengeyi leaves the Chronicle to join the Southern Times as editor.
Jorum Nyathi, immediate past spokesperson of JOMIC and former deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, has been appointed Group Political Editor.
Herald senior assistant editor Tumeliso Makhurane has been appointed editor of The Sunday News in Bulawayo, taking over from Paul Mambo who died in August.
Munyaradzi Huni has been promoted to deputy editor at the Sunday Mail from his previous post as assistant editor, taking over from Nomsa Nkala who is set to head a new Zimpapers television station.
Brezhnev Malaba will remain as editor of the Sunday Mail, the country’s biggest selling newspaper.
Labels: GILBERT NYAMBABVU, JORAM NYATHI, MDUDUZI MATHUTHU, NEWZIMBABWE
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Making a constitution no one wants
Posted By Joram Nyathi on 19 Aug, 2010 at 11:51 am
THE United States ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, appears to me to be a decent man despite his recent theatrics on behalf of The System at the burial of Sabina Mugabe at the Heroes’ Acre. If, on the other hand, it is all acting, then he deserves a chance on the theatre stage. I will explain why later.
Since the constitution outreach programme started nearly two months ago, the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC) has attended a number of the meetings. We witnessed the chaos of the first week in Manicaland and Mashonaland Central and people’s frustration with the Constitution Parliamentary Select Committee (COPAC)’s delays.
We didn’t witness any of the violence or intimidation we read about in the media. We have received reports of violence and intimidation, but these are sporadic rather than systematic and JOMIC has been dealing with such reports since early 2009 before COPAC constituted.
People were free to air “their views”. The reservation was whether these would be reflected in the new constitution. In Manicaland, we visited five centres in the first week. We had pretty much the same experience in Matabeleland South. We had similar reports from other provinces, especially Masvingo where women often far outnumbered men. It wasn’t too hard to tell which “party” was talking.
We have our limitations. We are able to send only two two-member teams per district at a time to observe COPAC’S scheduled meetings. I travel with one political liaison officer. Where I am unable to go out, the three liaison officers from Zanu PF, MDC-T and MDC travel together, and none of them would want to prejudice his party. On average, they stay out for three nights to attend a random sample of meetings per province. We are still attending some more meetings.
Still, there are problems. In the constitutional debacle, unlike the Marange diamonds where we had foreigners pleading our cause and innocence while some among us fought gallantly to paint the gemstones redder than the Red Sea in defence of sanctions, we only have ourselves to blame. Despite its numerous demoralising logistical problems, it is not COPAC’S problem.
For all his wilful waywardness, Lovemore Madhuku has no clout to be the “evil men” in the constitution-making process. He is correct that Zimbabweans are not making a national constitution. It is mainly Zanu PF and MDC-T who are engaged in a contest of wits. Given a chance, they would emerge with two constitutions from the same meeting.
In a bid to please a mischievous but vociferous crowd driven by illusion that the biggest problem and hence the solution to all our problems is the constitution, Zimbabweans were stampeded into putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Meeting the Global Political Agreement (GPA) timeframe on the new constitution soon became a national pandemic.
During JOMIC’s historic interparty workshops, I indicated that Zimbabwe was still too polarised to craft an enduring constitution. We needed national healing first. Traditional leaders know this reality. I understand Party activists too are aware of this but are unemployed, and many crave some bit of action. Civic society wants the dollars.
Politicians are playing along and ordinary Zimbabweans are caught between the hammer and the anvil: mention of an election evokes images of 2008, yet political stability has not yielded the much talked-about Mighty Dollar. And they don’t know what a constitution is beyond the propaganda from their parties. Thus the Presidency is not an office but Robert Mugabe, and Prime Minister means Morgan Tsvangirai.
The parties to the GPA went out divided. When you ask people what they want in a preamble to a constitution in a remote bush in Bosha/Marange, and an elderly woman stands up to denounce gay marriages and a school drop-out demands dual citizenship, you don’t ask which political parties have been prowling this wood.
Worse still, some COPAC team leaders could not explain what a “preamble” was. Translation into vernacular drew blank faces. At one meeting in Umzingwane District, Matabeleland South, from a crowd of about 120, only two men seemed to have a clue of what was going on. At the close of the meeting, an elderly man stood up and wagged his index finger at the COPAC team sitting up front: “When this thing turns sour, don’t tell us we gave it to you,” he warned grimly.
