By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IT is no coincidence that at a time when the ordinary Zimbabwean feels most alienated and excluded from the current finance and payment system being enforced by finance authorities and institutions, the media are full of stories about ‘financial inclusion’ and ‘the ease of doing business’.
In my last instalment, I showed that media supporters of the finance authorities took the position that there was absolutely no confidence among all the people in the idea of our own money or in existing financial institutions.
Therefore we were stuck with the use of the destructive foreign currency in the place of our own money.
On the other hand, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development claimed to be building that non-existent confidence at times and at other times said they were protecting the same allegedly non-existent ‘confidence’.
What the media do not report is the fact that there is an elite minority which benefits from such policy confusion and confused discourse.
What is obvious from all this confused discourse is the fact of employing fugitive psychology against common sense and against the majority povo.
This is the context of Omen N. Muza’s article: ‘The psychology of currency management’ which I shall analyse later in this instalment.
I use the adjective ‘fugitive’ to underline a global struggle going on, pitting local sources, local content, local originality and local communities against so-called globalisation and run-away politics, run-away economics, run-away capitalism.
In the case of Zimbabwe, the challenge is an arrogant minority of derivative ‘technocrats’ and ‘economists’ who are incapable of adapting for local use and local relevance the ideas they have learned from around the world.
Therefore, economics and finance in Zimbabwe remain escapist.
The news media are full of stories about ‘border jumpers’ and refugees:
About refugees’ rights; about asylum seekers; and about human trafficking and trafficked people; and about US President Donald Trump rousing up a backlash movement of ‘Trampkins’ to throw out all undesirable immigrants from a nation built by immigrants and based on immigration.
The media are therefore dominated by spectacles and dreams of people driven by the idea that the grass is always greener over there if only we can get there; or if only we could borrow just one or two ideas from there to use here, then we would be home and dry!
If the issue is not escape to greener pastures, it becomes one of using clever gimmicks to attract foreign direct investment at any price, again from those greener pastures.
This is the framework of fugitive democracy; fugitive human rights; fugitive livelihoods; fugitive economics; fugitive finance — all practised away from home, from the people, in spite of the people and even against the people; which is the exact opposite of homecoming and local/indigenous content or even independence.
What is borrowed must be adjusted, carefully calibrated for local use.
We should not say: ‘Embrace technology’.
We should say: ‘Harness technology’.
We have been told that confidence in the idea of our own money does not exist; so we must get it from somewhere else; or that the authorities are building this confidence from scratch; but before they even put down a single brick we are again told that all along the financial authorities have been protecting this non-existent confidence from being destroyed by the ignorant povo.
So, in this column I have been inviting MaDzimbahwe and asking them if what we are hearing and reading makes sense.
Professor Tony Lawson, trying to moderate Rajan Kanth’s criticism of economics, wrote that:
“The scandal of the mainstream Western reductivist (economics) project is not in its conclusions but its lack of relevance (to society); its inability to provide an understanding of the real world.
In order to facilitate the deduction of statements in terms of actual phenomena (actual things, that is) social life in this mainstream framework is necessarily transformed (by the economist on paper), beyond recognition.
In ensuring that closure (or boxing) is achieved, so that deductivist modelling is able to proceed, realistic assessments are unavoidably abandoned in favour of, in effect, formulations in terms of isolated (that is fugitive) crypto-atoms.
And with the criterion or goal realisticness so abandoned it is easy enough to produce models that generate anything you want.”
It becomes futile therefore to ask to be ‘on the same page’ when you are not even on the same planet.
Since 2009 I have argued that the conversation about our money could not take off and make sense because the same elites supposed to provide leadership were in a conflict of interest situation.
They were the biggest exclusive beneficiaries of their own defective decisions about our money and yet also supposedly responsible for ending our destructive dependence on the US dollar which was benefiting them.
In such a situation it became necessary to blame the lack of confidence in our own money on the povo without ever consulting the same povo.
The most recent and most honest admission of this paradox is Owen N. Muzá article, ‘The Psychology of Currency Management’ which appeared in NewsDay Business on August 10 2017.
Muza is managing director, TFC Capital, Nottingham Trent University and has had experience on the editorial board of Global Trade Reviews (GTR), at Renaissance Merchant Bank Limited and at other financial institutions.
He is therefore one of the minority of financial elites in Zimbabwe and he has been quite close to the thinking of both RBZ and Treasury officials.
