(HERALD ZW) China — The ‘Enemy’ the West Donates to us
November 30, 2013 Musah Gwaunza Nathaniel Manheru
Zimbabwe is set to export over US$1billion worth of tobacco, surpassing the US$800million exported last season.
Zimbabwe is set to export over US$1billion worth of tobacco, surpassing the US$800million exported last season.
Let’s punch in a few figures, even though I know figures don’t make good, easy read. We need them all the same, more so when one realises certain prejudices have tended to entrench and misguide debate on national issues, all in the absence of hard figures and facts. I will start with tobacco, our area of real breakthrough.
Earnings have hit US$1.3bn this marketing season, up from slightly over US$700million recorded same season last year. This staggering figure comes from the 160million kg of tobacco sold during the season, well above the 130million of previous season. From this haul, we are set to export over US$1billion worth of tobacco, surpassing the US$800million exported last season.
The downside is that we process and consume a mere three percent from this staggering harvest, arguably good for national health but decidedly bad for value addition, for our movement away from the raw material export regime which has been the bane of our economy and economies of most Third World countries. All these are TIMB figures.
When the Chinaman smokes
But there are some key figures emerging from our raw tobacco exports. China is and has been the country’s biggest tobacco buyer, been so for more than a decade now. It takes in 46,3 million kg tobacco worth almost US$360million.
Indeed the Chinese love their smoke, and
need our tobacco to ginger up theirs. What is more, China also gives the country the highest average price by volumes of US$7,76 per kg. Additionally, China funds the growing of a sizeable portion of this tobacco through contract farming.
There is another shocker. The next best buyer of our tobacco after China is Belgium, accounting for 22million kg, just below half of what China
buys. Belgium’s value to the industry is US$114 million, at an average price of US$5,15 per kg, which is about US$2.5 dollars shy of the Chinese average price.
Next is South Africa, coming a distant third from imports accounting for 17million kg of our tobacco worth 56million at an average price of US$3,36. I am told the highest price came from Japan which paid US$10.03 per kg, but bought a mere 600kg. Of course the Congo offered the worst price of US$0.29. It accounted for 76 800kg of our tobacco.
I need to clinch the points: China is the biggest and best buyer of our tobacco whose growing it also sponsors through contract farming.
The next best customer is Belgium, followed by South Africa. Let us keep that order in mind in this industry which now records almost 84 000 growers who, arguably, are also households. Compute the welfare implications of this and the broader land reform programme which made this possible.
Indeed when the China man smokes, Zimbabwe catches a livelihood.
When size of concern outstrips trade
I move on to Zimbabwe’s broad trade with the rest of the world. Trade between China and Zimbabwe grew 30 percent in the nine months to September, with Zimbabwe enjoying a surplus of US$279million, according to figures released by the Chinese Embassy here. Zimbabwe’s exports were up 44 percent and valued at US$597million, against Chinese imports of US$318million.
Of course the greater portion of Zimbabwe’s exports to China subsist in raw tobacco. Not diamonds as widely believed! Noteworthy is the fact that our imports from China are largely machinery.
China smokeThe Trade and Law Centre which captures trade statistics between Zimbabwe and the whole of the EU record a doubling of trade to US$888,12million in 2012, up from US$479million three years before in 2009. Of course sanctions made sure the trade between the bloc and Zimbabwe declined from an all-time high of US$1,2bn achieved in 2009, just before land reforms.
In fact the US$888,12million marks some decline from US$931,5 achieved in 2011, indicating some fluctuations but within a general upward trend in trade. Our exports are dominated by minerals but also include agricultural products.
Again, let me clinch the points. Let it be recorded that more of our finite mineral resources are going to the EU than to China, a point rarely acknowledged by our pseudo-European, African nationalist commentators!
Let it also be recorded that value of trade between Zimbabwe and China peeps that between Zimbabwe and the whole EU bloc. I hope we can give our policies and this notion of re-engagement with the West a sense of size and proportion. It makes little sense to go feverish about engaging people whose trade value to us is small and unpredictable, while bad mouthing those who are emerging as real trading partners. Let the size of our affection and concern be the size of our trade. Please!
The way to Brussels is via Brussels
How about boss America? Well, the US Department of Commerce says in the three quarters of this year, Zimbabwe has recorded a trade surplus of US$32million in its trade with America. Total trade between the two countries is worth US$106million.
The rises in the last three years have been marginal. Our exports to the Americans are predominantly minerals , then skins and a few agricultural commodities. Again, let our Eurocentric commentators take note — due note — of who is using up our finite mineral resources.
But a few more points are in order. The US$32 million trade surplus is a little shy from the US$20 million our companies have lost to the US by way of impounded receipts under the sanctions law, ZDERA. That makes America’s net cost to this economy huge, when read against the paltry US$32million surplus, so-called.
Our tobacco sales to Belgium mean more to us than our total trade with America. Surely it is much more than re-engaging the West; it is about quantifying the West’s value to us, and also forensically determining which polity in the whole western world is worth developing relations with.
Given Belgium’s role on our diamonds, Belgium is definitely worth cultivating, and Brussels is not reached through London or Washington.
China the investor
I move on to the area of investment. The Zimbabwe Investment Authority (ZIA) recently revealed that China emerges as a consistent top investor in Zimbabwe from 2010, with its investments contributing 72 percent, or US$670million from a total of US$930million worth of projects approved last year. By end of October, ZIA had approved US$374,8million worth of investments mainly in the areas of energy and mining.
Given Belgium’s role on our diamonds, Belgium is definitely worth cultivating, and Brussels is not reached through London or Washington.
Given Belgium’s role on our diamonds, Belgium is definitely worth cultivating, and Brussels is not reached through London or Washington.
In fact in 2012, China’s cumulative investments in the mining sector (gold, diamonds and chrome) totalled US$583million, or 62percent of the total US$688million FDI approvals for the entire Zimbabwean mining industry last year. China offers 40 tradeable minerals, all of them in Zimbabwe.
Agriculture amounted to US$18,6million of her investments, manufacturing US$35,5million, while US$23million went into services. Construction accounted for US$7,4million.
There is clear evidence of balanced Chinese appetite across sectors, with an emphasis on medium to large-scale projects.
When not looking West really helps
There is another surprise. Russia emerges second on investments, with approvals from it worth US$40,1million. Next came South Africa with US$39million, and UK with US$34million.
Next comes Mauritius with approvals worth US$25million. But of course these are figures on mere approvals. Real figures on investments which come into the country are far lower, albeit with China still dominating.
ZIA figures show China as having invested US$100million in the first five months of the year, followed by Malaysia with US$11million and South Africa with US$7million.
The key points to make is that China is targeting extractive industries which it is still developing. Presently it cannot explain who is chewing our finite mineral resources, although it could in due course. But its partnership approach to investments gives us an equal share in the exploitation of those resources.
More important, Zimbabwe’s healthy resource base means more Chinese FDI is more than likely. Secondly, Russia is to be watched as a growing investor in Zimbabwe, with Zimbabwe gaining more from associating and cultivating South Africa and Mauritius than the hoary UK, all along its traditional circumstantial investor and decade-long tormentor.
China does, the West’s endless excuses
Even more important, China is entering the infrastructural and energy areas, both of which are key enablers to economic recovery as envisaged under Zim Asset. A good pointer to China’s responsiveness to local beneficiation policies are the US$100million-worth of five chrome processing plants underway, one of which is now virtually complete, sited at Selous.
Contrast this with the Americans who have been here, exploiting our Chrome since UDI days when they refused to obey UN sanctions citing security concerns. Contrast this with British extractive companies which have been here for well over a century without beneficiating.
Contrast this with Zimplats which has been dropping all manner of arguments on why a platinum refinery is not yet possible. Early December shall witness a major Chinese investment in the cotton ginning sector.
Early December shall witness a major Chinese investment in the cotton ginning sector.
Early December shall witness a major Chinese investment in the cotton ginning sector.
About this, let me not give away too much, except to say that job creation is going to be massive, both directly and indirectly. These are the hard facts, formidably backed by statistics. I take it we are all agreed that real jobs and real value come from value addition, not raw exports.
I apologise for this part which is so heavily laced with figures. But we needed it for what follows.
Another Caliban, again
I now turn to the dominant economic discourse in this country, all in the light of the above hard facts. One article which dominated headlines this week read: “Analysts, citizens slam Look East policy.”
The article expresses serious reservations about “the conduct of Asian investors in Zimbabwe”, adding “The Chinese in particular have become notorious for their violation of the labour laws, which in some instances involves long working hours, poor salaries and lack of protective clothing as well as physical abuse of employees.
They have also come under fire for failing to create employment amid allegations they are bringing cheap labour from their country. The extremely poor quality of products they sell here has become a major concern among consumers. Of late, the Chinese have been implicated in illegal activities such as smuggling of minerals and ivory poaching.”
Some economist is imported into the story — one Innocent Makwiramiti — who says the Chinese have failed to fill the void left by Western investors and have become “more looters than investors”.
“They have failed to create employment compared to Western investors, who come with their technology and skills and impart them to the locals,” adds the so-called economist.
It is almost the story of Caliban, the conquered native for whom gaining a new master — not getting emancipated from all mastery — seems a major milestone. It is so sad.
Why are you here, Chinese?
Then John Robertson weighs in: “Their objective is to make money for China and we should not be encouraging that kind of investment.” Then ZCTU’s Nkiwane who calls them “worst employers”. After Nkiwane comes ordinary black Zimbabweans from “Harare’s Central Business District”, all brought in to prove that “public opinion was very much against the Chinese.”
In reality, the article whips an anti-Chinese sentiment almost to xenophobic proportions. “I have not yet seen anything that would justify the Chinese staying here. Despite their presence, we still have a high unemployment rate unlike during the days of Western investors.
“They are only here because of Zanu-PF — their mission is to make money and go,” says one Last Chinodya from Mufakose. As a representative voice for us blacks, Chinodya sounds militant and nationalistic, averse to any occupation of national space by the Chinese. But only by the Chinese. No regard is paid to the rampant persisting unemployment, only matched by many westerners who remain here. So what justifies their staying here? And it is as if the small Chinese have toppled our dear, employing whites! Again, so, so sad!
We don’t need to look east!
In case you thought the above article is a fluke, here is the Zimbabwe Independent, a finance and business weekly. Its editorial comment this week, titled “We need coherent, pragmatic leaders”, rails against a hidebound, ideological approach to national issues by the political leadership, all in an increasingly complex and interdependent world. In part the editorial comment reads: “Zimbabwe is “looking east”, while the East is looking West and on every other direction.