At a meeting in Insiza District, also Matabeleland South, the COPAC leaders couldn’t explain what a devolved state was. Proportional representation, said a COPAC team leader, meant that people voted only for a party and the president selected MPs for them. A federal system of government was equated to the defunct Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland! It is a scandal that a nation can allow itself to be led on wild goose chase for a “people-driven” constitution.
Which can lead to only one outcome: a constitution no-one wants, whether it passes or fails the referendum. Not Zimbabweans; not Tsvangirai, not Mugabe. It’s Morton’s fork. We adopt it or revert to the devil we know from Lancaster. Which is back to 2000 when the “no” victory left everybody else a loser except President Mugabe.
We visited a business centre near Esigodini in Matabeleland South where we were warmly welcomed by Eddie Cross as one of the team leaders. They had a clever set up upfront where the “talking points” were raised in a rotation. A blind man on a wheelchair reading Braille asked the question on the disabled. There was an outpouring of compassion.
When it came to war veterans, a number of positive proposals were made. Then a grey-haired man in his seventies stood up to make a point. “Let’s do away with war veterans,” he said. And sat down. Many Zimbabweans talk disparagingly of “so-called” war veterans. The man was old enough to be my father.
One of my sons is about my age when the liberation war “ended” in 1980. I am trying to explain to him where Zimbabwe came from, what the land reform and indigenisation mean. His mother is trying to teach him to fasten his trousers around the waist, not across the buttocks. The man on the wheelchair at the top table should have been old enough to be a war veteran. I don’t know how he came by his disability. I said to myself: “Has it come to this? What am I supposed to tell my son?”
On the occasion of our Heroes’ commemorations last week, it took Charles Ray in an article in The Standard newspaper to explain what war means, and that we should respect war veterans, regardless of the cause. It was politicians who started war, he said, and it is invariably the youth who give their blood, sweat and tears.
That includes disastrous ventures like the US is facing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could be the liberation war like Zimbabwe’s in which an estimated 50,000 lives were lost. As a show of gratitude, all we can say is: “Let’s do away with war veterans”! To please who? For what?
Unfortunately, given the extent of self-hatred and sponsored anger in Zimbabwe, Ambassador Ray runs the risk of being labelled “too African”. Twice in July, he had to defend Zimbabwe against itself even as her own sons wanted her slaughtered over her diamonds.
First, Ray said coalition governments could be made to work if people focused more on their commonalities and less on the things that divide them. And I always wonder why we should be so divided over control of our land and minerals!
Second, Ambassador Ray was angry at false reports in a local daily that President Barrack Obama, in his “broken heart”, had classified President Mugabe as a financier of terrorism. As the US embassy pointed out, “the ambassador is not amused at all. It seems that in their haste to discredit the President (Mugabe), they failed to interpret something that has been in existence for seven years.”
Ambassador Ray might want to know that some media here worry more about the freedom to earn money by smearing people than they care about truth and the sacredness of facts. How else does one explain the insanity of denying the existence of sanctions which the whole world knows about? How does one justify the fight against Zimbabwe lawfully exporting its diamonds but instead that it should wait for foreign aid contingent upon nebulous benchmarks?
Indeed, without in any way condoning corruption, how does one explain that when Finance Minister Tendai Biti talks of US$30 million missing from the export of diamonds, the media wants to give him a Nobel Prize but there is universal silence when he states that the country’s diamonds, gold and platinum are “benefiting outsiders”, and reveals that: “Last year we only got US$44 million from the mining industry yet they exported over a US$1 billion. This year they have exported about US$650 million worth of minerals but we have only gotten US$15 million?”
And when the same daylight robbers of our finite minerals return with a token US$5 million donation to their own NGO, some lunatics tell us they are the philanthropists who feed Zimbabwe!
What happened to the US$956 million from last year’s exports, plus US$635 million so far this year? Is there any moral or economic justification for this imbalance? Does one have to be Zanu PF to appreciate the need for indigenisation?
