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Tinomudaishe Chinyoka
OVER time, different justifications have been used to deny Zimbabweans the right to own their own land and resources. At various times, different rationale has been used to either explain away the unlawful dispossession of natural resources suffered by us the original owners, or to denigrate efforts to repossess what is rightfully ours using unrelated and often-times phantom claims about the likely consequences.
In 1919, the Privy Council of The United Kingdom (the highest court for their ‘territories’) ruled, in a judgment called In Southern Rhodesia, that when Cecil John Rhodes and his usurpers came into our country, the land and natural resources in our prodigious land did not in fact belong to us or to anyone, and that as a result, they could all be taken by the white people because they were more civilised than us.
This was because the savages (that’s you and I, if you must know) were “so low in the scale of social organisation that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilised society.”
In other words, it was through good luck and sheer charity on the part of our white civilised betters that after they discovered this land that was just waiting for them to find, that they did not drive us all to the Kalahari to create room for themselves. They could have done so, because we did not own the land.
In the 1990s, when attempts to reclaim our land via the administrative methods put in place by legislation and the courts were being thwarted by the conspiratorial chicanery of the British government acting in favour of their former nationals (many of whom had retained ancestral rights of citizenship in the UK) and a white-dominated judiciary that fought the government at every turn, the oft-repeated reason to justify a continuation of the status quo was that any new black farmers would not know how to farm, and that food production would suffer.
The white farmers, it was alleged, knew how to farm, and the black farmers did not. This prompted President Mugabe to say one of his most famous statements: “The fact that the person that stole my car has a driving licence does not justify him keeping it”.
So, these days when drought affects crop production, we are told that it is because the land is now owned by black people that the maize fails. The fact that tobacco production is now surpassing pre-land reform levels is dismissed as either a fluke or “unsupported by figures”, because it is hard for anyone from these quarters to accept that in fact, the original owners know what they are doing.
The fact that farms that were once lying idle (because the white farmers had too much land to their names) are now productive is glossed over, as is the fact that in some cases, this land was being used as glorified safari parks for their friends and relatives from abroad while our land hungry people languishing in semi-arid “native reserves”.
Having failed to reverse the gains of the Third Chimurenga through the imposition of a proxy government headed by their pawns in four elections since 1999, the West has changed tack, attempting to denigrate our efforts to retake the economy through indigenisation by preaching a new doctrine, that of woe and brimstone. We are told that if we continue down this path, we will not succeed in empowering our own people, but will instead bring Armageddon to our economy.
The Minister of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment, instead of being lauded for pushing that more of his fellow citizens share in what we now, is denigrated with statements like “Kasukuwere, an ally of President Robert Mugabe, has become the face and driving force behind the controversial indigenisation programme which has been scaring off investors, causing direct foreign investment to plummet by about three-quarters in 2013”.
This ignores the fact that capital will always look for a home, and that when it comes to investment, it matters not in the creation of jobs whether such investment is by white people from abroad or local black entrepreneurs coming onto the market through such enabling policies as indigenisation. Besides which, the idea that foreign direct investment will leave in 2013 is laughable: for the last 15 years the West has tried to effect regime change by discouraging any foreign investment into Zimbabwe.
Whoever could have been “scared off” by indigenisation is already not there!
Criticism of the programme has not been confined to the West, but has seen some would-be saviours of the Zimbabwe public embarrass themselves with statements like this one from Thokozani Khupe: “Our people are not crying for ownership of industry. They need jobs to be able to feed their families . . . This is not the time to implement the indigenisation programme . . . Who has the money to buy the 51 percent of the shares they want offloaded? Who will buy those shares? Is it the people in my constituency of Makokoba, or Dotito or Muzarabani?”
This kind of talk is not only shameful, but downright misleading. It is false that our people are not crying for ownership of industry. It would be interesting to know how many people Ms Khupe asked before making such statements.
They certainly did not ask me or anyone else that I know, because we would jump at the chance to “own industry”.
And if people in Makokoba, Dotito or Muzarabani do not have the money to buy shares in these companies, maybe it is the job of those campaigning to be in government to come up with policies that provide for such people to access those shares?
Maybe the government could buy them and allocate to the people, or offload them on concessionary terms? In any event, the method through which shares are acquired by the individual Zimbabwean citizen should never be confused with the principle that Zimbabwean companies should be majority owned by Zimbabweans.
I would like to posit that indigenisation is not just something that we must resort to in some aspects, but must be the guiding principle of our politics. In any transaction involving our resources, it must be an obligation of government to be guided first by the question: how shall local people benefit from this resource, before looking at any other consideration. It is time for us to own that which is ours. Indigenisation is the idea of our time. To quote from their own words: Victor Hugo once said that ‘there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come’.