Deng, with his cat metaphor, and Kwame Nkrumah’s words, long debunked this misleading linear thinking. The truth is we don’t need such things as the “Look East” policy; we need progressive thinking and strategies of economic development.
Government can’t afford to think within the “Us versus Them” premise; their policies and decisions must be based on research, data, technocratic advice and citizens needs. We live in a world of complex matrices and perplexing choices, so we need to be more nuanced and discerning in our understanding of issues. Crude and crass thinking doesn’t help anymore. Zimbabwe needs a coherent and pragmatic leadership, not insular and myopic rulers, more so when clashes over resources have become a political lightning rod in many mineral-rich countries like ours.” Of course in many ways the editorial reads like Manheru last week, except for very different reasons.
On whose behalf are we angry?
I want to raise key questions in the continuing discussion on our national visioning task. What factual and statistical basis supports Zimbabwe’s incipient but clearly growing anti-Chinese discourse in its economic arguments and visioning escapades? The above statistics clearly attest to a growing role for Chinese capital at a time of sanctions-induced severe contraction on the part of western capital, whether actual or prospective. What supports this reflexive deriding of Chinese capital which has waded into our market in spite of greater politics, against all caution? Are we dealing with an economic argument or a political attitude?
On whose behalf are we angry with the Chinese? . . .Once asked Arthur Mutambara.
On whose behalf are we angry with the Chinese? . . .Once asked Arthur Mutambara.
If it’s a political attitude, whose is it, ours, congenitally ours, or induced and borrowed? The figures above show who has been moving Zimbabwe in its lean years. Who, in other words, has been stopping the country from collapsing. I would want to believe that is our real interest, collective national interest. So, in whose interest is this anti-Chinese sentiment which comes through us as raw anger, indigenous and very black? On whose behalf are we angry with the Chinese? It is a question Arthur Mutambara once raised, but we ducked responsibility for answering it by turning it into a rhetorical question.
Blaming China for western ruin
Or the obverse, before the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, western capital was dominant here, both before and after our Independence. By the mid nineties and certainly after the 2000 land reform programme, that capital deserted this market on political instructions and as part of building pressure against our taking back our land. The current industrial dysfunction has nothing to do with the Chinese. It has everything to do with western resistance to Zimbabwe’s post-independence nationalist policies before we looked East, everything to do with western economic sabotage to force the hand of local politics. Blair even wanted to follow that hostile action through with military action. Yet we don’t blame the offending West, don’t blame ourselves, our entitlement policies and the land we have recovered.
Accept that this is the price we pay for our freedom and heritage. No, we blame the Chinese, ostensibly for not replacing the westerners effectively after they have ruined our country, by creating many jobs for us and by transferring technology to us! Except the westerners took back their jobs and never injected new technology here, which is why this country beats the rest of the world as an industrial museum showcase for decrepit technologies. It is as if the West left in protest at the arrival of the Chinese, and not that the Chinese only coming in after the West has left in a huff.
Tony Blair even wanted to follow the West's hostile action against Zimbabwe through with military action. Yet we don’t blame the offending West, don’t blame ourselves, our entitlement policies and the land we have recovered.
Tony Blair even wanted to follow the West’s hostile action against Zimbabwe through with military action. Yet we don’t blame the offending West, don’t blame ourselves, our entitlement policies and the land we have recovered.
Don’t we sense we have a problem, ourselves as Zimbabweans and how we understand and appreciate our total circumstances? Surely it makes better sense to blame and attack the West for ruining our jobs and destroying our economy?
Reverse insularity
And then our understanding of rules for investors who come here. When we say Government must be pro-business and pro-investors, indeed berate it for being ideological in a pragmatic era, are we laying down ground rules for all investors regardless of colour, shape of face, height and geographical origin? Or are we hiding behind these seemingly broad, neutral rules to push through our pro-West ideological hide-boundedness whose flip side is the same ideological inflexibility we charge the political leadership with? When we say “we don’t need such things as the “Look East” policy”, are we not saying we only need “Look West” policy, and saying so with a sense of supreme flexibility, wisdom and fashionable bigotry? Are we not being “insular and myopic”, like our rulers against whom we reserve full rheum?
White, western and Rhodesian
Robertson says the objective of Chinese businesses “is to make money for China and we should not be encouraging that kind of investment.” Although I don’t know who “we” is, I still say fair enough. But what has been the objectives of British, American, German, Dutch, Swedish investments since 1890? For whom have they been making money? For the Chinese, for the Russians, for the Africans? Which investor in this country has made money for someone else other than themselves , their country and race?
Where are the national returns on the countless mining dumps, industrial chimneys, broken lives and livelihoods that are ours to count and endure as the once colonised? Robertson confuses me. And when his fellow Rhodesian – Eddie Cross – tells Parliament only this week that: “There is no investor in the world that is going to put a dollar on the table and have fifty-one cents taken by ZANU-PF,” might such a rule of thumb on investor handling encompass, accommodate the Chinese? Where would that leave Robertson and is arguments? And Cross makes remarks that yield an amusing yet far-reaching double-meaning: “We cannot expect any substantial new investment in Zimbabwe until we are able to guarantee
Cecil John Rhodes . . .The pioneer of colonialism. What has been the objectives of British, American, German, Dutch, Swedish investments since 1890 as they scrambled for Zimbabwe?
those investors power”! Could we concede such power to all investors, including the Chinese? Or an investor is more than he who brings in capital? He must be white, western or Rhodesian? What would be our stake as Africans in such a racialised definition?
Selective xenophobia
One senses not just double standards, but a deep-seated racism which we have met sometime in our history, but which we have never fully grasped by way of its full scope in history, its extraordinary adaptability in post-colonial, global times. What is worse, we have internalised it. Historically, racism developed in circumstances of colonial invasion, occupation and plunder. Whilst its core tenets were the same, it adapted itself to circumstances of subject nations and peoples against whom it was practised. We Africans mistakenly think we are the only victims of racism. No, we aren’t.
The Chinese, the Indians and the Latinos were. What is not known by many in Zimbabwe is that just as we blacks were profiled as indolent, infantile and lewd, the Chinese were characterised as sly, deceitful and given to stealing, so mischaracterised by the same British who dehumanised us here. Before British eyes, we were the same subjects who had to be redeemed from damnation. How different is this image from the dummy Robertson and his ilk are selling us today, in spite of China’s powerful role in global affairs? Don’t we see the incongruity of a black mouth spouting the same dehumanising epithets as was reserved for a fellow oppressed Chinese by the British in colonial heyday?
If China is so deceitful and so bad for nations, why is the West looking and courting East, something apparently unknown to the Zimbabwe Independent? But it is also funny that we black Zimbabweans are incited to hate the Chinese who gave us guns and the technology of liberation yesterday, give us technology and capital for development today, while loving uxoriously the very westerners who have crafted and imposed hurtful sanctions that daily ravage our lives and destroy our collective livelihoods. Or that we who have suffered more than 400 000 white intruders and occupiers here for well over a century, suddenly invent xenophobia against a handful of Chinese people who are here to do business with us, indeed have only been here less than a decade ago. Why are we taught to hate people with whom we have a shared colonial history, taught to hate each other by our common enemy?
Bearded infantiles
It helps to recall that one enduring ruse of imperialism is turn its real victims into its “freed” beneficiaries from another and even imaginary evil power invented solely to burnish its own otherwise glaring misdeeds and evil acts. So in 1890 the Shonas were not invaded, conquered, occupied and enslaved; they were saved from a marauding despot called Lobengula. So goes the colonial lore. Similarly, today Zimbabweans have to fear and be saved from the Chinese who loot their diamonds and “invest only for China”, and not from the British who have looted their country, independence, resources and personality since 1890.
Not saved from the same British who seek the old colonial mastery. I thought we had come of age, grown older than child-men and child-women of yore, bearded infantiles who are given new, diversionary scapegoats by their real enemies. That way we forget that China became a powerhouse not by smoking British opium, not by aping British ways, but by skillfully riding the hyena of capitalism, taming it until it accepted to have Chinese characteristics. I have no problem in Zimbabweans not wanting to lose their finite resources to the Chinese; what bothers me is their readiness to lose them to the West. And feeling most holy and righteous about it. Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: CHINA, JOHN ROBERTSON, NATHANIEL MANHERU, NEOLIBERALISM, TOBACCO
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(HERALD ZW) China — The ‘Enemy’ the West Donates to us
November 30, 2013 Musah Gwaunza Nathaniel Manheru
Zimbabwe is set to export over US$1billion worth of tobacco, surpassing the US$800million exported last season.
Let’s punch in a few figures, even though I know figures don’t make good, easy read. We need them all the same, more so when one realises certain prejudices have tended to entrench and misguide debate on national issues, all in the absence of hard figures and facts. I will start with tobacco, our area of real breakthrough.
Earnings have hit US$1.3bn this marketing season, up from slightly over US$700million recorded same season last year. This staggering figure comes from the 160million kg of tobacco sold during the season, well above the 130million of previous season. From this haul, we are set to export over US$1billion worth of tobacco, surpassing the US$800million exported last season.
The downside is that we process and consume a mere three percent from this staggering harvest, arguably good for national health but decidedly bad for value addition, for our movement away from the raw material export regime which has been the bane of our economy and economies of most Third World countries. All these are TIMB figures.
When the Chinaman smokes
But there are some key figures emerging from our raw tobacco exports. China is and has been the country’s biggest tobacco buyer, been so for more than a decade now. It takes in 46,3 million kg tobacco worth almost US$360million.
Indeed the Chinese love their smoke, and need our tobacco to ginger up theirs. What is more, China also gives the country the highest average price by volumes of US$7,76 per kg. Additionally, China funds the growing of a sizeable portion of this tobacco through contract farming.
There is another shocker. The next best buyer of our tobacco after China is Belgium, accounting for 22million kg, just below half of what China buys. Belgium’s value to the industry is US$114 million, at an average price of US$5,15 per kg, which is about US$2.5 dollars shy of the Chinese average price.
Next is South Africa, coming a distant third from imports accounting for 17million kg of our tobacco worth 56million at an average price of US$3,36. I am told the highest price came from Japan which paid US$10.03 per kg, but bought a mere 600kg. Of course the Congo offered the worst price of US$0.29. It accounted for 76 800kg of our tobacco.
I need to clinch the points: China is the biggest and best buyer of our tobacco whose growing it also sponsors through contract farming.
The next best customer is Belgium, followed by South Africa. Let us keep that order in mind in this industry which now records almost 84 000 growers who, arguably, are also households. Compute the welfare implications of this and the broader land reform programme which made this possible.
Indeed when the China man smokes, Zimbabwe catches a livelihood.