Joram Nyathi is JOMIC communications manager and former deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper. He writes in his personal capacity
Labels: CHARLES RAY, CONSTITUTION, COPAC, JOMIC, JORAM NYATHI
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Ignore Malema at your peril
Posted By Joram Nyathi on 10 Jun, 2010 at 5:08 pm
THERE are only two ways to deal with ANC Youth League president Julius Malema: either the whites physically eliminate him, or the ANC sacrifices him. Neither option resolves the key question of Malema’s popularity: the quest to give meaning to African independence by taking control of our natural resources.
The whites will not kill him because they are wise enough not to precipitate the same catastrophe which they fear an unrestrained Malema represents, and the ANC as a party can only sacrifice Malema at irreparable damage to itself and its credibility as a revolutionary movement. But it risks sacrificing both the man and principle through a lack of resoluteness in pursuit of what is historically just. That is if President Jacob Zuma wants to earn himself the tag of Mr Nice Guy, and forgets why the poor black majority voted him into power.
Because of their fear, the whites, especially farmers and big corporates, have shifted the task of dealing with Malema to the ANC itself. In particular, President Zuma is now being asked to deal with this Frankenstein monster which he created to fight his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. It’s a pretty clever trick to get the ANC to fight itself while exonerating those who want a weakened ruling party which won’t threaten their vested interests.
For their part, whites are fighting Malema at the symbolic level. He is semi-literate if not a “buffoon” like Zuma himself. Malema poses a threat to freedom of expression and the press. Malema exposes Zuma’s partiality for Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe against MDC-T as a mediator in the Zimbabwean political crisis. His “kill the boer” song is racist. Malema is a threat to foreign investment.
So it was that all powerful media in SA were in celebratory mood when it was announced that Malema was going to face disciplinary action from the ANC for all these sins. It was time to silence Malema once and for all. The ANC played along, but luckily retreated at the brink last week. Malema was fined only R10,000 for disrespecting Zuma. He was also ordered to go for political lessons. Slap on the wrist, sorted!
That is as much as the ANC can go. The Youth League in most of the country’s provinces is fully behind Malema. They have made it clear they elected Malema for his radicalism, which is clearly lacking in the older generation. The ANC is fully aware that silencing Malema is not the same thing as resolving the cause he is championing.
In turning against Malema instead of confronting recalcitrant white farmers and mining conglomerates who won’t share anything with poor blacks, the ANC leadership is showing unforgivable cowardice. It leaves future generations a terrible legacy of a people who won the liberation war but refused to take control of the country.
The ANC, and white South Africans in particular, need to accept a little truth. The Malema phenomena is more than an individual. It is an idea. He represents a generation which is ready to confront a monstrous evil in the form neo-colonialism and its more insidious sibling, the liberal ideology. South Africa’s problems are not going to be solved by killing Julius Malema or dismissing him from the ANC for telling the truth.
South Africans, black and white, must confront head-on the material conditions which breed the likes of Malema. It was because of these conditions that Nelson Mandela went to prison for 27 years. The “ideal” for which he said he was “prepared to die” is still a pipedream for the majority blacks while the whites have appropriated the man to themselves and turned him a mock idol on his people.
What is sad is that while white South Africans are aware of the danger to themselves of eliminating Malema, they are refusing to learn plain lessons from the stubborn stance chosen by their cousins in Zimbabwe. The land reform which they so much revile began on a willing-seller-willing-buyer paradigm. The approach didn’t work because those who “owned” the land asked for “market prices” which they knew the government could not afford. They would not part with fertile farms, with some farmers as late as the year 2000 still owning up to 13 farms each.
They thought they could still keep their farms in perpetuity by instigating their indigent farm labourers to vote en mass in the February 2000 referendum against a new constitution which would allow government to seize these farms without paying compensation except for improvements such as houses and other infrastructure. They won the vote but lost the farms.
They thought they could stop the process by attacking leaders of war veterans who spearheaded the land reform as lawless thugs. Looking at the travesty going on in SA, one sees people who still believe “not in a thousand years” will they share their ill-gotten wealth with blacks.
Zimbabwe is now in the second phase of the struggle for control of its natural resources: the indigenisation programme in which blacks must ultimately acquire 51% equity in all foreign-owned companies worth more than US$3,5 million. (In the original regulations the figure was US$500,000).
