The failure of independence

Joram Nyathi
SOMETHING is fundamentally wrong with our tertiary education. Wrong to the extent that it makes us love most the system of colonial oppression which demanded so much sacrifice to set us free again. Wrong to the extent that every effort to create a new Zimbabwe weaned from the shackles of colonial rule is interpreted by our own as a journey into the primitive past, a destruction of the “jewel of Africa”.

Even our contemplation of the future is framed in nostalgic terms of lost glory which must be recaptured: we must restore the rule of law, regain the sunshine city status, reclaim our breadbasket position, revive closed companies and regain our economic status in the region. That about sums up all we can immediately recall about the black person’s exclusion from the colonial economic architecture. That’s our conception of the way forward! Our vision of the future centres around an imagined glorious past we never lived.

There is a desperate need for a new pedagogy.

This is why: recently one writer tried to characterise the government’s land reform and the indigenisation and economic empowerment policy as attempt to pursue failed socialist egalitarian politics. And experience has taught us that that is the quickest way to discredit any policy regardless of its noble intentions. I cannot remember the last time I heard anyone in Zanu-PF, not even President Mugabe, mentioning the word socialism, gutsaruzhinji.

A time was when socialism was in vogue, I recall the daily, or was it weekly, TV programme featuring the late Kempton Makamure and Kenyan Shadreck Gutto back then: The Road to Socialism. They depicted a system which would be straitjacketed in an ascetic lifestyle as aspired to under Zanu-PF’s Leadership Code which frowned on material accumulation for the party leadership, whose every conduct was expected to be exemplary to the masses under a one-party hegemony.

But the temptations of power were too great. The whole moral edifice of a clean society where we would all be equal collapsed with the expose of the Willowgate vehicle scandal in 1988. Owners of capital and the “jewel of Africa” who had always been sceptical and apprehensive about the “red terror” rhetoric felt vindicated by the hypocrisy of it all. Socialism was a language they didn’t want to hear and loved to hate. It was discredited.

The reaction in the establishment was a volte-face, and the nation found itself tomorrow in a dalliance with Washington’s treacherous whore, the IMF, in search of economic “revival”. From that dalliance we had Esap and the Washington orders.

A new nomenclature was born and our economists and captains of industry and commerce loved it. While the policies were unfamiliar, the terrain was. Everything was clear and consistent: tighten belts, retrench, devalue, price review, downsize and streamline operations and the bottomline.

All these would give Zimbabwe a strong economy and a sharp competitive edge, so went the new gospel. You couldn’t query the orders from Washington on how these massive employee layoffs could possibly give us a virile and stable economy in the long-term.

Our economists behave like well-trained lawyers, they are well-equipped to observe strict rules and laws of economics, they are good at enforcing traditional behaviour, they love to preserve a given economic system rather than challenge it even if it is clearly morally repugnant. That is what they are trained to do and will protest vigorously against politicians “trying to reinvent the wheel” by proposing variants from the cultural.

In a scholarly piece in this paper last week titled, “I’m in a meeting”, New African editor Baffour Ankomah quoted at length from a research paper by renowned fellow Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah on his findings about the pitfalls of the Aristotelian system of education which produces “technically-incompetent intellectuals”. Armah notes that America and Europe have abandoned this approach to education since the Industrial Revolution.

Africa still clings to it, never mind whether we are talking about the liberal arts, law or economics. In fact I recall several times when President Mugabe has challenged Zimbabweans to take up the sciences, hopefully because he believes some day our engineers or doctors might stumble on something “new” which we can patent. We are the only continent which doesn’t have a vehicle brand!

So Armah points out in his research: “All African intellectuals today are trained to work inside this system-maintenance structure (inherited from colonialism). Ultimately, as far as working practices go, this means we are kept busy performing routine maintenance functions (teaching, research, conferences, festivals, celebrations of the existent). So we have no time left for designing a different economic system, social order, or work ethos. We can talk about change, but we cannot work for it, since work takes time and skill, and we have neither.”

Which takes me to my main point today. All their lives our intellectuals are “kept busy performing routine maintenance functions” on the exploitative system which colonialism and capitalism handed us. That is the alpha and omega. That routine cannot be changed. They are in fact so busy with this “routine maintenance” work that they “have no time left for designing a different economic system, social order, or work ethos”.

That in effect means that our economists and other thinkers, being thus too busy with “routine maintenance” work on how economies work and finances are managed as bequeathed to Africa by the owners of capital, they possibly don’t have time to think at all. They can only mimic what the books say, beyond the book, they are out of their depth, nothing else ever works. Any experimentation which challenges colonial property relations is heresy.

That is why there has been so much opposition to the land reform and indigenisation and economic empowerment policies by our intellectuals.

They present a peculiar challenge which books never prepared them to contemplate as probable. Opposition to land reform or black empowerment has never originated from among the poor or “ignorant” villagers.

The initiative to “design a different economic system” is having to come from ignorant “populist politicians” who dare to believe that a different economic architecture is possible. And the biggest resistance is being mounted and spearheaded by those who know, those full of book, those who should be the guiding light out of slavery and colonialism. This is because they have been left with a mammoth task to preserve the economic status quo, to “perform routine maintenance” on behalf of the master who is enjoying the fruit of his “investment”.

It is said there are few tasks as hard as talking liberty to a happy slave.

While land reform and empowerment policies seek to broaden control of real sources of wealth at the bottom of the pyramid to include the poor, those racially-marginalised, such policies are viewed as peculiar and unworkable because they seek to turn the Washington orders on their head by weakening the comprador class’ role of managing the status quo. They are inconsistent with the learned and bequeathed wisdom; there is no suitable vocabulary for what is being proposed, hence attempts to conjure up misnomers such as socialist egalitarianism. It is more fashionable in fact to rail against corruption and cronyism than it is to raise a hand against the wholesale looting of our own natural resources. We are expected to stand guard and provide security to anyone who comes under the cloak of an investor.

There is no need to gloss over the imperfections of both the land reform and economic empowerment policies when it comes to implementation.

There has been grand corruption, including multiple farm allocations exposed in the government-initiated land audits. These malpractices must be rooted out and corrective measures taken. That goes too for other empowerment policies.

But such aberrations cannot be reason enough to say let’s live with the colonial heritage. Pretending to be searching for a perfect methodology can only lead to policy paralysis, which is why no African countries has gone beyond political “independence” as symbolised by the flag.

And one is tempted to feel that perhaps the African leadership is partly to blame for the fiasco of that independence. After protracted and often bloody struggles, the colonial power is forced to capitulate, to allow the former colony to get its own flag. The tragedy is that what should have been a brief hiatus in the struggle to hoist that flag is then mistaken by the euphoric natives for an end in itself, even as people remain mired in poverty and don’t know who controls their economy. Hence the now legendary African condition: the failure of independence.

When Zimbabwe belatedly resumed the torrid struggle to economic emancipation starting with the Land Acquisition Act of 1991/2, even its own children protested — because this was perceived as completely delinked from the original war. Mhandu yanga yatambarara, as Tuku would say. It was now lawlessness, a violation of property rights.

In short, this had become corruption.

Joram Nyathi is the Zimpapers Group Political Editor