The problems we face can never be solved at the same level of thinking which created them.
GUEST COLUMNIST VINCE MUSEWE
Herald weekly columnist Nathaniel Manheru is at it again, celebrating failure and extenuating the economic decline of our industrial base which he terms the “Rhodesian economy” only for his psychosomatic relief. I hate to say it, but if that is his analysis of what is wrong with Zimbabwe, then we are in trouble indeed.
In my view, any generation cannot celebrate its failure to build onto what it inherited from past generations, regardless of who might have built it. Our economy has been under-developed by Zanu PF over the last 34 years simply because they have failed to plan for any industrial growth. They have been playing politics and forgot that the nation must eat.
The decline of our industry is solely because of how Zanu PF decimated our once vibrant agricultural sector; the hand that fed us and others before Manheru’s plunder brigade arrived on the scene in 1980.
“We have to get over this irrational attachment to the Rhodesia’s decrepit industrial complex, indeed accept that most industries we have received from the settler era are dead, dying or must soon die.”
And who has killed industry are made it decrepit dear Manheru? Sanctions! I can hear you repeat your master’s voice. Absolutely not, for we are the sole manufacturers of our own fate.
Thirty-four years has been all Zanu PF needed to kill these industries, but not only that, in the process, emerging black entrepreneurs were banished while in excess of three million educated and skilled Zimbabweans left the country in utter disgust. In addition, vast tracts of land sit unproductive and owned by the Zanu PF’s “plunder brigade”.
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If Manheru is indeed trying to convince us that a “Zimbabwean economy” is in the making, nothing can be further from the truth. Eighty thousand peasants are destroying our forests in the pretext of exporting tobacco, while thousands of small-scale miners are flooding our rivers with tonnes of mercury each year as they look for gold. The now informal Zimbabwean survivalist economy that employs the majority is importing cheap wares and second-hand clothes from the imperialists for peddling in the over crowded streets and dirty streets of Harare.
As if that is not enough, we now import 70% of our food requirements mainly grown by Afrikaanners in South Africa. So, in effect, our economy is now a Chinese and South African supermarket.
Manheru further educates us on agriculture as follows: “On the one end, we have inputs which go into the sector. On the other, we have outputs which come from our agricultural exertions. In between, we have the technologies which enable transformation processes of the sector. Immediately, that implies an industrial policy: for the generation of agricultural inputs; for the production of implements which we need for agriculture; and for the processing of agricultural products for higher value. Such a systematic approach is likely to free us from Rhodesia.”
But wait a minute, isn’t this the very Rhodesia’s decrepit industrial complex that we inherited which Zanu PF has worked so hard to destroy? This is the travesty which Manheru is trying to force down our throats.
“In fact, we are likely to find out quite soon that instead of concentrating on reviving the so-called private sector, which should be renamed the Rhodesian Sector, we are better off focusing on the public sector, reforming it as the basis for a new economic thrust. That is what we have, what we own, indeed what we control.” My questions here are simple: What public sector or is it the plunder sector and who, in your view, “owns” this public sector?
In excess of 80 State enterprises are facing collapse while the chefs have now loaded them with loyal underlings drawn from your pool of party members.
The public sector, my dear brother, is just that, public and not productive. It must be funded by taxes from the Rhodesian economy which your lot has vociferously gobbled over the last 34 years. Today we have nothing to show for it; our liberators have robbed us!
Unfortunately, the Zimbabwe economy that Manheru wants can only emerge by us using other people’s money since. Somehow, we have forgotten to save our own money throughout the years. So in effect, my brother, you can forget about “owning” anything until we are able to save our own money locally. For now, we remain cashless, broke and mere consumers who must beg the Chinese to loan us money; but at what cost?
On the issue of mortgaging our resources as a country where the World Bank’s outgoing economist, Nadia Piffaretti, has duly warned us lest we squander our children’s heritage, Manheru argues as follows:
“But she uttered an abomination for which I roundly condemn her. She thinks Zimbabwe is robbing from her future generations by harnessing her finite natural resources towards securitising borrowings from China. And it is clear from the tone of her warning that she is not making a general point, but warning us against hobnobbing with China. If hers was a general point, then she would have realised Zimbabwe’s scions were robbed a long time ago in history, and even then not by the Chinese. She would have also realised China is insisting that revenue from the sale of resources should be what securitised loans, not actual mineral deposits which should be exploited through partnerships.”
A robber is a robber Manheru; whether from the West, the East, or from Zanu PF, the fact remains that Zimbabweans have been robbed by all including this regime which you exuberantly represent.
The value of our minerals is based only on the income that those minerals can generate and without that potential income, our minerals deposits are worth zero. So the argument that we are mortgaging our income streams and not the mineral deposits is trite. The problems we face can never be solved at the same level of thinking which created them.
Vince Musewe is an economist and author based in Harare. You may contact him on [email protected]