In South Africa’s case, Malema might be one of those who benefited from black economic empowerment programmes of the past 16 years. His detractors prefer to see patronage as the only source of his wealth. Whichever is the case, he lives the poverty of the poor majority everyday to be able to tap into their anger and frustration with a revolution which appears to have ended prematurely before it could deliver on the promise of independence. These are the realities which should exercise the collective conscience of South Africans of all races. Instead, what one sees is a preoccupation with form over content by most white South Africans.
Malema might be semi-literate, according to those who benefited under apartheid, but he knows there are millions of black South Africans who are worse than he is, thanks to racial segregation which favoured the white race in everything, including the quality of education. Most of the cadres who fought the liberation wars in Southern Africa were semi-literate or illiterate. So that epithet against Malema hits at the core of all those who sacrificed their education to liberate their country, but today wallow in poverty because they are illiterate! How can history be so cruel?
The crushing irony is that our countries are full of literate black journalists who are historically illiterate. So illiterate in fact that they believe it is right to stop Malema from singing liberation war songs like “Dubul’ ibhunu”. Like one sage observed: “A history forgotten is a future lost.” So illiterate that they believe a SADC Tribunal seeking to reverse Zimbabwe’s land reform should be enforced just to stop South Africa and Namibia from embarking on similar programmes.
The ANC, as the oldest liberation movement in the region, needs to provide decisive leadership. One can only hope that the meeting of five former liberation movements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, last week breathed new life into the ANC. Silencing Malema can only prolong the inevitable. It is more likely to bring forth a 100 angrier, semi-literate Malemas so long as things don’t change for the black man.
We are too familiar with this hypocrisy in Zimbabwe where all rights count for blacks, except economic rights, that is the right to own their God-given natural resources.
Joram Nyathi is the communications director of the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee – a multipartisan body overseeing Zimbabwe’s power sharing government. He writes in his personal capacity.
Labels: JORAM NYATHI, JULIUS MALEMA, LAND REFORM
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Indigenisation and curse of land reform
Posted By Joram Nyathi on
1 Apr, 2010 at 5:11 pm
IN HIS intriguing book, The Problems of Philosophy, British philosopher Bertrand Russell criticises “absolute sceptics” who claim nothing can ever be known with any certainty.
While criticism is the hallmark of philosophical inquiry, he brands the sceptics’ approach as “destructive criticism”. This form of criticism is meant to destroy the spirit of inquiry after the truth. We have something akin to that kind of criticism in the current controversy over indigenisation in Zimbabwe.
Debate presupposes rational discourse where people try to balance their views. In our case, the discourse has shifted from the merits and demerits to outright opposition to indigenisation as a policy. Those who debate have become so dogmatic about methodology that this has become an end in itself, like the parallel debate on the constitution-making process. The process has become an end in itself with Lovemore Madhuku campaigning against a constitution which doesn’t yet exist.
The “destructive criticism” of Zimbabwe’s indigenisation policy revolves around at least three disempowering pillars:
• Only Zanu PF fat-cats will benefit;
• It will fail like the fast-track land reform;
• It will chase away foreign investors.
The conclusion is that it cannot be done.
To tackle the issue of Zanu PF first: Suppose it was true, why is it so repugnant for say 50,000 indigenous people to control 50% of the economy but it is politically and morally correct for 4,500-6,000 whites to control 75% of the same when the mode of coming by such control is the same — usurpation?
To me the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act seeks merely to reverse that order. Nobody said people should not be compensated for their investment.
Second, Zanu PF fat-cats can only benefit alone if the rest of us miss the vision and become obsessive about methodology. That is how the land reform was turned into a Zanu PF affair.
Already, ordinary people are being deceived to shun indigenisation as another devilish scheme by Zanu PF for self-enrichment. Beware of these cheap divide-and-conquer tactics. We risk being bitten twice in the same argument.
Third, the real debate should be on how to make it almost impossible for the rich to get super-rich after benefiting from previous affirmative action programmes. The idea is not to take from a white minority to give to a black minority. The debate is how Mr & Mrs Allofus can mobilise resources to be part of the 50,000 imaginary Zanu PF beneficiaries of indigenisation.
Fourth, the racial overtones in the debate have clouded the overall vision of indigenisation and turned the discourse into an ideological contest between political parties. There are hundreds of Zimbabweans in the Diaspora who want to leverage their resources to benefit from the 51% to be ceded by the huge conglomerates. Instead, they are being made to fight over a policy initiative meant to benefit the majority if properly articulated and executed.
