Zimbabwe’s middle-class and the Diaspora

Nick Mangwana View From the Diaspora

Zimbabwe paid a heavy fiscal price to educate and skill up a lot of the people who emigrated before giving back. Most of the people that went to State Universities in Zimbabwe were on Government loans and grants. The grant was a privilege given to the people by a caring Government

THE African Development Bank ( AfDB) says that the African middle-class are anyone who spends between US$2 to US$20 per day.

This is a ridiculously wide range, especially when one implies that a person who spends US$2 a day is in the same general class as the one that spends 10 times that.

This only begins to make sense when this class is divided into sub-classes such as lower middle-class and all the way to upper-middle class tiers.

South Africa, and possibly Zimbabwe, would define its middle-class as those that do white-collar jobs.

This is even a more absurd as people like artisans, while they do blue-collar jobs, earn substantially enough to be classified as the middle-class. In order not to get bogged down with definitions and semantics, maybe it is better to classify the middle-class so the reader is left to decide where to place their own middle-class.

Possibly those who have a three-course meal, can afford meat every day, have a fridge and each child has their own bedroom. They have at least a car for the family’s use. They can afford to eat out at least once a month.

They have a maid at home and they have their own house or at least are paying for it. They have insurances and can also afford at least one holiday a year. These traits are not exhaustive but are the ones which are going to be used to define this class of people in this piece. The reader is already furrowing their burrow trying to decide which class they are in.

This is not a class war. This is not Zimbabwe of the ‘80s where the operative words were bourgeoisie (mbozha) and the proletariats. This discussion is germane to the current economic challenges bedevilling Zimbabwe.

The location and enhancement of its middle-class is the propeller to economic prosperity. In general, Africa’s middle-class are the young, possibly with a degree, who are in the acquisitive stage of their lives.

This is the group that buys insurances policies, property , health products , cars and household furniture.

They are the spenders in the economy. Spending or having disposable income builds up productivity as industry boosts production to meet the demand.

They are the ones that take their families to Kariba, Victoria Falls, Nyanga and other national resorts. This in turn increases the employment and economic activity and enhances the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

It is not about the elite few who have a lot to flaunt and splash. These even tend to import most of their purchases as if in a bid to remain different. This group of people would only be good for the economy if they were taxed according to their capacity to pay.

The lower-class remains very important in that as the economy improves there will be social mobility to the next level. Zimbabwe needs to focus on growing its middle-class. The only major challenge is that a good fraction of Zimbabwe’s middle-class is now in the Diaspora.

Only through valuing and nurturing both its middle-class at home and finding a way of harnessing Diaspora investment will Zimbabwe’s stuttering economy become an oiled machine again.

Harnessing the Diaspora should not only be about Diaspora remittances.

While this is very welcome and does some of the things a middle-class in Zimbabwe would have probably done, it is also about pushing for the engagement with the Diaspora as agents for economic development.

Zimbabwe paid a heavy fiscal price to educate and skill up a lot of the people who emigrated before giving back.

Most of the people that went to State Universities in Zimbabwe were on Government loans and grants. The grant was a privilege given to the people by a caring Government. However, the loan component was what it was.

A debt that still needs to be paid (Zimbabwe’s dry coffers would benefit greatly from this. Thank you very much). This was noble deed.

It was meant to be the propellant to an economic boom. Some other countries now benefit from those sacrifices. Not harnessing this obvious investment is like a farmer who did everything right for his crops but regrettably neglected to harvest.

For Zimbabwe to realise the economic resurgence which everyone knows it has potential for, its politicians and technocrats have to start thinking laterally. In that economic activity can pick upward swings by simple solutions such as allocating stands for construction to those in the Diaspora who are hungry for houses.

A boom in the construction industry would have a multiplier effect in the rest of the economy as it stimulates vertical and horizontal activity everywhere. This increases aggregate output of the whole economy and employment which we are hungry for.

From the USA to Singapore, all these countries have benefited from promoting construction through projects for their middle-class. This also has the dual effect of further investment by those Diasporans that have already poured money in the country through housing. Attachment breeds loyalty.

This is where Mark Twain said that loyalty to one’s country is always, but loyalty to one’s government is when it deserves it. In the same vein, if the very good Government of Zimbabwe wants loyalty from its Diaspora then a lot more engagement is needed.

But their loyalty to the country should never be questioned. A business as seal approach is not going to work. Not in this dispensation. This is a cutting edge era. It needs cutting edge approaches. Nothing short of that will ever bring cornucopia to the tables of Zimbabweans as well as widen the middle-class.

There has been a lot of efforts by those in the Diaspora to invest in Zimbabwe. The only problem is syndrome of sailing with the wind. That explains their over-representation in the transport sector. There is currently a situation whereby everyone who considers themselves a businessperson buys either a truck or a Kombi.

Granted, this sector is credited with employing about 40 000 Zimbabweans so it deserves to be venerated for this positive side and criticised for the avoidable reckless loss of life.

But whether this is entrepreneurship is highly contestable. One of the reasons why the Diaspora choose this line is because it has much less hoops than the gauntlet one has to run when they are coming to invest in innovative hitherto not tested ideas.

Supporting the middle-class includes making it very easy to register and set up business in Zimbabwe.

This is a process that would normally take just hours in other countries but anything from weeks to years in Zimbabwe. Ideologically, one cannot fault the Government of Zimbabwe’s emphasis on empowerment rather than aid.

It is empowerment that breeds a new crop of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is starting or developing a business model. Over the years the country has produced some very creative entrepreneurs but not just many enough.

Then there are those corporate opportunists who are bringing the noble Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Policy into disrepute.

They are corporate opportunists. Innovation does not come that way. Innovation creates and innovation is revolutionary. Like the Ruling Party. It is the middle-class which is supposed to be the bedrock of entrepreneurship.

A poor middle-class does not only hurt the economy, it will hurt the rich and the elite. It will hurt the poor as well because of lack of social mobility. Africa is still expected to have a third of its population considered poor by 2060.

This is a very unacceptable piece of statistics, which is an indictment on its leadership. It’s a call for dynamic forward-looking thrust to build the middle-class. Zimbabwe cannot underplay the role of corruption in the current economic malaise.

The middle-class plays a role even in issues of governance, they demand efficiency and quality of service from government. The middle-class care a lot about the quality of their children’s education, the reliability of water supplied as well as other infrastructural utilities. They demand value for money and/or accustomed efficiencies.

This should never be seen as a negative thing or unpatriotic. The middle-class’s desired quality of life is closely tied to the lifestyle which is commensurate with their social station. If this is delivered, it serendipitously pulls the whole country in an upwards direction.

Hostility to constructive criticism would only drag both the country and party down.

There should be a socio-economic move to buttress the role of the middle-class and promote Zimbabwe’s empowered peasantry into this group.

 

Nick Mangwana is chairperson Zanu-PF UK.