Sundaymail EditorRichard Mahomva
Zimbabwe’s drive towards accelerated openness to business with global market players raises both optimism and pessimism. Optimism in this regard emanates from a broad spectrum of hopes for economic revival against a background of the country’s isolation from key global markets, international monetary institutions and other global policy establishments.
This alienation mainly originated from the land reform policy taken up by the Government in 1997 in response to Britain’s negligence of its land compensation mandate.
This was, of course, followed by economic sanctions on Zimbabwe which further heightened what came to be known and popularised in academia as the “Zimbabwean crisis”. The policy direction by the new administration towards the urgency of re-engagement and foreign policy reconciliation has attracted a fair share of pessimism.
This protestant pessimism is primarily grounded on fears of Zimbabwe’s vulnerability to the realist gravitas of the West in asserting its dominance.
In a way, this may indicate some degree of hesitancy towards the approach prescribed by Government to attract Foreign Direct Investment. This follows the West’s historically-defined leaning to capitalist realism largely characterised by exploitative labour and resource capital harnessing not only in Zimbabwe, but in Africa as a whole.
In support of this perspective, in his book, “Looting Africa”, Patrick Bond argues: “Africa is poor, ultimately, because its economy and society have been ravaged by international capital as well as by local elites who are often propped up by foreign powers.
“The public and private sectors have worked together to drain the continent of resources which — if harnessed and shared fairly — should otherwise meet the needs of the peoples of Africa. Changes in ‘governance’ — for example revolutions — are desperately needed for social progress, and these entail not only the empowerment of ‘civil society’ but also the strengthening of those agencies within African states which can deliver welfare and basic infrastructure.
“The rich world must decide whether to support the African Union’s Nepad programme, which will worsen the resource drain because of its pro-corporate orientation, or instead to give Africa space for societies to build public/people partnerships in order to satisfy unmet basic needs.”
Therefore, as the nation is engrossed in celebrating the milestone stride of re-engaging the international community, some introspection is also important in defining the parameters of Zimbabwe’s willingness to renew its synergies of engagement with the West.
Standing our ground
In so doing, Zimbabwe must have a well-grounded ideological standing — one which is cognisant of the permanence of interests. These interests are anchored on the West’s quest for development at the expense of its counterpart’s under-development.
The West’s modus operandi of engaging economic powerhouses outside their locale has been traditionally Machiavellian. While Europe has set that precedence of dominance, it must be noted that this is the case across the board where political-economy interests are concerned.
This follows the West’s clear position on its market and democracy relational terms on neo-liberalism.
Put simply, neo-liberalism is a cross-cutting rationale which is emphatic on the value of free market competition. Neo-liberalism privileges economic laissez-faire and the freedom (or liberty) of individuals against the excessive power of government. This position champions respect to private property entitlement.
Across Africa, neo-liberalism has been explored to widen Foreign Direct Investment, at the same time alleviating employment woes. Against this background of Africa’s exploited and massively colonially-dependent political-economy structures, neo-liberalism has gained popularity as a rational course for prescribing poverty-reduction and raising the standards and principles of “good governance”.
In most instances, neo-liberalism has been mainly engaged as developmental than it is an expression of the West’s attempt to spread out the uniformity of its principles of governance at the expense of the experiences of those it targets as its students.
This is the same neo-liberalism which mutilated African economies to structural adjustments in the early 1990s.
In some spheres, the rationale of neo-liberalism has been problematised for promoting a one-sided course of the democracy debate in Africa. It is not also disputable that neo-liberalism has aided the growth of opposition politics to safeguard colonial property ownership in Africa.
In Zimbabwe’s case, neo-liberalism played a crucial role in raising a selective awareness on human rights and democracy following the people-driven Land Reform Programme. In turn, this prompted the need for reviving nationalism which was emphatic of Zimbabwe’s delink from the West in the early 2000s.
Nationalism became an emotive liberation-anchored perspective for reasserting Zimbabwe’s interaction with the West.
Today, nationalism should be a resource for constructively defining Zimbabwe’s policy leaning with regards to improving the livelihoods of the citizenry.
Nationalism must be the defining mark of Zanu-PF’s entry into this dispensation.
Nationalism must be a key resource to grounding the legitimacy of the new administration in its economic development aspirations.
Taking a nationalist turn
Nationalist pronouncements on this engagement envisaged by the ruling must go beyond the narrative of employment-creation. This is because job-creation mainly sustains the economic power base of the multi-national company and the hegemony of its mother country.
The proposition of employment-creation must also cascade to enhancing the supply of skills to the mushrooming “informal sectors”.
Likewise, the notion of employment-creation must add value to the absence of skills with direct impact on crucial sectors like our extractive industry. There is also need for emphasis on promoting indigenous specialisation in the production of high-value commodities for export markets to compete with the imports consumer culture catalysed by neo-liberalism. Our engagement with the international community must facilitate a lucid re-organisation of capital through mutual benefit of our local businesses and their foreign counterparts.
In the same vein, regional trade should be strengthened so that Sadc and Africa as a whole also benefit from Zimbabwe’s openness to business.
This will enable the country to become a relevant contributor to Africa’s growth, particularly in terms of restoring her legacy as the breadbasket of Africa.
Through this approach, it may also be easy for Zimbabwe to set the pace for fostering collective dialogue in trade negotiations regarding goods and services which the continent has to offer.
Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in the architecture of governance in Africa and political theory. He wrote this article for The Sunday Mail.
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