I find it pointless to respond to proponents of another willing-seller, willing-buyer model. I wonder whether such people are aware of how farmers paid only lip-service to supporting the same approach on land in the 1980s and early 1990s and how it failed because those who “owned” land believed it was “private property” to be sold at the grotesquely inflated “market price” because they didn’t want to share fertile land. The major difference this time is that short of insider dealings, the “market price” for most listed companies is in the public domain.
Another errant argument is that everyone should start their own companies. Even the Bible acknowledges that the poor shall always be with us. It is the duty of every responsible government to try and reduce their number or at least ease their suffering. That is why Barack Obama is passionate about health policy in the US. That is why there are unemployment benefits in the UK. That is why the welfare doctrine is so strong among in Nordic and Scandinavian states.
In Zimbabwe, you will be told all this is about cronyism, patronage, corruption or downright mismanagement. We can’t all be self-sufficient, let alone entrepreneurs.
Indigenisation will fail like the fast-track land reform, so we are told. To start with, most of the people advancing this argument don’t want to visit the tobacco sales floors to witness the riches farmers are reaping from the land and the properties they are buying in town.
They are also not interested in talking to the new farmers themselves to hear their side of the story. How can a one-sided tale about the SADC Tribunal ruling and the plight of 79 white farmers be the whole truth? What about Justice Bharat Patel’s landmark January judgement on the land reform policy?
Second, what is needed are not louder prayers for indigenisation to “fail” like the land reform. What is needed is debate on how it can be made to succeed without avoidable dislocations in the economy. There is no disputing that to a large extent, the land reform was chaotic. But that is not the only reason it “failed”.
Land reform “failed” mainly because there were “interests” which didn’t want it to succeed. Most such interests controlled finance, technical skills, the manufacturing, storage and supply of fertiliser and seed production. They had the connections to markets for the produce and sources of equipment and machinery. Above all, they had a voice which could be heard far and wide.
Suddenly all banks closed their agro-business sections which were dedicated to supporting farmers because without title, land had become “dead capital”. In their headlong rush to grab what was on the farms, those who responded to the fast-track land reform forgot about tomorrow – that they didn’t control the whole supply chain. Left on barren lands with neither skills, fertiliser nor financial resources, they vandalised some of the irrigation infrastructure.
Indigenisation will “fail” if the debate is not focused on financing the various small-scale enterprises already in existence to enable more people to purchase shares in big companies. Resistance will be immense.
Niccolo Machiavelli quickly comes to mind: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has, for enemies, all those who have done well under the old.” Who is resisting change?
Third, closely linked to the land reform were sanctions to make sure it “failed”. Normal human behaviour is that once someone gets into trouble, regardless of however foolhardy their behaviour leading to the present calamity, we assist them by, if necessary, putting them on a life support system. In Zimbabwe’s case, not only was the life support system withdrawn, an albatross was tied round its neck to punish the “innovator”. Sanctions became the United States’ Marshall Plan.
It is tempting to speculate that the maintenance of sanctions on Zimbabwe is to make sure the economic recovery takes long and is as painful as possible. As early as 2005, we were already being told by “experts” it would take at least 15 years for the economy to recover to 1997 levels. By 2008, it must have been 25 years. But Zimbabwe’s dramatic stabilisation with the introduction of the multicurrency regime in January 2009 demonstrated that this could be wild speculation.
The recovery period can be shortened even with the economy and infrastructure supporting more people than in 1997. Zimbabwe needs a humane Marshall Plan as originally conceived for Europe’s recovery from World War II by General George Marshall, that is to restore people’s confidence in the future of their own economy!
Investor flight is another favourite scare-crow. But for me that is the more reason why indigenisation is vital so that we are not perpetually held to ransom by the threat of withdrawal or withholding of investment money by aliens. Once indigenous people control 75% of the economy they constitute a formidable bulwark against the fickleness of international capital.
There is a limit to how far Philip Chiyangwa, Trevor Ncube, Strive Masiyiwa, Shingi Mutasa, Shingi Munyeza or Mutumwa Mawere can run away with their investments because they object to certain government policies. Even more, once they are the dominant group, their financial muscle should give them clout over those policies as key stakeholders. An alien only has an interest in our resources but his loyalty lies with his capital whereas a Zimbabwean owes loyalty first to his country.
