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Language, economics and value creation

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN my last instalment for this column I dealt with Speaker of the National Assembly Advocate Jacob Mudenda’s complaint that intellectuals and academics did not offer constructive critiques of the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-ASSET).
If Dr Vimbai Gukwe Chivaura were still alive today, he would, upon hearing such a complaint, ask why Parliament did not put Zim-ASSET into Shona, siNdebele or Tonga.
In fact, he would go further to ask why Zim-ASSET was not conceptualised in an indigenous language before being put into English, that is, if it was really a national economic blueprint for the people of Zimbabwe as alleged.
But even for intellectuals and academics fluent in English, Zim-ASSET is no more than a mouthful of meaningless jargon with no real relationship to the daily economic life of the people.
A genuine and sustainable national blueprint has to be named in a way which speaks clearly about what it seeks to achieve for the people.
The contradiction I want to address is the persistent use of fugitive English (that is, English meant to distance the speaker from the povo or to bamboozle the povo) for the purpose of communicating policies and programmes which would, under normal conditions and if genuine, require mass mobilisation of the same povo to succeed in the national interest.
According to scholars Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintes:
“The economy (including the use of money and language) produces people. The production of commodities may be considered of quite minor importance except as a necessary input into people production.
Our critique of the capitalist economy is simple enough: the people production process – in the workplace and in schools – is dominated by the imperatives of profit rather than by human need.”
So, where our politicians, technocrats and businessmen are singing about the three P’s – public-private partnerships – I am thinking of four P’s which are quite insidious and which explain the people production functions of language, money and the economy, resulting in an often unexplained and unnoticed chain linking principle to practice, to perception and to posture.
The first P (for principle) means that there is a destabilising imbalance at the level of fundamental principle because the embassy system regulated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not matched by a treasury and a central bank with their own national currency as an expression of the full principle of autonomy and sovereignty.
Likewise, the originality and creative genius of the 14 million people is not harnessed in their mother tongue.
So it has to be ignored or suppressed via fugitive English and its fugitive economics and imported culture.
The second P (for practice) means that in daily practice the people of Zimbabwe experience the raw, unmitigated and unmediated monetary and propagandistic power of the US whose species expression is the US dollar which has replaced their demonetised national currency as well as the unmitigated English language. This is like drinking gin or whisky straight from the bottle.
To appreciate the impact of this daily practice, the reader has to imagine the abolition of the Geneva Conventions and the abolition of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; so that the whole of Zimbabwe becomes a US Embassy or UK Embassy compound; so that as a daily routine the people experience US political and sovereign power raw and unmitigated on their own doorsteps.
That is what happens when fugitive English overwhelms local language and national idiom.
The third P (for perceptions) means that the direct daily exposure to the unmitigated and unmediated species presence of the US dollar and its language begins to alter the daily perceptions of the people from the reference point of US money and the English language: Perceptions of US power; perceptions of success and failure; perceptions of viability and bankruptcy; perceptions of Zimbabwe in relation to the US; perceptions of poverty and wealth; perceptions of who is ‘hardworking’ and who is ‘lazy’.
The persistent use of the Shona term murungu wangu for ‘my employer’ today is a direct residue of the perceived power of the white settler and his deployment of Rhodesian money as wealth.
The same applies to the designation of mwana wevhu as a ‘willing buyer’ of his/her own land in the Lancaster House Constitution of 1979!
The fourth P (for posture) means the people so exposed to the raw experience of US money, propaganda and culture, especially the young people, begin to assume an economic, political and ideological posture consistent with their daily experience of the imbalances I have outlined here, just as millions of Africans also changed their posture toward the Rhodesian settler-regime through their daily exposure to Rhodesian currency and English with Chilapalapa in daily use; through their daily exposure to white native commissioners, white magistrates, white missionaries, white managers and white policemen – all earning more Rhodesian money than themselves.
The children begin to notice the glaring gap between our revolutionary rhetoric and our daily financial, commercial and productive or unproductive practices being driven mainly by the pursuit of US money, the glorification of the English language and the cultivated failure to say and do important things for ourselves in our own language.
The fourth point of my conclusion concerned the logical implications of the principle of mediation and mitigation.
South Africa mediates and mitigates the raw power of US monetary decisions such as tapering through decisions of its own treasury and central bank who have their own currency, the rand, to deploy.
The fifth point of the conclusion is that the same capacity of the South African state to mitigate and mediate the impact of US monetary policies through the rand has also helped South Africa to take advantage of the absence of a Zimbabwean national currency; to take advantage of Zimbabwe’s use of an expensive US dollar in the place of a Zimbabwean currency.
While the expensive US dollars make Zimbabwean labour and goods too expensive even for Zimbabweans themselves, the weakening of the rand as a result of US tapering enables South Africa to export more and cheaper goods to Zimbabwe, further eroding any prospects for an early economic recovery in Zimbabwe.
In the end, despising our own national languages is directly linked to fear of creating, defending and popularising our own money.
That is why the RBZ and the Ministry of Finance cannot put the Bond notes policy into Shona, Sindebele or Tonga.
People therefore ask: Where is this country called ‘Bond’ which is going to give us ‘notes’ to use side-by-side with US dollars and in the place of our own money?
The lesson from colonial use of Chilapalapa as a crude lingo in the colonial factory and on plantations has two sides to it.
l It was a recognition of the principle that the settler-economy needed a local lingo.
l It was a way of denying the fact that African women, self-employed African men and peasants in general were also creating value for the entire colonial economy.
l The stunted Chilapalapa lingo was a back-handed, grudging recognition of the need for a language of the productive place.
In short, continuing reliance on fugitive English and the US dollar denies a commonsensical principle that most economies have their own language of value creation and their own money.
It also denies the fact that reliance on fugitive English and on foreign money actually alters our daily practices in the economy, in culture and in education.
It also denies the reality that once principles and daily practices are changed, public perceptions of reality are also changed and distorted.
Finally it also denies the fact that all these changes lead to a shift in posture, the stance that we take in defence of what is ours and in acceptance of/or resistance to foreign domination.
We have surrendered the four Ps to those whose language and money we use unmediated and unmitigated in the place of our own.

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