By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
IN the articles by Brett Chulu which I cited in the last instalment, the author claimed he was being scientific when he used Gresham’s Law and Reverse Gresham to justify drawing a parallel between the challenges of reinstating a national currency in Zimbabwe today, on one hand, and the difficulties which the English monarchy under Edward VI encountered with its currency during the mid-16th Century.
At the same time, Chulu admitted that ‘confidence’ was the most critical factor when introducing a national currency.
In fact, all the economists agitating for dollarisation or re-dollarisation claim that the necessary ‘confidence’ is not there to support a national currency.
But they never go on to explain how their science of economics explains the causes of confidence and whether or not the opinions and polemics they themselves churn out every week in the local papers are ideological salvos meant to build or destroy ‘confidence’.
To them, the question of ideology and ideological stance does not apply because they happen to wear robes of social science objectivity.
Now, if the reader wishes to find out from the outset whether economists in Zimbabwe are practising objective science or not, he/she should start by objectively analysing how these economists are used by ideologically polarised local media outlets.
This would be a simple test of ideological alignment precisely because all the gatekeepers for the media outlets in Zimbabwe accept that they are terribly polarised along political and ideological lines.
If the reader were to carry out the exercise I am suggesting, he/she would find that the Zimbabwe Economic Society and most of the economists are split right in the middle between the two polarised media camps.
In fact, most of the opinions and polemics they write and publish here and abroad about the Zimbabwe economy are mere echoes of polarised politics.
So the issue is, how can economists who are being scientific become echoes of polarised politicians?
On one side, one tends to find writings by the following ‘economists’ even though some of them are accountants and not economists in their training:
John Robertson
Steve H. Hanke
Godfrey Kanyenze
Tony Hawkins and the late
Eric Bloch.
Vince Musewe and Eddie Cross also used to be in this group but changed slightly only after the new dispensation in 2017.
On the other side, the gatekeepers allow writings by the following economists:
Brains Muchemwa
Takunda Mugaga
Gift Mungano and
Persistence Gwanyanya
The former group is made up of those silent on sanctions as a factor and those who mention sanctions only in order to dismiss them as an important factor without of course explaining why the sanctions have been renewed every year since 2001 if they are not important.
Why would the US and EU give the Zimbabwe Government something to use as an excuse for economic failure if indeed sanctions are just an excuse?
The best way to expose the alleged incompetence of the Government would have been to stop sanctions altogether as soon as the ‘excuse’ was made.
If the reader were to refer back to the previous instalment which cited the US doctrine on psychological operations, he/she would find that the destruction of confidence is one critical purpose of Western propaganda. And the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) was meant as a weapon to destroy confidence in Zimbabwe’s finances.
But before dealing with the question of where confidence comes from, let me look at the use of pseudo-scientific objectivity and the use of supposed ‘experts’ for ideological and propaganda purposes in Western imperialism.
The ideological scaffolding used by the Anglo-Saxon powers and the sanctions lobby to throw mud at Zimbabwe in order to justify the illegal economic embargo and financial warfare may remain intact, even unnoticed, long after the sanctions have been removed because it has been there; it has been used to defame the entire African people since the days of slavery 500 years ago.
Any patriotic Zimbabwean who thinks about the criminal defamation of Zimbabwe, starting from our first moves to transform the 1979 Lancaster House Constitution (1992-2002), will be struck by the types of professions, vocations, disciplines and personalities employed to mount the campaign to defame and demean Zimbabwe: They all had to base their right to do what they were (and still are) doing on claims of vaunted objectivity (impartiality) or selflessness or both.
λ The false science of neo-liberal economics used to justify structural adjustment and to criminalise the African land reclamation movement and revolution in land tenure is pushed by objective-sounding economists and technocrats.
λ The false science of ‘human rights’ to denounce African leaders of liberation movements in government as either buffoons or terrorists is propped up by objective-sounding lawyers and human rights ‘experts’ claiming to be motivationally independent and ideologically innocent.
λ The false science of ‘universal’ international law used to deter national governments from using their sovereign rights to make and enforce their own laws is propped up by impartial-sounding human rights commissions and apartheid-like war crime tribunals claiming to be independent of even those who wholly finance their operations.
λ And the criminal humanitarianism which supports illegal economic warfare against innocent peoples in order to cause mass poverty which then invites charity is pushed by hordes of sponsored NGOs wearing missionary badges of selflessness.
One thing we learn from Professor Bernard Magubane’s book, Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other, is that vaunted objectivity (impartiality) and alleged selflessness have been the two most enduring characteristics of the professions, disciplines and vocations chosen or developed by Anglo-Saxon powers to attack and defame Africans and to extend and sustain white supremacy, especially through periods of crisis.
In the particular case of Zimbabwe, we can easily divide the organisations employed, between those using claims to objectivity and independence and those claiming to be selfless and, therefore, holy.
Those claiming to be objective and independent include: the Law Society of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights, Independent Journalists Association of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Media Lawyers, the Zimbabwe Economic Society and, of course, the ‘independent’ press and ‘independent journalists’.
Those claiming to be ‘selfless’, disinterested and therefore non-partisan are the hundreds of NGOs falling under the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (NANGO).
To understand what is involved, it helps to go back briefly to the manner in which white supremacy dealt with the crisis of the First British Empire and the need to create physical, moral and intellectual space in which to launch the Second British Empire. The problem was that theology and race prejudice alone were no longer able to cope with the end of the First British Empire and the condemnation and abolition of race-based enslavement of the African.