We need investment, yes, but not at our own expense.
Second, it is not clear what figures are involved when we talk about investor flight. The Indigenisation Act is a fairly new law. Why were we not getting a deluge of investment before it was enacted? What guarantee is there that stopping indigenisation will bring huge foreign investment when this is tied to nebulous benchmarks which are interpreted subjectively? Who will pass us the test?
The trouble with Zimbabweans is that we have been taught self-contempt, and not only have we internalised it but have turned it into a fetish and a source of national pride. Matters of bad governance and corruption plague all nations and solutions to local problems can never be outsourced to foreigners. God gives every nation enough brains to match the problems it creates.
Third, Zimbabwe has a lot to commend it for the serious investor, from a vast variety of minerals to excellent soils, road and rail networks, natural attractions and a fabulous weather. No long-term investor will run away because of scare-mongering by those who have become slaves to the experience of past failure.
Serious investors mainly need explicit and consistent policies so they can hedge their bets. Have people stopped climbing Mt Everest because there is a possibility of dying? Can investing in Zimbabwe be more treacherous than trying to climb Mt Everest?
We are also told that investors need special treatment because they create employment. That might be true but what is the value of that employment? How is this better for me than owning a big stake in the company? One investor here in Zimbabwe often advises people to buy a company, not shares. That is, when you decide to invest in a company do it in a big way; try to indigenise it if you have the resources.
Still on employment creation, AFP news agency recently did a feature on the plight of garment factory workers in Bangladesh. These are produced for giants such as Wal-Mart, H&M, Correfour and Levi Strauss.
Quote: “Bangladesh’s 4 500 garment factories are the country’s largest employers providing jobs to 2,5 million people or 40% of the industrial workforce. Last year the country was one of the world’s top three garment exporters, with shipments up 10% to US$12,3 billion – around 80% of the country’s total exports.”
Impressive, you think. The working conditions are appalling while the wages are a scandal. Workers are paid US$25 a month which they say can’t buy food or pay rent. While exports last year hit a staggering US$12,3 billion for the Western companies, the 2,5 million employees together got a measly US$750 million in wages. That has been the situation on Zimbabwe’s farms since before Independence, even after the black government set minimum wages for the sector.
The destructive criticism against newly-resettled farmers for low productivity is largely unmerited given the lack of skills and resources in addition to the forces ranged against the land reform programme. It is not a secret that farming is heavily subsidised by the state in much of Europe and the US.
Closer to home in South Africa, white farmers recently threatened to quit if the government removed subsidies. They have been at it since Jan Van Riebeeck was governor of the Cape Colony in 1653 — using slave labour, yet Zimbabwe’s new farmers are supposed to be weaned off and self-sustaining in just 10 years, failing which black empowerment must be stopped!
We all learn something from open debate and criticism. It need not be destructive criticism.
Joram Nyathi is Jomic communications manager. He writes here in his personal capacity and the views expressed have nothing to do with those of Jomic.
Labels: INDIGENIZATION AND EMPOWERMENT ACT (ZIMBABWE), JORAM NYATHI, LAND REFORM
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Why I want to be a white man
Posted By Joram Nyathi on
18 Jun, 2009 at 3:36 pm
IT is people like Cremer who give President Mugabe a cult status if what he allegedly said is true. It is also people like Sekai Holland who undermine the MDC’s credibility. For, as the Frenchman said, with friends like Holland, who needs an enemy! The MDC simply has too many mouths.
First things first. ML Cremer, it is alleged, is a farmer in Chegutu, some 110km west of Harare. He has lost a lot of his De Rus Farm to the land reform programme launched in 2000. The last thing he wanted to see, it is suspected, was someone waving a piece paper called an “offer letter” claiming for somebody ownership of his remaining 60 hectares. No matter how well-connected such a personage was.
As it turned out, the bearer of the bad omen was a sister of American Dr Arikana Chihombori, said to be a relative of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai or his late wife, Susan. The good lady, a pastor, asked a lands officer to accompany her to claim possession of Cremer’s farm.
