Published by the government of Zimbabwe
George Shire
18 March 2008
opinion
London — Politics is for the most part a matter of words expressed in certain ways, formats or locations to achieve certain effects.
It is about some people trying to persuade the rest of us of their virtues or the virtues of their political position. Politicians employ rhetoric intended to illustrate the ways in which their political programme will be good for us by associating it with positive ends and characteristics.
No one else can tell Zimbabweans what life in Zimbabwe is like or has been for the last 10 years despite the bizarre attempts by the BBC and many other international media institutions. Zimbabweans know only too well who have been the architects of the economic terrorism that has been visited on the country through the so-called ZIDERA and EU smart sanctions. They know who has been holding the country to ransom for choosing to determine its own destiny.
What is at stake in the forthcoming elections is the very future of the legacy of the liberation war, the consolidation of the land revolution, the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill, the provision of affordable public transport in all of Zimbabwe's 10 provinces to people in the rural areas, the continued growth of further and higher education, and perhaps, most importantly, the increased participation of women in all aspects of public life and Zimbabwean institutions.
Someone needs to remind the discredited former Minister of Finance that it is the reproduction of dual, unequal economies as effects of globalisation that render poorer societies more vulnerable to the culture of conditionality. Someone should remind him that the economic solutions to equality and poverty subscribed to by the IMF, his favourite institution, have the feel of a colonial ruler. Maybe that does not bother him that much.
After all he is independent. His love affair with neo-liberal doxa is what got him thrown out of the Cabinet and why he finds himself unable to remain inside Zanu-PF. His "academic" friends have warped ideas about how democracy is produced and have not got the faintest idea about how to form an alliance with the people. In their hands the machinery of the State is not accountable to anybody and they are a sure guarantee to a rapid descent into fascism. That is why they like the idea of being "independents".
Despite their rhetoric, they are a class that is only interested in domination. Like a two-headed snake, they move in all directions. They tell us all the time that they want to be friends with the West. They conveniently forget that the constitutive hidden side of modernity is coloniality. It is the hidden logic of coloniality that justifies their involvement in the drafting of ZIDERA and their silence on the crippling effects of the not-so-smart sanctions. Their sloganeering shows a real capitulation to the exigencies of globalisation from the North and real abandonment of a substantive commitment to the economic liberation and freedom of the people. In a famous passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes: "The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure."
He goes on to say: "What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be." In today's language Fanon's call for redistribution of wealth goes beyond the rhetorical pieties of the "independents".
It speaks to the popular movements and social institutions that demand debt cancellation; it is about those health initiatives that see the availability of generic drugs for HIV-Aids as an economic necessity for the right to life and human capability; it is about restructuring international trade and tariffs; it is about democratising the governance of global institutions in favour of equitable assistance and redistribution; it is about strengthening regional institutions and developing a critical regionalism.
Meanwhile in Britain, Gordon Brown is at it again. The BBC reports that he is contemplating banning all Zimbabwean sports men and women from entering Britain. He is enthusiastically supported in this by the Zambian (or is it Kenyan) migrant-cum-Zimbabwean cricketer Henry Olonga and the MDC. Add to this list Nkosana Moyo who is doing the rounds in London rallying support for Simba Makoni.
Gordon Brown, despite his missionary economic solutions for Africa, would love to see that system of consumption in which the West continues its parasitical relationship with the post-colonial world. He is no friend of the British people either. He presides over a decaying project and driving everybody to learn to love Powellite ideas about Britishness. What he has in common with the MDC is an unflinching desire to see the privatisation, the selling-off of Zimbabwe's assets to the highest bidder, large corporations and the West. Thanks to him and his New Labour cronies, many British people now use the name of Robert Mugabe to frighten their own children to go to bed.
He does this to divert attention away from how the New Labour project has failed the British people. He is no different from David Cameron either. Solidarity with this lot is bad news for Southern Africa and bad news for the British people as well. The MDC's fantasy that Gordy and George Bush will come to their rescue is serious wishful thinking. Only Zimbabweans are their own liberators.
Another passage from Fanon is worth reading. He writes: "Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of an oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. The effect consciously sought by colonialism is to drive into the natives' heads the idea that if settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality."
This passage should be made compulsory reading to all those who subscribe to the idea that returning the patterns of land distribution that existed prior to "Hondo ye Minda" is a good thing or those who are opposed to the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act. It is a good passage to share with those young and gullible people who flock to MDC rallies for a mug of Chibuku.
People who advocate privatisation as an alternative to the State are criminals. Zimbabwe's public infrastructure has been built by public money. It belongs to the people. It does not belong to Tsvangirai Private Limited incorporated in Australia. He is an embarrassment to the good people of Buhera. His and his party's policies are wrong.
Should he win, Zimbabwe will become a society riven with enormous inequalities in income, wealth and power, with key decisions taken by a minority of international financiers and industrialists. These are the people he talks about when he mouths off about inviting international experts to come and help Zimbabwe. The MDC's fascination with supply side economics is borrowed word for word from their erstwhile godfather Tony Blair. It's a hotch-potch of new monetarism. They are convinced that markets are in essence good, and market actors rational. It is nothing more than political expediency. It is business that precipitated the economic crisis.
Seeking to maintain the confidence of the finance capital and secure the consent of those rich and powerful in business will only spell doom for ordinary people. Voting for them will be the making of a legendary disaster for Zimbabwe and the Sadc region. I have just one more thing to say to Simba Makoni, Ibbo Mandaza, Nkosana Moyo and Dumiso Dabengwa and that is: "You can cut the branches of the tree of liberty, but you cannot destroy the roots because they are too strong and too many." Stay with your U-turns and right turns. Yours are the economics of the fat man at the heavily-laden dinner table who does not have a choice of three different kinds of roast beef.
The revolution will live on after March 29. Much depends on everyone who can vote to exercise that vote freely for the political party that stands for the spirit of Pan-Africanism. In my view, that is Zanu-PF.
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And Mugabe's regime is better for the poor than the colonialists were? I've been actively oppose to IMF style global polices for 35 years. I materially supported the Revolution in Zimbabwe,but Mugabe is a monster.I oppose him for exactly the same reasons i oppose colonialism,neocolonialism,neoliberalism etc.He cares only for his own advantage not for the common good.
The saddest thing about this absurd article, for the most part factually inaccurate and historically illiterate, is that it exploits the genuine grievance many Africans righteously feel for their treatment over decades at the hands of an inequitable 'global' market. Can Mugabe - and such ridiculous mouthpieces as this 'George Shire', a.k.a. presumably some semi-literate hack in the department of propaganda, a.k.a. the herald newspaper - not understand that by employing the rhetoric of economic emancipation for black Africa in pursuit of their own morally bankrupt and historically ruinous politics of survival they merely make the struggle for economic fairness throughout Africa, and most clearly in their own benighted Zimbabwe, that much more difficult?