When size of concern outstrips trade
I move on to Zimbabwe’s broad trade with the rest of the world. Trade between China and Zimbabwe grew 30 percent in the nine months to September, with Zimbabwe enjoying a surplus of US$279million, according to figures released by the Chinese Embassy here. Zimbabwe’s exports were up 44 percent and valued at US$597million, against Chinese imports of US$318million.
Of course the greater portion of Zimbabwe’s exports to China subsist in raw tobacco. Not diamonds as widely believed! Noteworthy is the fact that our imports from China are largely machinery.
China smokeThe Trade and Law Centre which captures trade statistics between Zimbabwe and the whole of the EU record a doubling of trade to US$888,12million in 2012, up from US$479million three years before in 2009. Of course sanctions made sure the trade between the bloc and Zimbabwe declined from an all-time high of US$1,2bn achieved in 2009, just before land reforms.
In fact the US$888,12million marks some decline from US$931,5 achieved in 2011, indicating some fluctuations but within a general upward trend in trade. Our exports are dominated by minerals but also include agricultural products.
Again, let me clinch the points. Let it be recorded that more of our finite mineral resources are going to the EU than to China, a point rarely acknowledged by our pseudo-European, African nationalist commentators!
Let it also be recorded that value of trade between Zimbabwe and China peeps that between Zimbabwe and the whole EU bloc. I hope we can give our policies and this notion of re-engagement with the West a sense of size and proportion. It makes little sense to go feverish about engaging people whose trade value to us is small and unpredictable, while bad mouthing those who are emerging as real trading partners. Let the size of our affection and concern be the size of our trade. Please!
The way to Brussels is via Brussels
How about boss America? Well, the US Department of Commerce says in the three quarters of this year, Zimbabwe has recorded a trade surplus of US$32million in its trade with America. Total trade between the two countries is worth US$106million.
The rises in the last three years have been marginal. Our exports to the Americans are predominantly minerals , then skins and a few agricultural commodities. Again, let our Eurocentric commentators take note — due note — of who is using up our finite mineral resources.
But a few more points are in order. The US$32 million trade surplus is a little shy from the US$20 million our companies have lost to the US by way of impounded receipts under the sanctions law, ZDERA. That makes America’s net cost to this economy huge, when read against the paltry US$32million surplus, so-called.
Our tobacco sales to Belgium mean more to us than our total trade with America. Surely it is much more than re-engaging the West; it is about quantifying the West’s value to us, and also forensically determining which polity in the whole western world is worth developing relations with.
Given Belgium’s role on our diamonds, Belgium is definitely worth cultivating, and Brussels is not reached through London or Washington.
China the investor
I move on to the area of investment. The Zimbabwe Investment Authority (ZIA) recently revealed that China emerges as a consistent top investor in Zimbabwe from 2010, with its investments contributing 72 percent, or US$670million from a total of US$930million worth of projects approved last year. By end of October, ZIA had approved US$374,8million worth of investments mainly in the areas of energy and mining.
Given Belgium’s role on our diamonds, Belgium is definitely worth cultivating, and Brussels is not reached through London or Washington.
In fact in 2012, China’s cumulative investments in the mining sector (gold, diamonds and chrome) totalled US$583million, or 62percent of the total US$688million FDI approvals for the entire Zimbabwean mining industry last year. China offers 40 tradeable minerals, all of them in Zimbabwe.
Agriculture amounted to US$18,6million of her investments, manufacturing US$35,5million, while US$23million went into services. Construction accounted for US$7,4million.
There is clear evidence of balanced Chinese appetite across sectors, with an emphasis on medium to large-scale projects.
When not looking West really helps
There is another surprise. Russia emerges second on investments, with approvals from it worth US$40,1million. Next came South Africa with US$39million, and UK with US$34million.
Next comes Mauritius with approvals worth US$25million. But of course these are figures on mere approvals. Real figures on investments which come into the country are far lower, albeit with China still dominating.
ZIA figures show China as having invested US$100million in the first five months of the year, followed by Malaysia with US$11million and South Africa with US$7million.
The key points to make is that China is targeting extractive industries which it is still developing. Presently it cannot explain who is chewing our finite mineral resources, although it could in due course. But its partnership approach to investments gives us an equal share in the exploitation of those resources.
More important, Zimbabwe’s healthy resource base means more Chinese FDI is more than likely. Secondly, Russia is to be watched as a growing investor in Zimbabwe, with Zimbabwe gaining more from associating and cultivating South Africa and Mauritius than the hoary UK, all along its traditional circumstantial investor and decade-long tormentor.
China does, the West’s endless excuses
Even more important, China is entering the infrastructural and energy areas, both of which are key enablers to economic recovery as envisaged under Zim Asset. A good pointer to China’s responsiveness to local beneficiation policies are the US$100million-worth of five chrome processing plants underway, one of which is now virtually complete, sited at Selous.
Contrast this with the Americans who have been here, exploiting our Chrome since UDI days when they refused to obey UN sanctions citing security concerns. Contrast this with British extractive companies which have been here for well over a century without beneficiating.
Contrast this with Zimplats which has been dropping all manner of arguments on why a platinum refinery is not yet possible. Early December shall witness a major Chinese investment in the cotton ginning sector.
Early December shall witness a major Chinese investment in the cotton ginning sector.
About this, let me not give away too much, except to say that job creation is going to be massive, both directly and indirectly. These are the hard facts, formidably backed by statistics. I take it we are all agreed that real jobs and real value come from value addition, not raw exports.
I apologise for this part which is so heavily laced with figures. But we needed it for what follows.
Another Caliban, again
I now turn to the dominant economic discourse in this country, all in the light of the above hard facts. One article which dominated headlines this week read: “Analysts, citizens slam Look East policy.”
The article expresses serious reservations about “the conduct of Asian investors in Zimbabwe”, adding “The Chinese in particular have become notorious for their violation of the labour laws, which in some instances involves long working hours, poor salaries and lack of protective clothing as well as physical abuse of employees.
They have also come under fire for failing to create employment amid allegations they are bringing cheap labour from their country. The extremely poor quality of products they sell here has become a major concern among consumers. Of late, the Chinese have been implicated in illegal activities such as smuggling of minerals and ivory poaching.”
Some economist is imported into the story — one Innocent Makwiramiti — who says the Chinese have failed to fill the void left by Western investors and have become “more looters than investors”.
“They have failed to create employment compared to Western investors, who come with their technology and skills and impart them to the locals,” adds the so-called economist.
It is almost the story of Caliban, the conquered native for whom gaining a new master — not getting emancipated from all mastery — seems a major milestone. It is so sad.
Why are you here, Chinese?
Then John Robertson weighs in: “Their objective is to make money for China and we should not be encouraging that kind of investment.” Then ZCTU’s Nkiwane who calls them “worst employers”. After Nkiwane comes ordinary black Zimbabweans from “Harare’s Central Business District”, all brought in to prove that “public opinion was very much against the Chinese.”
In reality, the article whips an anti-Chinese sentiment almost to xenophobic proportions. “I have not yet seen anything that would justify the Chinese staying here. Despite their presence, we still have a high unemployment rate unlike during the days of Western investors.
“They are only here because of Zanu-PF — their mission is to make money and go,” says one Last Chinodya from Mufakose. As a representative voice for us blacks, Chinodya sounds militant and nationalistic, averse to any occupation of national space by the Chinese. But only by the Chinese. No regard is paid to the rampant persisting unemployment, only matched by many westerners who remain here. So what justifies their staying here? And it is as if the small Chinese have toppled our dear, employing whites! Again, so, so sad!
We don’t need to look east!
In case you thought the above article is a fluke, here is the Zimbabwe Independent, a finance and business weekly. Its editorial comment this week, titled “We need coherent, pragmatic leaders”, rails against a hidebound, ideological approach to national issues by the political leadership, all in an increasingly complex and interdependent world. In part the editorial comment reads: “Zimbabwe is “looking east”, while the East is looking West and on every other direction.
Deng, with his cat metaphor, and Kwame Nkrumah’s words, long debunked this misleading linear thinking. The truth is we don’t need such things as the “Look East” policy; we need progressive thinking and strategies of economic development.
Government can’t afford to think within the “Us versus Them” premise; their policies and decisions must be based on research, data, technocratic advice and citizens needs. We live in a world of complex matrices and perplexing choices, so we need to be more nuanced and discerning in our understanding of issues. Crude and crass thinking doesn’t help anymore. Zimbabwe needs a coherent and pragmatic leadership, not insular and myopic rulers, more so when clashes over resources have become a political lightning rod in many mineral-rich countries like ours.” Of course in many ways the editorial reads like Manheru last week, except for very different reasons.
On whose behalf are we angry?
I want to raise key questions in the continuing discussion on our national visioning task. What factual and statistical basis supports Zimbabwe’s incipient but clearly growing anti-Chinese discourse in its economic arguments and visioning escapades? The above statistics clearly attest to a growing role for Chinese capital at a time of sanctions-induced severe contraction on the part of western capital, whether actual or prospective. What supports this reflexive deriding of Chinese capital which has waded into our market in spite of greater politics, against all caution? Are we dealing with an economic argument or a political attitude?
On whose behalf are we angry with the Chinese? . . .Once asked Arthur Mutambara.
If it’s a political attitude, whose is it, ours, congenitally ours, or induced and borrowed? The figures above show who has been moving Zimbabwe in its lean years. Who, in other words, has been stopping the country from collapsing. I would want to believe that is our real interest, collective national interest. So, in whose interest is this anti-Chinese sentiment which comes through us as raw anger, indigenous and very black? On whose behalf are we angry with the Chinese? It is a question Arthur Mutambara once raised, but we ducked responsibility for answering it by turning it into a rhetorical question.
Blaming China for western ruin
Or the obverse, before the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, western capital was dominant here, both before and after our Independence. By the mid nineties and certainly after the 2000 land reform programme, that capital deserted this market on political instructions and as part of building pressure against our taking back our land. The current industrial dysfunction has nothing to do with the Chinese. It has everything to do with western resistance to Zimbabwe’s post-independence nationalist policies before we looked East, everything to do with western economic sabotage to force the hand of local politics. Blair even wanted to follow that hostile action through with military action. Yet we don’t blame the offending West, don’t blame ourselves, our entitlement policies and the land we have recovered.
Accept that this is the price we pay for our freedom and heritage. No, we blame the Chinese, ostensibly for not replacing the westerners effectively after they have ruined our country, by creating many jobs for us and by transferring technology to us! Except the westerners took back their jobs and never injected new technology here, which is why this country beats the rest of the world as an industrial museum showcase for decrepit technologies. It is as if the West left in protest at the arrival of the Chinese, and not that the Chinese only coming in after the West has left in a huff.