Cremer, like any law-abiding citizen, exploded into a white hurricane. He allegedly called her “a cold stupid kaffir”. Cremer is said to have also told her he didn’t “take instructions from a kaffir” to vacate his farm. He employs 300 blacks to whom he gives instructions everyday.
My vocabulary in both Shona and Ndebele is very shallow. I can’t find the equivalent adjective for kaffir to refer to a white man in our vernacular languages. Ibhunu is a corruption of boer or “farmer”. He was always fearsome.
We probably didn’t need any such words. I grew up knowing only words of endearment for the white man — ikhiwa. We say ikhiwa to refer to someone who is very light in complexion. Ikhiwa can also mean beautiful. It can refer to a man who exhibits financial independence, or someone who doesn’t bother others, a gentleman who minds his own business.
The word kaffir was especially rare for some of us who didn’t live on farms. When it was used, even in colonial times, it was a sign that the white man was very angry. It is a very derogatory term for a black African. With independence, and now with the land reform, ikhiwa or murungu, refers to anybody with money and political power. It means even a potential employer or anyone from whom you need favour.
Mugabe has tried to demystify the white man through land reform regardless of his other human foibles. Blacks should control their natural resources. They should be employers: that’s the way to be a white man. That’s at the core of European and US economic sanctions.
The policy of reconciliation in 1980 was meant to appease the white man, for it would have been awkward for Mugabe to call for reconciliation with Joshua Nkomo or between Zanu and Zapu when the two were fighting a common enemy — the white man or the Rhodesian system.
The independence Lancaster House Constitution also gave the white man 20 “reserved seats” while blacks went onto the “common roll”. The white man was given a moratorium on the land while freedom fighters received “demobilisation” money. That was in 1980.
But the white man never reciprocated our adoration which didn’t diminish with self-rule. A straight dealer is still “a white man”. If you want a second-hand item, be it a vehicle or fridge or television set, a white man is your best bet. Any deal with a white man is value for money. Yet after more than a century, few whites deign to speak local languages while we are told English is your passport to life.
While this might be true for the educated elite who can land good jobs in Europe and beyond, it has not yielded as much bounty as the gun did the semi-literate horse riders who invaded Zimbabwe at the end of the 19th century and continued to grab land from Africans until as late as the 1970s.
Is it then possible that after 30 years of “reconciliation”, and 10 years of land reform, a black man is still a kaffir – a low caste citizen?
My worry is that this mental attitude about kaffirs could in fact be more pervasive than is acknowledged. The meaning of reconciliation was never fully articulated.
We were a slave race. If we could now walk along First Street Mall, even if our pockets were empty, we had “arrived”. Apart from the political leadership, nothing had changed. The white man remained a god perched up there, followed by the Indian, then the Coloured while the kaffir bore the burden of all productive labour from the farm to the factory floor.
To the extent that the policy of reconciliation legitimised property relations which obtained prior to 1979, it emptied the liberation war of all content beyond political power, and was a negation of the spirit of the revolution. It once again weakened the kaffir who had been empowered through war and revolutionary consciousness.
The land reform has only helped to underline this. The racial undertones in the fight to defend Zimbabwe’s “international citizens” from their uncivilised government is self-evident, yet the moral weight implied in these property rights is absent in a generalised human rights discourse anchored on the munificence of an employer race.
It hawks itself as the donor race. It is the same race which maintains sanctions on Zimbabwe which have become as indefensible as rape whatever the perpetrator’s defence.
Labels: JORAM NYATHI, LAND REFORM, NEOCOLONIALISM, RACISM
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Soros’ caveat on free markets
Posted By Joram Nyathi on 25 Apr, 2009 at 6:52 am
“IF we increase our production capacity from the current 7% to about 25% or increase direct revenue to US$60 million from the current US$20 million, our workers would receive proper salaries.”
Finance Minister Tendai Biti made these comments ahead of a meeting with the IMF and the World Bank in Washington this week. The government is seeking lines of credit to finance its Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme.
Each time the IMF is mentioned, I recall the old Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) led by Morgan Tsvangirai before it was swallowed up by the MDC. Tsvangirai didn’t stop ESAP, but he tried.
Faced with the prospect of a repeat, you would expect workers to unite and ignite. Not in Zimbabwe, where all civil authority has been ceded to a venal civic society!
