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Joram Nyathi Spectrum
LAST week The Herald Business hosted a post-budget breakfast conference for the media, business executives and industry chiefs at which Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa was the chief interlocutor. I left the Celebration Centre venue satisfied that we have the right man
for the job from the way he ably parried questions from the audience. But he also left me feeling that we probably need a new vocabulary. Most of all, I hope our industrialists and chief executives learnt a thing or two about the much-abused phrase “thinking outside the box”.
Let’s come back to this later. First things first, from the East. He came, he saw, we appreciated. Chinese President Xi Jinping made a historic reciprocatory two-day State visit to our shores. For a leader of the world’s second largest, economy reckoned in trillions of dollars, a population of 1,2 billion and some of the biggest global manufacturing firms, President Xi showed great humility by dedicating a personal article to praising and acknowledging the excellent relations between Zimbabwe and China, which he likened to a “blooming flower”.
He stressed the need for a win-win engagement with Zimbabwe in particular and Africa in general.
By the time he left for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in South Africa, he had witnessed the signing of investment deals estimated at more than $4 billion.
Our right-wing media and their political cousins didn’t disappoint. They were lockstep in deprecating President Xi’s visit as “inconsequential”. What was of consequence on this high noon of Zimbabwe’s relations with China was that “Tongogara wanted Nkomo to lead Zim” and “Mugabe will not die anytime soon”, both headlines blazoned rudely above resplendently garlanded pictures of Presidents Mugabe and Xi.
It’s pathetic. More so because this is grievously disingenuous. These are the same media houses and politicians, who never tire of reminding us of China’s meteoric rise after its much-maligned cultural revolution. They make a fetish of reminding us of President Deng, who famously said one cat is as good as any so long as it catches the mouse. Yet each time Zimbabwe talks about its “Look East” policy these same people betray their preference for a Western cat, the same cat going to catch mice in China.
Zimbabwe is most unfortunate that the supposed seers and interpreters of its well-being are growing up in an era of prophecies and miracles and tend to reckon national development as an event.
Reality is different. Over the past 30 or so years China has notched average GDP annual growth of around 10 percent to overtake the economies of Britain, Germany, France and Japan. This was not a product of alchemy. It had its foundation in those despised years when it was depicted as insular and a backward Communist pariah. Those were years of painful sacrifice, when all ate local unless your were a foreign diplomat. Neoliberal democracy was a wasteful luxury.
Once it was confident that it was in full control of its economy, that its people had enough skills and that its industry could compete, China opened up its economy. Zimbabwe’s disastrous encounter with Esap was a result of our failure to grasp these basics of national development, as a result of which Rhodesia’s uncompetitive industry which had been protected under UDI since 1965 was almost wiped out.
In China’s case, it was fortuitous that Deng happened to be at the right place at the right moment to preside over the “miracle” transformation whose time had come. It was not a wasted 40 years.
But the opening of the economy was not a reckless ideological shift, but properly managed, otherwise China would have abandoned Communism and there would have been no Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the collapse of the Iron Curtain with the end of the Cold War in 1991.
I am deliberately labouring the point about the need for a strong foundation from two perspectives: first, our sad experience with Esap from 1991 when we were ill-prepared for the vagaries and onslaught of a free market, and second, in light of Chinamasa’s apparent endorsement of an ill-applied phrase borrowed from the Latin American financial crisis of the 1980s when incomes fell, economies stagnated and debt and unemployment soared — commonly referred to as the “lost decade”.
We need a new vocabulary for our current phase of economic transformation.
The lost decade in Zimbabwe is used to depict the period of the land reform from 2000 during which what remained of the whiteman’s economy from the ravages of Esap collapsed. But unlike Latin America, Zimbabwe has not enjoyed a glut of loans from the IMF or other multilateral lenders. Debt has in fact stagnated save for interest accruing to the principal and arrears. Instead, there has been a deliberate effort to empower our people with land which, with sufficient funding, skills development and adequate extension services, should grow the economy rapidly enough to repay whatever we owe.
To me this period of laying the foundation cannot fairly be characterised alongside Latin America’s so-called lost decade. We are closer to the Chinese experience before 1978, minus the seriousness required for a revolution. A new economy is germinating in the decaying womb of the Rhodesian economy. This is a period when big business should grow organically from the SMEs to conglomerates unaided by racial policy preferences or distortions.
Yes, Cde Chinamasa, in a huge programme such as the historic land reform programme there are bound to be opportunists and corrupt party elements who have no regard for principle or policy, as a result of which opportunities have been lost over the past decade. That doesn’t translate into indigenous blacks losing the decade. It’s been the most fruitful part of the struggle for total economic emancipation for those who seized the moment. That’s why I believe we need a new vocabulary.
Minister Chinamasa is closer to the policy decisions of the ruling party. At the breakfast conference he touched on the matter of title deeds for farms and referred to rural land as “dead capital”. All good. He then mentioned the EU being interested in funding a land audit in Zimbabwe.
I don’t know the thinking behind this interest from the same nations which opposed the land reform programme and went so far as to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe under the nebulous rubric of human rights violations.
Are we so naive to believe the white former farmers still holding on to their title deeds and are suing government for compensation in European courts have suddenly forgiven all our sins and the EU now wants to empower Zimbabwean farmers to prosper and compete with their own?
Indigenisation monster
This phrase came from the floor and came to Minister Chinamasa as a question from a seasoned business executive. He wanted to know what government was doing to the “indigenisation monster” which was scaring away much needed foreign investment.
The phrase hit me like a brick. Chinamasa had to refer to examples like Ethiopia, which owns the only profitable airline on the continent, is home to the AU headquarters, where China is building the most modern rail system, that foreigners are not allowed to own banks, foreigners can’t own land except on a 50-year lease basis to establish plantations and where average wages are as low as $30 per month.
This is the source of my disappointment: if our own industrialists are still unconverted and deliberately distort the message about the application of the 51/49 indigenisation principle, can we blame foreigners for their confusion and scepticism about government’s empowerment policies? Should we be surprised when foreigners exaggerate their fears to claim that Barclays and Standard Chartered banks could be seized the same way farms formerly occupied by whites were taken over?
So it is that when President Xi comes to Zimbabwe, we have danger warning signs of colonisation by China. We are better off under British, French and American masters by conquest than freely negotiating trade deals with China, thus endorsing Donald Trump’s desire for Africa to be recolonised for another 100 years because its people have no capacity to think, let alone govern themselves!
Steve Biko makes the point in a notoriously poignant manner; “The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”.
Mr Businessman, what does it mean to think outside the box? Shouldn’t you be thinking out winning strategies and changing the rules of the game rather than nurse a nostalgia for those who eternally despise you because of the colour of your skin?
Online Reporter