The careers of two British prophets of white supremacy and expansionism help to explain part of the answer to the crisis. According to Magubane:
“Robert Knox studied medicine at Edinburgh University and graduated in 1814. The following year he obtained a commission as assistant surgeon in the British army…on April 2 1817 he sailed for the Cape Colony [South Africa] where he served as a frontier army surgeon… In 1860-61, Knox was elected a Fellow of the Anthropological Society of London (ASL) and became curator of its Museum in 1862.”
This was in the middle of the US Civil War over the role of chattel slavery in capitalism and the fate of the African in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The second prophet, James Hunt, boasted that he was a student of Robert Knox and that he ‘imbibed’ everything which the surgeon-anthropologist taught him about the science of race.
“He attended Cambridge University and then the University of Giessen, where he earned a PhD in 1855 and an honorary MD in 1867.”
So both men fit the image objective, professional, dispassionate and rigorous men of science — experts.
White supremacist intellectuals and business interests of the 1860s felt threatened by the ideas behind the movement to abolish slavery as well as to give the vote to the white working class represented by the Chartist Movement in Britain and the 1848 revolution in Europe. What the system needed was a new body of ideas and propaganda which would divert the poor white revolt, keep the dark races in their place and relaunch the British Empire after its North American losses.
At first the Aborigines Protection Society was forced to branch into the Ethnological Society of London (ESL) in 1843. But the ESL was found by Hunt, Knox and Thomas Henry Huxley to be inadequate. The ESL was accused of being too limited to the use of geography, linguistics and philosophical speculation to be able to serve the new imperialism. So, Hunt “…left this group to found the Anthropological Society of London” which published the Anthropological Review which popularised the ideas and pseudo-scientific papers of Robert Knox and other anthropologists of race.
The complaint by white supremacists against the Aborigines Protection Society and Ethnological Society of London was that their work was not robust enough, not scientific enough, for the needs of the new age dominated by ‘science’ and industry; and not robust enough to silence those who believed in racial equality and one origin for human kind.
White supremacists wanted a ‘science’ which could prove separate origins and species of humanity and make Anglo-Saxons a species by themselves.
But the ‘scientific objectivity’ of Knox and Hunt regarding race and power did not amount to anything more than using observable differences among so-called varieties of human kind for the purpose of constructing a false ladder or hierarchy of 13 separate human species which arbitrarily placed the Anglo-Saxon at the top.
The ‘robust’ science of the ASL was used to defend slavery beyond the US Civil War and after the abolition of slavery.
It was also used to continue dehumanising the freed African slaves in particular and Africa in general.
As Magubane shows, it turns out that plantation capital based on slavery made generous donations to the ASL, just as today the ‘robust’ and objective campaigners against Zimbabwe also receive donations from imperialist powers.
So, today, ideological commitment explains why so many economists write about lack of confidence in Zimbabwe’s fiscal and monetary policies without explaining how their own science deals with the matter of confidence; without explaining whether Western sanctions were meant to build confidence in the first place; and without saying whether these economists’ own writings are meant to build or destroy that confidence.
Confidence in history
What of the allegations that MaDzimbahwe will not have confidence in their own national currency?
Confidence is not like a stone or a burning bush one stumbles upon and may be able to capture, hold and keep.
Confidence is cultivated, encouraged, nurtured and mobilised through people.
Often it requires fighting against lies, rumours and prejudices in order to create and uphold the confidence.
The US dollar was adopted in 2009 as our war currency during an economic war, the same way most Zimbabweans studying or travelling abroad accepted the British passport as a temporary war time identity document during the liberation struggle.
We had to put up with being called ‘British subjects from Rhodesia’ precisely because we knew that to be a temporary war necessity.
Ten years of dollarisation from 2009 to 2019 showed that it was a blunder to allow 100 percent dollarisation. Even now, partial dollarisation, through the granting of exceptions, is jeopardising the whole policy.
At independence in 1980, most people throughout the world had never seen a Zimbabwean passport.
MaDzimbahwe used British passports and passports of the Frontline States, especially Zambia and Tanzania, which were hosting and assisting the liberation movements of Zimbabwe.
But, come independence, the confidence and courage to conceive, design, publish and present a Zimbabwe passport was ours through our new Government of Zimbabwe.
There were those who, indeed, lacked such confidence and chose to remain British subjects. There were those who chose the US Green Card and remained in the US. But for the majority, once we were free we were also most proud to present our own passport and other travel papers as MaDzimbahwe. And the world welcomed us and our papers because we welcomed and respected them ourselves.
The same was true of our diplomacy. Before our liberation movements were recognised by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and by the United Nations (UN), it was hard to exercise our diplomacy, let alone appoint representatives. But once that recognition came, it was now a matter of extending it until it became almost universal.
The same can be said about the armed liberation forces in the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and the Zimbabwe Peoples Liberation Army (ZPRA). Outside the OAU, NAM and the Frontline States, ZANLA and ZPRA were labelled and denounced as terrorists. But after they brought our freedom and independence and they were moulded into one Zimbabwe Defence Forces institution, even our enemies honoured them and invited them to train others and to keep or enforce peace around the world. Because MaDzimbahwe were proud of their liberation forces, the rest of the world accepted and even praised them.
Why should it be different with the re-conception, redesigning, promotion and adoption of a national currency?
If economists want to be taken seriously on the issue of confidence, they must explain first why so many of their writings are mere echoes of the current political polarisation and, second, why they themselves never say whether they are out to build, thwart or destroy that ‘confidence’.