The IMF and the World Bank use a template on free markets and are controlled by the same nations which have imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe. The ZCTU should know the implications of IMF prescriptions, so should the CZI, but they opt to hold down their nation for rape.
The IMF/World Bank prescription is simple but it is a fatal dose. To create a conducive environment for investment, beneficiary countries are told: privatise parastatals, remove all price controls and subsidies, devalue the currency, remove trade barriers and cut tax on profits, allow wholesale remittances and free movement of capital, relax labour laws, reverse land reform, stop empowerment policies and forget environmental protection.
After this, the government is supposed to retreat to the national border and leave business alone at the temple of laissez faire — the same capricious goddess currently raining economic fire and brimstone on her worshipping believers in Europe and the US.
For Zimbabwe, it is a full-spectrum surrender of the state to the omnipotent emperor of market forces. This is part of the Washington Consensus. Foreign and domestic firms should be allowed to compete on equal terms.
These are replica demands made of Zimbabwe under the ongoing negotiations between Europe and ACP countries for Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) beneath the overarching regime of the World Trade Organisation.
EPAs hinge on three principles: reciprocity, rules of origin and most favoured nation status. On the surface, they are aimed at fair, reciprocal trade between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. Under the “rules of origin”, once imported goods enter a country, they can’t be discriminated against to protect local industry, and the “most favoured nation” principle means Zimbabwe does for Germany what it does for Brazil.
The reality of EPAs is, however, different and this is where I thought our labour movement would define its calling. It means if Zimbabwe signs a preferential trade deal on chickens with Brazil because we buy reasonably priced tractors from them, the terms must apply to all WTO members.
Biti says production capacity is at 7%. That means Zimbabwe’s industry cannot compete with Europe which already enjoys technological advances and economies of scale while Zimbabwe has been in reverse gear for the past 20 years and is saddled with obsolete equipment. How do you then raise industrial capacity utilisation to 60% by year-end under STERP when retail shops are flooded with cheaply produced merchandise from Europe? This reduces Zimbabwe to an import economy without generating the foreign currency to do so.
For industry and labour, this means de-industrialisation and loss of jobs on a massive scale. Employment rate is estimated at 10%. What market do you produce for? Why should an industrialist keep paying people who produce goods which he can’t sell? It is a travesty for anybody to pretend that Zimbabwe can achieve a sustainable economic turnaround under IMF terms.
In the blinding euphoria of reengagement with the “international community”, there are already calls for privatisation of public entities. Zimbabwe, it is claimed, would benefit.
Given the current state of most of the parastatals, how does one evaluate them for disposal? I am not even talking about ridiculously-low share prices of most listed firms. How many Zimbabweans have resources at their disposal to bid for any of the companies which the government might offer for sale? Not even the government has resources to purchase shares to warehouse for the poor. This is the equivalent of giving away the family silver for a meal.
An ill-executed disposal of national assets in the name of STERP would be worse than the land reform programme and will benefit only foreign bargain hunters.
There is need for caution and less haste to meet unrealistic election pledges or agenda-driven timelines as is already evident in the new constitutional debate. Deadlines have become of the essence, more important than content.
They say possession is 9/10 of the law. That is what the coalition government should be to Zimbabwe. This is the darkest hour before the dawn. This should be, to quote Winston Churchill at England’s darkest hour in 1940, be our “finest hour” in terms of national redefinition. Zimbabwe needs to speak loudly — it needs fair trade. What it doesn’t need are sanctions or IMF and World Bank enslavement.
To unthinking believers in the god of free markets, George Soros has a sobering caveat. He observed prophetically in a 1997 paper: “Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society.”
To those who expect a Utopian Zimbabwe before the lifting of sanctions, Soros warns from the experience of his own “open society” movements in Eastern Europe, set up to undermine the Soviet Union.
With the collapse of communist rule in 1989, says Soros, the “foundations (of civic society) shifted from a subversive task to a constructive one — not an easy thing to do when the believers in an open society are accustomed to subversive activity”.
I fear there are still too many forces against the coalition government crying “wolf!” everyday. Fortunately, some nations have begun to see through this wolf.
Labels: GEORGE SOROS, IMF, JORAM NYATHI, MDC, NEOLIBERALISM, SAP, WASHINGTON CONSENSUS
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