Tony Blair even wanted to follow the West's hostile action against Zimbabwe through with military action. Yet we don’t blame the offending West, don’t blame ourselves, our entitlement policies and the land we have recovered.
Tony Blair even wanted to follow the West’s hostile action against Zimbabwe through with military action. Yet we don’t blame the offending West, don’t blame ourselves, our entitlement policies and the land we have recovered.
Don’t we sense we have a problem, ourselves as Zimbabweans and how we understand and appreciate our total circumstances? Surely it makes better sense to blame and attack the West for ruining our jobs and destroying our economy?
Reverse insularity
And then our understanding of rules for investors who come here. When we say Government must be pro-business and pro-investors, indeed berate it for being ideological in a pragmatic era, are we laying down ground rules for all investors regardless of colour, shape of face, height and geographical origin? Or are we hiding behind these seemingly broad, neutral rules to push through our pro-West ideological hide-boundedness whose flip side is the same ideological inflexibility we charge the political leadership with? When we say “we don’t need such things as the “Look East” policy”, are we not saying we only need “Look West” policy, and saying so with a sense of supreme flexibility, wisdom and fashionable bigotry? Are we not being “insular and myopic”, like our rulers against whom we reserve full rheum?
White, western and Rhodesian
Robertson says the objective of Chinese businesses “is to make money for China and we should not be encouraging that kind of investment.” Although I don’t know who “we” is, I still say fair enough. But what has been the objectives of British, American, German, Dutch, Swedish investments since 1890? For whom have they been making money? For the Chinese, for the Russians, for the Africans? Which investor in this country has made money for someone else other than themselves , their country and race?
Where are the national returns on the countless mining dumps, industrial chimneys, broken lives and livelihoods that are ours to count and endure as the once colonised? Robertson confuses me. And when his fellow Rhodesian – Eddie Cross – tells Parliament only this week that: “There is no investor in the world that is going to put a dollar on the table and have fifty-one cents taken by ZANU-PF,” might such a rule of thumb on investor handling encompass, accommodate the Chinese? Where would that leave Robertson and is arguments? And Cross makes remarks that yield an amusing yet far-reaching double-meaning: “We cannot expect any substantial new investment in Zimbabwe until we are able to guarantee
Cecil John Rhodes . . .The pioneer of colonialism. What has been the objectives of British, American, German, Dutch, Swedish investments since 1890 as they scrambled for Zimbabwe?
Cecil John Rhodes . . .The pioneer of colonialism. What has been the objectives of British, American, German, Dutch, Swedish investments since 1890 as they scrambled for Zimbabwe?
those investors power”! Could we concede such power to all investors, including the Chinese? Or an investor is more than he who brings in capital? He must be white, western or Rhodesian? What would be our stake as Africans in such a racialised definition?
Selective xenophobia
One senses not just double standards, but a deep-seated racism which we have met sometime in our history, but which we have never fully grasped by way of its full scope in history, its extraordinary adaptability in post-colonial, global times. What is worse, we have internalised it. Historically, racism developed in circumstances of colonial invasion, occupation and plunder. Whilst its core tenets were the same, it adapted itself to circumstances of subject nations and peoples against whom it was practised. We Africans mistakenly think we are the only victims of racism. No, we aren’t.
The Chinese, the Indians and the Latinos were. What is not known by many in Zimbabwe is that just as we blacks were profiled as indolent, infantile and lewd, the Chinese were characterised as sly, deceitful and given to stealing, so mischaracterised by the same British who dehumanised us here. Before British eyes, we were the same subjects who had to be redeemed from damnation. How different is this image from the dummy Robertson and his ilk are selling us today, in spite of China’s powerful role in global affairs? Don’t we see the incongruity of a black mouth spouting the same dehumanising epithets as was reserved for a fellow oppressed Chinese by the British in colonial heyday?
If China is so deceitful and so bad for nations, why is the West looking and courting East, something apparently unknown to the Zimbabwe Independent? But it is also funny that we black Zimbabweans are incited to hate the Chinese who gave us guns and the technology of liberation yesterday, give us technology and capital for development today, while loving uxoriously the very westerners who have crafted and imposed hurtful sanctions that daily ravage our lives and destroy our collective livelihoods. Or that we who have suffered more than 400 000 white intruders and occupiers here for well over a century, suddenly invent xenophobia against a handful of Chinese people who are here to do business with us, indeed have only been here less than a decade ago. Why are we taught to hate people with whom we have a shared colonial history, taught to hate each other by our common enemy?
Bearded infantiles
It helps to recall that one enduring ruse of imperialism is turn its real victims into its “freed” beneficiaries from another and even imaginary evil power invented solely to burnish its own otherwise glaring misdeeds and evil acts. So in 1890 the Shonas were not invaded, conquered, occupied and enslaved; they were saved from a marauding despot called Lobengula. So goes the colonial lore. Similarly, today Zimbabweans have to fear and be saved from the Chinese who loot their diamonds and “invest only for China”, and not from the British who have looted their country, independence, resources and personality since 1890.
Not saved from the same British who seek the old colonial mastery. I thought we had come of age, grown older than child-men and child-women of yore, bearded infantiles who are given new, diversionary scapegoats by their real enemies. That way we forget that China became a powerhouse not by smoking British opium, not by aping British ways, but by skillfully riding the hyena of capitalism, taming it until it accepted to have Chinese characteristics. I have no problem in Zimbabweans not wanting to lose their finite resources to the Chinese; what bothers me is their readiness to lose them to the West. And feeling most holy and righteous about it. Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: CHINA, CHINESE, NATHANIEL MANHERU, SANCTIONS, TOBACCO
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(HERALD ZW) Zimbabwe: Myth-making and Myth-eating
December 7, 2013
Nathaniel Manheru
"David Cameron at Heathrow Airport with some of the delegation flying with him to China. – The Guardian"
My deep condolences to the Mandela family and South Africa on the passing on of Madiba. May his soul finally rest in eternal peace.
West call, Chinese curseZimbabwe has received many myths, repeated them, expanded them, fed on them, munched them to specter-thinness. Of course her hope was for an all-weather nourishment. For that very reason, Zimbabweans have been unable to clearly envision, unable to lay their hands firmly on reality.
Last week I gave you a slice of such myth-receiving, myth-making, myth-expansion and myth-eating. And the rich slice was that the West is Zimbabwe’s call, while China is Zimbabwe’s curse. Zimbabwe’s salvation would come from the West, so the myth goes. Native voices were conscripted to validate that myth in a chorus, a myth which is white to the pith. And to even elaborate on it and give it profound colour.
Best with received thoughts
The white boss wants us to remain tethered to him forever. He invents gorgons to frighten us from venturing beyond the oppressive circle he has enchanted, a circle that we can’t break. We wonder round and round, unable to break that spell of servitude. And when the white oppressor tells us how grateful we should be to be in that circle, how well we must behave as his slaves, we quickly pick up the lethal exhortation, elaborate on it, bedeck it with formidable statistics in order to make it unassailable, to make it perfect and enduring enough to blight our own children, their scions and many black generations to come.
We are always at our best with a received thought – a mis-thought! And it fires us into blind raillery: against ourselves, against our own, against our futures. Cry the accursed race.
Best across the Crocodile river
Last week’s statistically-backed argument attempted to perforate that blighting myth. It is yet to be thoughtfully challenged. Not the crass challenge it got from Muckraker, that white centurion by the gates of the myth-making chamber where vile thoughts are cooked. Dear reader, what you must grasp is that once imperialism loses state power, loses instruments of coercion, loses even the ballot, its recourse is mental games that allow it to retain its hegemony.
This is why any attempts at challenging that remaining zone of vestigial hegemony invites vicious rebuke. Such as I got from Muckraker for merely stating the obvious. We are all supposed to be unthinking when the white man hands down a nugget thought! Muckraker takes himself for the best editor north of the Crocodile River, regards himself the best authority and guardian of Rhodesian history.
Yet in spite of this claimed enormous knowledge and skills, he misses an elementary distinction: the difference between settlers and intruders. By giving us a smaller figure meant to capture white settlers who blighted our land by their permanent residence, he thinks he makes lighter the burden of oppression that the black Zimbabwean suffered for close on to a century, still suffers in politically post-colonial, economically colonial Zimbabwe.
The one who bear scars
But I am black and oppressed. I know the tongs of oppression that scarred my skin, the hard forced labor that caroused my hands, that gave me lasting scars. All that came from white oppressors who came into my life, into my country, whether or not they stayed temporarily or stayed to their grave or to now.
Only a fellow white man would know and count those who came to leave, distinguishing them from those who came and stayed. For he was the one to lose a friend, a neighbour, or gain either or both. What I saw with black-red eyes was an endless chain of white oppressors coming in, coming to me, terror in hand.
None ever left, many made way to each other as they took turns to abuse me. By way of their oppression, there was no distinction. And hey Mister Muckraker, the one who counts accurately is the one who is mounted, indeed the one who bear and suffers the harsh cut. Since Muckraker is an historian — and only last week I was reading a piece of research he published in one of the Rhodesian journals in the 1970s – let him tell us where exactly Rhodes’ men – his symbolic forebears — slaughtered Lobengula, indeed where they hid the poor King’s abused remains.
I am sure that is a more useful start to the story of white brutality and oppression here. Not this myth about two hundred thousand plus white settlers here. Or about King Lobengula committing suicide in his northward flight. Not this diversionary journey to “Tibet” as if we need to go that far to learn oppression, we who carry its scars. Why is he not talking about Wales, Scotland, Gibraltar and Malvinas?
Only facing East
But grant him ground. He says: “When Zimbabweans talk of zhingzhong, that is not something invented by whites”. He is right, dead right and we should listen to him, understand him and his kind. As I write, Cameron is just back from a long trip to China. The published image on that visit is a massive Virgin Airbus, overflowing with British businessmen who were part of Cameron’s delegation.
He led a massive, all-manner British delegation of 131, all to help him plead for Chinese investments, Chinese money. Tactfully, the trip was framed as one seeking to persuade China to do business with Europe. In reality, the trip was for needy Britain seeking to escape the riotous fate of Spain, made more likely each day that passes.
The major economies of Europe are actually not pleased with him for inviting the dragon into the EU. But, as the editor of the British Guardian noted, there was something of mendicant in the trip! I am sure for Muckraker, Cameron did not “look East”. He merely “faced East”, with “zhingzhong” being a place he visited, never a description of Chinese wares, or their quality.
Incidentally, this is Cameron’s second visit to China.