I remember a time when we were students at UZ protesting against the fact that when Falcon Gold called their AGM, it was to be held in Luxembourg, because that was where all their shareholders were, yet all their mining was being done in Zimbabwe. Although we had no money then to buy shares, we would have regarded as retarded any statement to the effect that the reason why our government should not forcibly take majority ownership of such a company was that we had no money to pay for the shares.
The very premise of the question by Khupe is invalid: why do we need to pay for something that was stolen from us in the first place? The idea that the government must actually allow a situation where ordinary people have to fork out money to buy their own resources from foreigners is anathema to my way of thinking. Zvavakachera izvizvo zvakakwana, it is now time to hand over to the original owners.
Like their chief religious figure said so eloquently, “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, and to a Zimbabwean what is a Zimbabwean’s, I might add.
Be that as it may, the issue is that language is used to attack a noble project in Zimbabwe, yet when they do similar things in their own countries we are told that this is different. Just as violence in South Africa during their transition in the 1990s was called ‘black on black’ violence while at the same time the ‘white on white’ violence in Northern Ireland was invariably referred to as ‘the troubles’ or ‘sectarian strife’, language is a potent force used by the usurpers to impose their neo-colonial agenda and seek to keep us subservient to their aims.
Recently, an MP from the UK Independence Party referred to Africa and other aid receiving places as “Bongo Bongo land”.
Now, leaving aside the fact that it is regarded as okay for them to fight for their “independence,” yet not okay for us, as we know, there is no place called Bongo Bongo land.
However, to his audience, this was a dog-whistle phrase, and they get the idea. It is coded language, meant to disparage and insult. The condemnation of such race baiting is subtle, in that it is actually praise; their politicians fall over each other saying “while I won’t use the same words, the sentiments resonate with many of the people I know”.
Yet, when President Mugabe says things that ‘resonate’ with his fellow Zimbabweans like indigenisation and they vote for him in their millions, he is accused of rigging.
Almost on a daily basis, the British and American governments preach a doctrine of indigenisation. David Cameron is, according to Labour, in an “arms race on immigration rhetoric”, calling for “British jobs for British people” and promising to be “tough” on migrants because “Immigrants have taken British jobs from British workers.”
In America, immigration reform debates are tinged with racial stereotypes, and this ever present claim about jobs being stolen from the natives, only they call them “Americans”, not natives.
What is that if not an appeal to indigenisation? But, because the word “indigenous” has never been used in relation to white people, it is regarded as genuine political debate and something to be engaged with, not laughed at as is the case with Africa.
In 2006, Dubai Ports World went into a deal to manage 6 (later revealed to be 22) US ports, and the American political elite went apoplectic. Castigating the deal as a threat to national security, it was regarded as inconceivable that a foreign company could manage such a strategic sector.
The opposition rose to a crescendo that resulted in the company eventually pulling out of the deal. At no stage was this opposition dismissed in the same manner as our indigenisation programme.
There was a tacit acceptance throughout that the “national security” concerns resonated with the public, and therefore were legitimate.
Yet, when our government decides that the mining sector is too strategic for it to be owned by foreigners, we are dismissed off hand.
I recall that a foreign-owned company went to Mberengwa and “discovered” a mukwa woodland, then proceeded to plunder it without compensation to the local people.
That is wrong.
Taking back resource based companies like mines and timber merchants, where the foreign company has done nothing but “discover” the resource (which, by the way, was not lost, so did not need to be ‘found’), is something that we must not, as a nation, allow.
If, as a nation we have decided that 51 percent of any commercial enterprise must be owned by local people, for the betterment of local people, it really is nothing but a way to protect our national security interests.
Just because those national security interests include the building of clinics in Kitsiyatota, a crèche in Gwavamutangwi and a dip-tank in Matibi rather than a nuclear arsenal in Daytona or Kansas City Missouri does not make them any less important.
Allowing a situation to persist where our resources are majority owned by foreigners on the basis that they know better what to do with them persists the racist premise of In re Southern Rhodesia, that the resources in Zimbabwe are free for the taking because we are too primitive to know just what it is that we own.
When this Parliament ends it’s tenure in 2018, it will be a fitting 100th year anniversary gift to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom to tell them that we, the “savages” of what they called Southern Rhodesia, have finally and truly shaken off their shackles and reclaimed what which was stolen.
Next step, changing our Falls on the Zambezi to their real name: Mosi-a-Tunya. After all, who is this Victoria anyway?
Tinomudaishe Chinyoka is former president: University of Zimbabwe Students Union; former president: Zimbabwe National Students Union; former secretary-general: University of Zimbabwe Students Union, and PhD Student, History of Land Law and Political Science, UK.
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