Only an old European country
Cameron met a new China, a China way above its weak, dynastic past. Much soberer, stronger, certainly richer, this new China would no longer be coerced into taking opium by British gunboats. Not even into losing its Tibet. Or its politics. Not in a hurry to forgive Cameroon for an impulsive and populist tete-a-tete with the hugely-symbolic-in-the-West-but-politically-empty-at-home Dalai Lama, China, through one of its authoritative papers, foully reminded Cameron that Britain was nothing more than an historical relic in Chinese eyes.
Part of the editorial ran: “The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese. It is just an old European country apt for travel and study. This has gradually become the habitual thought of the Chinese people.” I am sure that hurt, wounded British pride, pierces Muckraker’s empire ego, leaving gushing scarlet.
It helps for Britain and all her children, whether at home and abroad, to know that this is in fact more than a Chinese view. The editorial summarised the world’s view of Britain, including that of her previous colonial subjects who now know that beneath the feathery horn of the proverbial owl is no gore!
When the wheel has turned
More hurt came. Among the key investments Britain hoped to attract from China was for its rail system, for a long time ailing, directionless since privatisation. History records that China’s maiden attempt at rail was done by the British, way way back in 1876, the age when Britain once mattered. No trains ever ran on that track.
Only the second attempt succeeded, prospered. It came in 1881, all under the supervision of an English engineer, Claude William Kinder. And the locomotives that followed the track puffed greater glory to Robert Stephenson, a British inventor! Today the land of Stephenson and Kinder seeks Chinese intervention for Britain to have fast moving trains.
Britain, the train-master, is now by the rail station, waiting, desperate to catch a lift from a Chinese bullet train. Not a very kind fate, if you ask me. And yes Mr Editor of the Guardian, the wheel has indeed turned!
Mad pig disease
As a write, reports are now taking stock of Cameron’s visit. One of his major breakthroughs during that visit reportedly is a £45million business proposal by which Great Britain will export hog semen and trotters of pigs that no longer grunt, export all that to China. Grunt, grunt, gruuuuunt!
At least it is far, far better than opium. One hopes China is not importing mad cow, sorry mad pig, disease. And receiving trotters that kill, not arouse Chinese desire. Real food for thought if you ask me.
Myth of junkets
But yes, all this is for Zimbabweans to note. Muckraker is right to say it is not whites who speak of zhingzhong. They cannot, for they are busy courting China, flooding its markets for succour. Those who speak of zhingzhong are “Zimbabweans” — you and me at the instigation of whites already aboard a plane to Beijing!
Wake up Zimbabwe, shake off the myth and then understand why it is in the interest of the West and Rhodesians to incite you against China, to cultivate an anti-Chinese sentiment designed to avert any strengthening partnership between us. Surely a whole old imperial country does not cart itself to China of junkets? This is the first myth we need to cast off.
The bogey of indigenisation
Tapiwa Nyandoro always writes quite boldly. His latest instalment advises the Zimbabwe Government to “suspend indefinitely its indigenisation policy and replace it with the “thin capitalization rule” to raise tax and broaden the tax base.” I don’t know what “thin capitalisation rule” means, or says.
I hope he does, which leaves one wondering why such a crucial part of his recommendation is not digested, but shoved down the reader so indigestibly. Whatever he means by that phrase, his recommendation betrays his image of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans: we are a good-for-nothing-else-but-taxation bunch.
We must build our nation on taxes. Our role and fortunes must be viewed in terms of taxes, we the tax-collecting Nation. But beyond all this, there is a clear thesis to say indigenisation policy is the real problem foreign direct investment is shunning us, skirting around our country.
When capital proves less timid
Nyandoro throws in very succulent figures: $1,35 trillion as value of global FDI in 2012. Out of this $50billion went to Africa, led by Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa, DRC and Ghana. Zimbabwe — our Zimbabwe — bagged a paltry $400million out of all that. Poor Zimbabwe, opines Nyandoro, plaintively advising this wretch of a country to please “prioritize FDI-friendly policy measures for economic development”.
I said we are notorious for receiving myths, regurgitating them after munching them. Here is a case of square figures being forced into round conclusions. The countries that grabbed much of the $50bn that came to Africa are no different, no better, no more righteous than poor Zimbabwe.
Quite the contrary, they leave one wondering why timid FDI regained boldness to venture into them. Three of them have conflicts. Or rumours of them. Two are quiet but facing social threats arising from acute inequities, acute marginalisation of their indigenes. Some of these social conflicts have forebodingly spilled blood.
But all are natural-resource rich, covering a whole gamut of mineral resources including that dark, dank liquid, oil. Or its more refined, airy twin — natural gas. All this apart from a whole range of minerals they richly have. Is that not the key consideration, which by the way also account for the destination of the paltry $400million which came our way in spite of sanctions and our odious indigenisation and land policies?
They still put in $400million, in spite of our policies which Nyandoro says block investments. He thinks we should not indigenise as that amounts to seeking more instead of being content to collect tax, thinly collect tax.
Where are the billions from minerals?
I just hope Nyandoro read a business story in yesterday’s Herald. I will summarise it for him in case he didn’t. Headlined “Mining firms bank 3pc of revenue”, the story revealed that a mere 3 percent out of about $2billion which foreign mining firms get from our resources find its way into our banks!
The rest goes overseas. Meanwhile the country reels from illiquidity, blaming itself, its politics, its politicians and its policies for this bad situation. It does worse. It hopes from continent to continent to seek more debts, including from those economies which receive fabulous receipts from our minerals.
Frigidly, these economies will not give us anything, not even loans from money that came from us! I really wish vaChidhakwa could share with the Nation what came to us by way of royalties and taxes from the same mining sector this year, against what miners took away, all read against our requirements “for economic development” which Nyandoro so sorely wishes us.
That way the second, dual faced myth of taxation versus indigenisation, could, hopefully, get finally exploded.
Beggaring a noble policy
I have sat in many investment-related meetings, here and abroad. To the meeting, the message coming through is that no one, none in this whole world, has any problems with the policy of indigenisation as we visualise it here. None at all. Quite the contrary, they find our policy quite mild-mannered, weakly and often corruptly implemented.
What is more, all that has been done since its inception has been words, voluminous words remarkably matched by absolutely no action on the ground. Spare me this nonsense about community share ownership. That is not indigenisation. It is only social responsibility which is an image-making exercise for serious corporates.
We have just made that corporate responsibility compulsory, poorly so too! Spare me this nonsense about chasing little African and Chinese retail outlet owners from messy Kaguvi road, before going to bed contentedly and heroically saying to our wives, we have indigenised! Bull . . . silly.
Far from doing anything for anyone, such stupid calls simply leave a noble policy in tatters, its proponents not just morally bankrupted, but sounding ridiculously mean and xenophobic. It’s coming across as a poor man’s desperate hard asset grabbing, sinking a big sharp dagger in the cornered back of Pan Africanism, the very spirit and impulse which has saved us and won us African support.
Why cheapen, beggar a noble policy, while looking away from where real wealth is being made and lost?
Speaking too much, at cross purposes
Botswana has harder policies on indigenisation than we do. Yet it gains fabulous FDI. Nigeria is beginning to give us man and women of real means, native investors who are beginning to go abroad, Strive-like. In relative terms, Nigeria calls for partnerships between locals and investors simply because it now has a dashing middle class.
Here the middle class is Government, for everyone else is either a manager or worse, a fawning fraud seeking to happen. What investors and investing nations have been complaining about is our lack of clarity and consistency on indigenisation, the lack of clarity on our policy on indigenisation.
We speak too much, speak at cross purposes. What is worse, we exploit an honourable, well-grounded and quite accepted and acceptable policy to feed our venality. And we seek to ingratiate ourselves with the white investor, we take a dig at that policy so as to look better, wiser, more reasonable than bad Africans.
All that, not indigenisation, has been the bane. Once we speak with one voice resolutely, once we make a real clear policy out of our aspiration to indigenise, the whole world will engage us, engage us on our terms. See what is beginning to happen in the chrome industry, once Government made it clear raw chrome exportation would attract punishing taxes.
Of course Biti hoped to spite the Chinese, upset them to poison their relations with Zanu-PF. But he has advanced Zimbabwe’s interests like he never intended. Many more myths abound and encrust us. I hope I can lay them bare for you so we begin to tackle the issue of our vision for the future.
Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: NATHANIEL MANHERU, NELSON MANDELA
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(HERALD ZW) Zimbabwe: Myth-making and Myth-eating
December 7, 2013
Nathaniel Manheru
"David Cameron at Heathrow Airport with some of the delegation flying with him to China. – The Guardian"
My deep condolences to the Mandela family and South Africa on the passing on of Madiba. May his soul finally rest in eternal peace.
West call, Chinese curse
Zimbabwe has received many myths, repeated them, expanded them, fed on them, munched them to specter-thinness. Of course her hope was for an all-weather nourishment. For that very reason, Zimbabweans have been unable to clearly envision, unable to lay their hands firmly on reality.
Last week I gave you a slice of such myth-receiving, myth-making, myth-expansion and myth-eating. And the rich slice was that the West is Zimbabwe’s call, while China is Zimbabwe’s curse. Zimbabwe’s salvation would come from the West, so the myth goes. Native voices were conscripted to validate that myth in a chorus, a myth which is white to the pith. And to even elaborate on it and give it profound colour.
Best with received thoughts
The white boss wants us to remain tethered to him forever. He invents gorgons to frighten us from venturing beyond the oppressive circle he has enchanted, a circle that we can’t break. We wonder round and round, unable to break that spell of servitude. And when the white oppressor tells us how grateful we should be to be in that circle, how well we must behave as his slaves, we quickly pick up the lethal exhortation, elaborate on it, bedeck it with formidable statistics in order to make it unassailable, to make it perfect and enduring enough to blight our own children, their scions and many black generations to come.
We are always at our best with a received thought – a mis-thought! And it fires us into blind raillery: against ourselves, against our own, against our futures. Cry the accursed race.
Best across the Crocodile river
Last week’s statistically-backed argument attempted to perforate that blighting myth. It is yet to be thoughtfully challenged. Not the crass challenge it got from Muckraker, that white centurion by the gates of the myth-making chamber where vile thoughts are cooked. Dear reader, what you must grasp is that once imperialism loses state power, loses instruments of coercion, loses even the ballot, its recourse is mental games that allow it to retain its hegemony.
This is why any attempts at challenging that remaining zone of vestigial hegemony invites vicious rebuke. Such as I got from Muckraker for merely stating the obvious. We are all supposed to be unthinking when the white man hands down a nugget thought! Muckraker takes himself for the best editor north of the Crocodile River, regards himself the best authority and guardian of Rhodesian history.
Yet in spite of this claimed enormous knowledge and skills, he misses an elementary distinction: the difference between settlers and intruders. By giving us a smaller figure meant to capture white settlers who blighted our land by their permanent residence, he thinks he makes lighter the burden of oppression that the black Zimbabwean suffered for close on to a century, still suffers in politically post-colonial, economically colonial Zimbabwe.
The one who bear scars
But I am black and oppressed. I know the tongs of oppression that scarred my skin, the hard forced labor that caroused my hands, that gave me lasting scars. All that came from white oppressors who came into my life, into my country, whether or not they stayed temporarily or stayed to their grave or to now.
Only a fellow white man would know and count those who came to leave, distinguishing them from those who came and stayed. For he was the one to lose a friend, a neighbour, or gain either or both. What I saw with black-red eyes was an endless chain of white oppressors coming in, coming to me, terror in hand.
None ever left, many made way to each other as they took turns to abuse me. By way of their oppression, there was no distinction. And hey Mister Muckraker, the one who counts accurately is the one who is mounted, indeed the one who bear and suffers the harsh cut. Since Muckraker is an historian — and only last week I was reading a piece of research he published in one of the Rhodesian journals in the 1970s – let him tell us where exactly Rhodes’ men – his symbolic forebears — slaughtered Lobengula, indeed where they hid the poor King’s abused remains.
I am sure that is a more useful start to the story of white brutality and oppression here. Not this myth about two hundred thousand plus white settlers here. Or about King Lobengula committing suicide in his northward flight. Not this diversionary journey to “Tibet” as if we need to go that far to learn oppression, we who carry its scars. Why is he not talking about Wales, Scotland, Gibraltar and Malvinas?
Only facing East
But grant him ground. He says: “When Zimbabweans talk of zhingzhong, that is not something invented by whites”. He is right, dead right and we should listen to him, understand him and his kind. As I write, Cameron is just back from a long trip to China. The published image on that visit is a massive Virgin Airbus, overflowing with British businessmen who were part of Cameron’s delegation.
He led a massive, all-manner British delegation of 131, all to help him plead for Chinese investments, Chinese money. Tactfully, the trip was framed as one seeking to persuade China to do business with Europe. In reality, the trip was for needy Britain seeking to escape the riotous fate of Spain, made more likely each day that passes.
The major economies of Europe are actually not pleased with him for inviting the dragon into the EU. But, as the editor of the British Guardian noted, there was something of mendicant in the trip! I am sure for Muckraker, Cameron did not “look East”. He merely “faced East”, with “zhingzhong” being a place he visited, never a description of Chinese wares, or their quality.
Incidentally, this is Cameron’s second visit to China.
Only an old European country
Cameron met a new China, a China way above its weak, dynastic past. Much soberer, stronger, certainly richer, this new China would no longer be coerced into taking opium by British gunboats. Not even into losing its Tibet. Or its politics. Not in a hurry to forgive Cameroon for an impulsive and populist tete-a-tete with the hugely-symbolic-in-the-West-but-politically-empty-at-home Dalai Lama, China, through one of its authoritative papers, foully reminded Cameron that Britain was nothing more than an historical relic in Chinese eyes.
Part of the editorial ran: “The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese. It is just an old European country apt for travel and study. This has gradually become the habitual thought of the Chinese people.” I am sure that hurt, wounded British pride, pierces Muckraker’s empire ego, leaving gushing scarlet.
It helps for Britain and all her children, whether at home and abroad, to know that this is in fact more than a Chinese view. The editorial summarised the world’s view of Britain, including that of her previous colonial subjects who now know that beneath the feathery horn of the proverbial owl is no gore!
When the wheel has turned
More hurt came. Among the key investments Britain hoped to attract from China was for its rail system, for a long time ailing, directionless since privatisation. History records that China’s maiden attempt at rail was done by the British, way way back in 1876, the age when Britain once mattered. No trains ever ran on that track.
Only the second attempt succeeded, prospered. It came in 1881, all under the supervision of an English engineer, Claude William Kinder. And the locomotives that followed the track puffed greater glory to Robert Stephenson, a British inventor! Today the land of Stephenson and Kinder seeks Chinese intervention for Britain to have fast moving trains.
Britain, the train-master, is now by the rail station, waiting, desperate to catch a lift from a Chinese bullet train. Not a very kind fate, if you ask me. And yes Mr Editor of the Guardian, the wheel has indeed turned!
Mad pig disease
As a write, reports are now taking stock of Cameron’s visit. One of his major breakthroughs during that visit reportedly is a £45million business proposal by which Great Britain will export hog semen and trotters of pigs that no longer grunt, export all that to China. Grunt, grunt, gruuuuunt!
At least it is far, far better than opium. One hopes China is not importing mad cow, sorry mad pig, disease. And receiving trotters that kill, not arouse Chinese desire. Real food for thought if you ask me.
Myth of junkets
But yes, all this is for Zimbabweans to note. Muckraker is right to say it is not whites who speak of zhingzhong. They cannot, for they are busy courting China, flooding its markets for succour. Those who speak of zhingzhong are “Zimbabweans” — you and me at the instigation of whites already aboard a plane to Beijing!
Wake up Zimbabwe, shake off the myth and then understand why it is in the interest of the West and Rhodesians to incite you against China, to cultivate an anti-Chinese sentiment designed to avert any strengthening partnership between us. Surely a whole old imperial country does not cart itself to China of junkets? This is the first myth we need to cast off.
The bogey of indigenisation
Tapiwa Nyandoro always writes quite boldly. His latest instalment advises the Zimbabwe Government to “suspend indefinitely its indigenisation policy and replace it with the “thin capitalization rule” to raise tax and broaden the tax base.” I don’t know what “thin capitalisation rule” means, or says.
I hope he does, which leaves one wondering why such a crucial part of his recommendation is not digested, but shoved down the reader so indigestibly. Whatever he means by that phrase, his recommendation betrays his image of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans: we are a good-for-nothing-else-but-taxation bunch.
We must build our nation on taxes. Our role and fortunes must be viewed in terms of taxes, we the tax-collecting Nation. But beyond all this, there is a clear thesis to say indigenisation policy is the real problem foreign direct investment is shunning us, skirting around our country.
When capital proves less timid
Nyandoro throws in very succulent figures: $1,35 trillion as value of global FDI in 2012. Out of this $50billion went to Africa, led by Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa, DRC and Ghana. Zimbabwe — our Zimbabwe — bagged a paltry $400million out of all that. Poor Zimbabwe, opines Nyandoro, plaintively advising this wretch of a country to please “prioritize FDI-friendly policy measures for economic development”.
I said we are notorious for receiving myths, regurgitating them after munching them. Here is a case of square figures being forced into round conclusions. The countries that grabbed much of the $50bn that came to Africa are no different, no better, no more righteous than poor Zimbabwe.
Quite the contrary, they leave one wondering why timid FDI regained boldness to venture into them. Three of them have conflicts. Or rumours of them. Two are quiet but facing social threats arising from acute inequities, acute marginalisation of their indigenes. Some of these social conflicts have forebodingly spilled blood.
But all are natural-resource rich, covering a whole gamut of mineral resources including that dark, dank liquid, oil. Or its more refined, airy twin — natural gas. All this apart from a whole range of minerals they richly have. Is that not the key consideration, which by the way also account for the destination of the paltry $400million which came our way in spite of sanctions and our odious indigenisation and land policies?
They still put in $400million, in spite of our policies which Nyandoro says block investments. He thinks we should not indigenise as that amounts to seeking more instead of being content to collect tax, thinly collect tax.
Where are the billions from minerals?
I just hope Nyandoro read a business story in yesterday’s Herald. I will summarise it for him in case he didn’t. Headlined “Mining firms bank 3pc of revenue”, the story revealed that a mere 3 percent out of about $2billion which foreign mining firms get from our resources find its way into our banks!
The rest goes overseas. Meanwhile the country reels from illiquidity, blaming itself, its politics, its politicians and its policies for this bad situation. It does worse. It hopes from continent to continent to seek more debts, including from those economies which receive fabulous receipts from our minerals.
Frigidly, these economies will not give us anything, not even loans from money that came from us! I really wish vaChidhakwa could share with the Nation what came to us by way of royalties and taxes from the same mining sector this year, against what miners took away, all read against our requirements “for economic development” which Nyandoro so sorely wishes us.
That way the second, dual faced myth of taxation versus indigenisation, could, hopefully, get finally exploded.
Beggaring a noble policy
I have sat in many investment-related meetings, here and abroad. To the meeting, the message coming through is that no one, none in this whole world, has any problems with the policy of indigenisation as we visualise it here. None at all. Quite the contrary, they find our policy quite mild-mannered, weakly and often corruptly implemented.
What is more, all that has been done since its inception has been words, voluminous words remarkably matched by absolutely no action on the ground. Spare me this nonsense about community share ownership. That is not indigenisation. It is only social responsibility which is an image-making exercise for serious corporates.
We have just made that corporate responsibility compulsory, poorly so too! Spare me this nonsense about chasing little African and Chinese retail outlet owners from messy Kaguvi road, before going to bed contentedly and heroically saying to our wives, we have indigenised! Bull . . . silly.
Far from doing anything for anyone, such stupid calls simply leave a noble policy in tatters, its proponents not just morally bankrupted, but sounding ridiculously mean and xenophobic. It’s coming across as a poor man’s desperate hard asset grabbing, sinking a big sharp dagger in the cornered back of Pan Africanism, the very spirit and impulse which has saved us and won us African support.
Why cheapen, beggar a noble policy, while looking away from where real wealth is being made and lost?
Speaking too much, at cross purposes
Botswana has harder policies on indigenisation than we do. Yet it gains fabulous FDI. Nigeria is beginning to give us man and women of real means, native investors who are beginning to go abroad, Strive-like. In relative terms, Nigeria calls for partnerships between locals and investors simply because it now has a dashing middle class.
Here the middle class is Government, for everyone else is either a manager or worse, a fawning fraud seeking to happen. What investors and investing nations have been complaining about is our lack of clarity and consistency on indigenisation, the lack of clarity on our policy on indigenisation.
We speak too much, speak at cross purposes. What is worse, we exploit an honourable, well-grounded and quite accepted and acceptable policy to feed our venality. And we seek to ingratiate ourselves with the white investor, we take a dig at that policy so as to look better, wiser, more reasonable than bad Africans.
All that, not indigenisation, has been the bane. Once we speak with one voice resolutely, once we make a real clear policy out of our aspiration to indigenise, the whole world will engage us, engage us on our terms. See what is beginning to happen in the chrome industry, once Government made it clear raw chrome exportation would attract punishing taxes.
Of course Biti hoped to spite the Chinese, upset them to poison their relations with Zanu-PF. But he has advanced Zimbabwe’s interests like he never intended. Many more myths abound and encrust us. I hope I can lay them bare for you so we begin to tackle the issue of our vision for the future.
Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: NATHANIEL MANHERU, NELSON MANDELA
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(NEWZIMBABWE) Manheru: When a Fool is my Colour, Name, Totem
09/11/2013 00:00:00
by Nathaniel Manheru
THE past three weeks have seen the articulation of four key thoughts for me, all of them taking the African debate a rung up. Don’t get me wrong, describing them as “key” thoughts is in no way endorsing them. I have very vigorous views on each of the four thoughts and that will hopefully come through in this article and two others to follow hopefully in as many weeks.
The key thing is to relate these thoughts to Zimbabwe, my country, our country together. I will give you all the four thoughts in this instalment, but will comment on just one for now.
The first thought came from Thabani Nyoni, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition spokesperson. He told participants to a three-day civic groups’ Ideas Festival exhibition show held in Bulawayo last week that it was a hallowed vocation of civic groups to seek regime change in Zimbabwe, adding such a pursuit is lawful.
Changing Thabani’s regime
In his words, or more accurately in the words of those who sent him: “As civic society it is our role to push for regime change. There is nothing illegal, that is why we have elections in this country. Why would we go for elections if you don’t want to change government or governance? We are really proud to push for regime change.”
He became even more bellicose: “We will not apologise for our push for regime change because there is nothing wrong with that, in fact we are now seeing the fruits of regime change. I was in rural areas in Tsholotsho recently and I saw Zanu-PF people telling their colleagues not to politicise food aid. That is something that was unheard of.”
And he proceeded to situate his principals’ thinking in the just-ended seismic poll:
“The elections have come and gone and left many realities that we have to deal with. It is therefore important as a country that we stop and think about what kind of republic we want and what kind of Zimbabwe will work for us.”
What colour is your rose?
The second key thought came from Strive Masiyiwa, Econet’s boss and one of the five African businessmen lined up for Forbes Person of the Year Award. He is a Zimbabwean and rumoured to be a billionaire. Last week he addressed the Obasanjo Foundation and told African leaders that the colour of the investor no longer mattered as focus on the continent must now shift to employment creation. I will let Masiyiwa speak:
“More than 50 percent of the population of African countries is below the age of 25. That means we have to create more than 500 million jobs over the next 10 years. If you ask me what sometimes makes me wake up at night, it is that challenge. It is not just the purview of politicians to worry about these things; it’s about jobs, jobs, and I mean decent jobs. Last year, Africa got about $50bn in direct foreign investment, and whilst this was 10 times what it was a decade earlier, the truth is, if we are to address the problem of poverty and youth unemployment we need to be running at 10 times that level, NOW!”
When the cat has no colour
He skilfully played the colour metaphor, initially literally, factually:
“As a company, we are “foreign” investors, in some 17 countries around the world (except Zimbabwe my homeland). Even in other African countries, we are technically foreign investors, there are no special considerations given for the fact that we are an African multinational . . . The world has changed; foreign investors are no longer just companies from western countries. In our business, our most fierce competitors come from countries like China, India, Mexico, the Middle East, Nigeria, as well as South Africa. For these companies, America and Europe are no longer off bounds, to invest in. We for instance have business interests in Europe, New Zealand and the US, and yet we are an African company; the world has changed.”
And then colour metaphorically:
“One of the most inspiring leaders of the 20th Century was Deng Zhaoping of China who in opening the door to foreign investment, said, “I do not care what colour the cat is, as long as it catches mice”. For me the “mice” are “decent jobs” for the youth. I shudder to think what China, would have been like, if he had not opened up the country to massive investment, and creation of jobs.” He contrasted Rwanda’s sparse resource endowment with its leadership’s thought expansiveness, evidenced by a refocus on jobs. Nigeria, too, was hailed for its pro-investor policies which Strive regards as enlightened.
Marikana and the scarlet colour
The third thought came from South Africa, our neighbour, at the very least geographically (after President Zuma’s exhortation to his people not to think like Africans, I am a bit unsure!). Advocate Dali Mpofu has left the ANC for EFF, Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters. There is frantic speculation about the Sandton lawyer’s latest move, a few moons ahead of South Africa’s crucial, potentially directional poll. Dali shot to fame following a leak that amorously linked him to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, then wife to Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon. Today he consolidates his fame by representing the survivors of Marikana shooting at the ongoing Farlam Commission of Inquiry. The miners were shot at the behest of London Minerals, a multinational investor which unlike Masiyiwa’s cat, gave South Africa a scarlet colour.
Only a few months back Dali represented Malema in a disciplinary hearing of the ANC, a hearing which got Malema ousted from the Youth League initially, and from the ANC subsequently. But Dali never lost colour after it all. Before that Dali had successfully represented a Free State faction of the ANC that sought to interdict the Free State delegation from voting at the elective Mangaung Conference of the ANC. It should not be difficult for my readers to understand why Dali’s joining of the EFF can only be so fraught. Stephen Grootes, a well-known anchor to South African talk radios, and a senior political correspondent for Eyewitness News, went as far as suggesting Dali’s desertion of ANC and subsequent joining of EFF could be an augury to more high-profile detections from the ANC to the EFF. And the speculation has been on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela who is well linked to both Dali and Julius — politically linked, that is.
Hanging on to a sentiment, a name
But all that is not my interest. My interest is the reasoning which Dali shed in leaving the ANC, or the converse, in joining the EFF. Among other things he said: “Internal paralysis (in the ANC) is such that it’s a question of time before it (the ANC) renders itself irrelevant to the broader revolution.” And he names the revolution: “I believe that the radical policies that are needed should deliberately favour the poor, the working class . . . and those who have not enjoyed the fruits of freedom. We have to accept that addressing the needs of those people (the poor of South Africa) has to be done at the expense of those who have, so that we can have the hope of achieving stability.”
He asserts that the ANC’s adoption of government’s National Development Plan at the Mangaung elective conference put on the saddle an era of “neo-liberal” vision for a South Africa so deeply fractured by racial inequities: “The path we are going to follow between now and 2030 is in my view the wrong prescription . . . So I don’t think we have to wait until 2031 to say this was not the correct prescription. By then the patient we are dealing with may be dead”. And he foresees more resignations from the ANC, adding: “My only prediction is that in the fullness of time, they (those still in the ANC) will see that they are just hanging on to the sentiment and the name”.
Mugabe’s out-of-wedlock son
The last key thought is in the latest issue of the Afro-centric magazine, New African. It comes from a very unlikely voice, Yahya Jammeh, the President of The Gambia. By age and pre-presidential profession (a middle-rank soldier), I never associated him with a thought of such continental expansiveness. Never! And today I call him Mugabe’s out-of wedlock son, politically that is. He has just taken his country out of the Commonwealth, stressing:
“I am saying we are not going to be part of any institution or organisation that has that legacy (of colonialism) or that is a representation of the colonial era, because colonialism brought us nothing but poverty, backwardness, exploitation, and slavery. In fact, we cannot in today’s age, continue to be associated with a country that was responsible for slavery in the first place. And while the Jews have been compensated and other people are being compensated, nobody is doing that for Africans. We have not even received an apology from Great Britain, which orchestrated slavery in the first place, and then brought us colonialism. Colonialism and slavery go together”.
When Africa needs a billion years
And he puts his bitterness in historical perspective: “The British were here in The Gambia for 400 years, and in that time they built only one high school (Armitage High School named after a British colonial governor, Cecil Hamilton Armitage) . . . So let us do the mathematics: if one high school was built in 400 years, how many years would it have taken us to add a college or a university? Nearly a billion years?” He cannot think of any African country that has been prospered by colonialism. Or its post-colonial variant, neo-colonialism: “Africa’s relationship with the West has seen Africa losing and the West gaining, and that will continue as long as we do not take a stand.
But for me and The Gambia, we are no longer going to follow anybody else, but our religion, our culture, and our beliefs. We need to question and act on why Africa is the richest continent in terms of mineral resources, but the poorest in terms of the bank balance. Everyone knows the status quo and that the current relationship has not benefited any African country but the Europeans. Now who are the Europeans that they should always teach the Africans what to do? From colonialism to now, they think that they are the gods of Africa, and that they should continue to tell us what we should do. The Gambia is saying no to that.”
One hell of a trip
He takes a dig at African leadership and its propensity to join any cause, any value, any principle, any institution, with remarkable thoughtlessness. Such as the International Criminal Court about whose operations Africa recently congregated to review: “We become members at a stroke of a pen, ratify our allegiance first and then read the text later, and only then do we realise what we have got ourselves into”. And he clinches it beautifully through a bus metaphor: “We jump into every bus (sic) without knowing the destination. And then when the driver stops in hell and asks the Africans to drop off, we find ourselves asking: why are we here? We have accepted everything created by the West without even questioning anything”. And his moral to Africa: “If you follow others, you can never lead”.
The real regime change
On July 31 this year, Zanu-PF won the harmonised elections resoundingly. Today it revels in that victory which has ravaged its enemies at home and abroad. The two MDCs are in throes, bickering bitterly around own leadership crisis which this stunning Zanu-PF victory has triggered. That means the ruling party has not just stunned its opponents; it has trounced the foundational values and personages around which its adversaries revolved. A real regime change in the MDC formation, if you ask me! Or at least the beginnings of it. Its victory has triggered a real fundamental question in the opposition, a scurrying for new values. Abroad, the British have admitted to being stunned, which is not quite the same as saying they have accepted defeat. Empires don’t accept defeat from their underlings. They only suffer them for a while; they withdraw to fight another day. And, if their underlings are not careful, they may win some day. They have a long-term view of conflicts. So, Caveat Emptor!
When parties no longer matter
And this sense of a continuing western challenge to Zanu-PF is key. It qualifies the July 31 result, does it not? Zanu-PF’s victory may have scattered its opponents, but it has not removed opposition. And opposition need not assume the form of parties or organisations, at least for now. After all parties are just but one form of organising opposition, of challenging values and a given hegemony. It is significant that the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition and other NGOs got together for an Ideas Festival at which Zanu-PF emerged the target and butt. Who needs MDC formations in such a situation? And with a bold warrior like Thabani Nyoni, who needs a Morgan Tsvangirai? But this teaches Zanu-PF to look beyond adversarial parties in its threats assessment. Today western oppositional ideas are being pursued under different organisational forms, through different discourses, different speakers.
Of course Thabani Nyoni is plain wrong, or simply duplicitous in equating a change of government to a change of regime. Regimes are never changed by superficial events like elections, even though electoral outcomes could very well point to, manifest or even precipitate a change of a regime. It takes deeper processes, more sustained processes to change regimes if these are conceived of in ways that Thabani never does, or can’t do. And to change a regime is not quite the same as to change a government. It is to overthrow an obtaining value system, to dismantle the ramparts of an order that has endured, that was a reigning ethos.
Where governments change, and regimes don’t
In economics we talk of shifts in demand as opposed to changes in demand. And you are always told that a shift changes direction, that a shift is seismic, a real departure from a given curve, while a change in demand is some mere movement along the demand curve. Thabani would or should know that 2008/9 changed a government without changing the core values, the core rules or ethos around which the Zimbabwean society is founded, constructed.
Those elections, Thabani, changed a government without changing a regime. This is why MDC formations came unstuck in the recent polls. They failed to dislodge the Zanu-PF ethos the same way that the 2008 hung result did not amount to, or become the same as hung values, a hung ethos, a hung experience, a hung perspective for Zimbabwe or Zimbabweans. Similarly, until about 2000, the regime of the colonial phase of this country remained intact under a Zanu-PF government inaugurated through the 1980 election, and repeatedly reinstated in five year electoral intervals. The 1980 electoral landslide did not become a regime landslide or landfall. Regime change is something more fundamental than disappearing into a ballot box for a few seconds, much more than a vote count.
And when the colonial regime finally changed here, the theatre was the countryside, the booth an old farmhouse, the voter an axe-wielding war veteran. And hey Thabani, the regime preservers were NGOs, were NGO personalities of various shades. Like You, Sir! Today we have new rules, new values, new personalities, new practices, new experiences, new property relations in that key realm of our lives. Yet even then we only have an enclave of a changed regime, never a regime change.
The regime that stayed
The British and their American cousins have never equated regime change in Zimbabwe to MDC electoral successes. Such successes would only mean the capturing of government, no doubt in itself a significant gain and resource for those working towards regime change. One key factor for those intent on regime change is capturing levers of the State, of which Government is one such. That was the reasoning at Lancaster when the Patriotic Front felt a transfer of power amounted to a minimum gain which could be leveraged later for maximum gain. But as they soon discovered, gaining political power gave them a mere potential for regime change, never the change of regime itself. Significantly President Mugabe for a long time spoke about the coexistence of socialism with capitalism, causing commentators like Andre Astrow to speak of a “revolution that lost its way”.
Equally, the policy of reconciliation was a way of placating the old order which could not be wished away. Zanu-PF’s interpretation of taking over the commanding heights of the economy amounted to a baneful inheritance of Ian Smith’s loss-making parastatals. And of course land, itself the pillar of the Rhodesian regime, was constitutionally protected for a good 10 years, the same way that white minority seats were entrenched for the first seven years.
Changing tact, changing discourse
Significantly, the West’s campaign for regime change has focused on key areas of property relations, goals and the value systems, and affinities and alliances. The attack on national leadership, party leadership, security leadership, the war veterans, national institutions and nationalist parties have all aimed at removing enablers to this unwanted property, value and alliance regime. Try and look at Zidera from this angle, and much gets revealed.
Zdera has never been a prescription or manual for democracy. It has always been about preventing or dismantling a new, nationalistic bundle of values, rules and goals, has always been about dismantling a nationalist regime where it has taken root, pre-empting it where it seeks establishment, in the process imperilling a neo-colonial setup.
If not why would elections here constitute “a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to US interests”? And from 2000, we have noted how the campaign message from the West has been changing more and more towards a less dissembling, more brazen discourse.
In the early 2000, the message was democracy, transparency, human rights and the rule of law, all of them fads and facades. The accent was on rule of law because western interests still wielded properties here which needed a pliant State that would police the environment for the safety of those interests. Then, the hope was that with a little pressure, Zanu-PF could be nudged into running a neo-colonial State it had adopted at Independence. A little later, we saw a campaign that was pitched on the mantra of “sound macroeconomic policy”, and which exhorted Zimbabwe to account for its policies through international financial institutions.
The strategy was to use the Bretton Woods institutions to change the book of economic rules here in a way that would pre-empt Zanu-PF’s attempt at overwriting old rules, writing new rules. It is not fortuitous that President Mugabe’s last campaign message this year challenged western economic orthodoxy with its overemphasis on capital, know-how and technology, all at the expense of natural resources which would shift the balance of power in favour of resource-rich Third World countries. Of course war veterans became the face of the alleged State profligacy when in reality the idea was to break affinities between a people and its fighting force in order to make reconquest easy, easier.
A Parapet for negative forces
Much later we saw a shift towards a more value-led campaign initially crudely named “de-Zanufication” and a little later, Security Sector Reform. The latter was more elaborately thought out and featured prominent Rhodesian soldier-thinkers and white thought institutions in Britain, America and South Africa. Both phases in this value-led campaign sought to overthrow a whole value system and tradition that fed into and stoked up the spirit of national resistance to imperialism. A key contribution to imperialism by the MDC formations was not so much their entry into Government after 2008; it was their role in writing a new rule book called the Global Political Agreement (GPA) which gave the pursuits of imperialism some semblance of national legitimacy.
The GPA allowed the West to excoriate and nudge Zanu-PF towards a neo-colonial setup while appearing to be acting within the law, consensually in national terms, and in good faith vis-a-vis its adversaries-turned-partners. Conversely, it allowed the two MDCs — pawns of the West — to push forward this borrowed imperialist agenda with some modicum of national respectability, away from their quisling identity. More significantly, it gave right wing, anti-liberation tendencies within Sadc and Africa a comfortable platform for opposing a sister State and/or sister Liberation movement without losing face or grounding in the eyes of their peoples.
The benchmarking of Zimbabwe’s electoral processes on Sadc and AU judgment by the West was founded on an expectation of using Africa and its processes to legitimise the destruction of an African revolution. Another key contribution by the MDC formations to imperialism was by way of the new Constitution whose drafting tellingly boiled down to a battle of values and direction, a battle between a neo-Rhodesian, a neo-liberal agenda and on the one hand, and values of the liberation struggle on the other.
Leadership and regime change
Of course there was a thrust to attack personnel and institutions which imperialism had marked as responsible for engendering anti-neocolonial values, or for implementing or defending them. Foremost was President Mugabe whose removal became a necessary and wished-for endgame, one pursued even in terms that suggested his physical removal. Beyond the many sinister plots against the President which shall be written about one day, imperialism’s death-wish for the President took the repeated form of fawned concern about his health in ways that were meant to naturalise his demise should it come as they hoped it would, or at the very least in ways that would make it thinkable.
As in countries like Lumumba’s Congo, Nkrumah’s Ghana and Allende’s Chile, in western propaganda terms, the removal or demise of Mugabe became synonymous with improved prospects for Zimbabwe. The idea was to create within Zimbabweans a reflex of wishing their leader dead or out of the way. When nature proved a coy or reluctant player, the focus shifted to knocking him out of the race through constitutional provisions.
That, too, did not work although all this confirmed Mugabe’s centrality in the defense of a nationalistic regime in Zimbabwe. I can also cite figures in the military, principally Chiwenga, Shiri, Nyikayaramba, Chedondo and Mugova who came under sustained attack, with clear suggestions to have them dropped from the military to enable security sector reforms, itself a key pillar in changing a regime, its values, its defences. Jabulani Sibanda became the butt of the anti-war veteran campaign. Nor was that all. The Judiciary came up for round attacks, with the Chief Justice, Judge President, Justices Bhunu, Hlatshwayo and others coming under attack. The institutional thrust of the attack should be all too obvious by now, and clearly showing a thrust to change the national ethos, not government as Thabani superficially thinks.
When imperialism grants a fool
All of which means what? Well, that either Nyoni does not understand what he is talking about or that he was sent on a bravery mission that didn’t require him to comprehend anything except to heroically naturalise and make mundane a very sinister agenda of imperialism. And both are very likely. How else is one to understand the courage that comes with articulating such a dumb position, and in public too? Or the quiescent acceptance of it all by his interlocutors. Something else but intellect appears to have been at work in the minds of both the sender and the receivers. Otherwise why would self-respecting Zimbabweans tolerate such a brazen, anti-nation message? Unless it has itself authored the knowledge, imperialism prefers ignoramuses to push its national agenda.
They are never restrained by knowledge or scruples. We saw the crudest form of that in Idi Amin of Uganda; saw that here in the internal settlement arrangement where ignorant bishops and chiefs were turned into “key” players. We have seen it in the leadership types chosen to lead the MDC formations, principally MDC-T whose leader America tells us requires “massive hand-holding”. I don’t know how literate this Nyoni boy is. But if for him an election, any election, which changes governments is the same as the pursuit and fulfilment of regime change, then one safely concludes that he is a very basic tool in foreign hands.
Even his own words rebel against him, as does his own argument. If going for elections legitimises and meets the requirements of regime change, then why proudly seek the same a mere four months down the line? And if we are already eating the fruits of “regime change” by way of Zanu-PF people telling their colleagues not to politicise food aid, then the polls changed the regime by keeping it the same! And if the people polled for a change that preserves the same, who, really is stopping to think with Thabani about “what kind of republic we want and what kind of Zimbabwe will work for us”? Who is “we”, who is “us”, this “us” who appears not to have participated in changing the regime on July 31, who appears not to have been represented by the outcome of July 31 polls? Indeed he who appears to reside outside of the people of Zimbabwe who voted, but who appears more important than all of them as to still want and deserve regime change after an electoral one?
The joke is on us
Nyoni appears to represent interests inhabiting a realm outside the national one outside one inhabited by its populace and filled by its national processes. For these interests, the July 31 result did not yield a regime change; rather, it yielded “many realities that we have to deal with”. That seems to do two contradictory things. At one level it seems to repudiate the efficacy of elections as a source of regime change, indeed as marking the fulfilment of one. Yet at another level it seems to suggest a deeper grasp of the “regime change” notion than what the functional Nyoni may be allowed to have.
He was sent to tell all those employed in the western-sponsored NGO sector that the July 31 elections were superficial vis-a-vis the endgame of regime change, indeed a mere faint marker of an effete phase in an old campaign that must continue. This is a very good warning to Zanu-PF which has been behaving as if it has reached “the end of history”. But a warning whose ironic twist is both comical and tragic. Comical in that the purveyor of the warning is a man who exhibits monumental ignorance at an Ideas Festival. Why did he, a cripple, join such an intricate dance? Tragic in that the ignoramus is a black Zimbabwean, is one of us. Hark, I hear peals of white laughter! That means the joke is on us, does it not? Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: JULIUS MALEMA, NATHANIEL MANHERU
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