Muza’s NewsDay article can be paraphrased as follows:
The Zimbabwe population harbours negative neurotic impulses against the idea of the Zimbabwe dollar or any local national currency, let alone any efforts to return or restore such a currency.
For this reason, economics and finance in Zimbabwe cease to be matters of science or objective reality and must therefore be understood and managed through public psychology and the art of PR communication.
Although Treasury and RBZ officials swore in public at ZNCC and CZI meetings in Harare, Mutare, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls throughout the period from 2009 to date that the Zim dollar would never come back and that they were not planning to restore any local currency at all, deep down they have always agreed with those calling for restoration of local currency that the economy and the nation need a national currency.
The only problem has been how to overcome the supposedly entrenched and popular resistance of the povo against the idea.
So the only question left is when the local money will be announced not a question of if it will be restored.
Here I quote Muza:
“Given (the fact that) any mention of the re-introduction of the Zim dollar elicits a neurotic response from the long-suffering public (the povo?), the monetary authorities’ trick has been to continue reaffirming the existence of the multi-currency regime, which, as we now know, exists only in name and should actually be called the uni/mono-currency system on account of the US dollar’s dominance.”
In other words, according to Muza, the authorities have had to tread carefully around the alleged manic psychosis of the povo against the idea of our own money.
They have therefore been playing a psychological hide-and-seek game with the public, hoping for the optimal moment when Bond notes or something like that could quietly be smuggled into national circulation and baptised as the national currency without the povo knowing or understanding what is going on!

Foisting an elite psychology without society
While Muza’s article is correct about the wrong-headed thinking of the financial elite in this country, it also exposes the complete lack of common sense within the finance sector as well as a truly scandalous relationship between the policy makers in finance and the povo.
First of all, the fear, neurosis or lack of confidence which is the alleged problem has never been within the povo but within the city-based elites and their urban-based lumpen hustlers who collaborate with them in urban-based speculative activity. That is why the RBZ would talk to #Tajamuka/Sesijikile about Bond notes but not to peasants or farmers or chiefs.
Second, Muza himself admits that the povo happily welcomed Bond notes as if they were a national currency and that this surprised the financial elites who had encouraged and expected stiff rejection!
Muza is correct about such surprise.
The RBZ showed surprise when the povo welcomed Bond notes despite the fact that it took more than three months of just talk of the Bond notes before people could actually have them to use.
The three months was much lost time and lost production because it allowed the minority groups opposed to the idea of national money to de-campaign the Bond notes and to set up new means of defeating the same when they were finally made available!
In the third place the povo were never really the drivers of actions which destroyed the Zimbabwe dollar.
It was not a povo psychosis which led to the destruction of the currency.
Rather it was the combined effects of the orchestration of economic sanctions; financial warfare; regime change politics seeking economic implosion as the fastest track to political change and the internal speculative activities of the financial and political elites benefitting from ‘burning’ currencies, price gauging and externalisation.
Then as now, the big individuals and big corporate entities involved knew one another.
In the fourth place, from 2009 to 2016 the financial elites and the policy makers deliberately stoked the fear, psychosis and resistance against the idea of our own money at exclusive meetings of the CZI, ZNCC and other elite forums at Harare, Bulawayo, Mutare and Victoria Falls.
They never dared to do so at Binga, Chisumbanje, Tamandayi, Chiredzi, Zaka or Muzarabani.
In the fifth place, readers need to go back to an interview RBZ Governor Dr John Mangudya gave Independent Media online in September 2016 and was published in NewsDay on September 9.
In that interview, the RBZ Governor admitted that the authorities and their advisors over-reacted to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 by dollarising 100 percent and then proceeding to demonetise a currency which was already as good as dead.
Currencies of other nations have been compromised or even destroyed by hyperinflation and financial warfare before: Germany, Russia, Argentina, Zambia, Mozambique and Cuba. But those countries did not abolish the currency, since it in itself was not the problem.
These countries simply mobilised their people to explain the real problems so that the people themselves would participate in reclaiming, reviving and strengthening their own money by developing daily practical confidence in its utility and recovery.
Therefore the attempt to blame the povo for the rejection of our own money is a cruel hoax.
Even worse is the attempt to justify the slow path which the authorities are taking to bring back a national currency.
This slow incremental approach has simply allowed opportunities for a fast recovery to pass.
So the worst thing about the financial elites’ bogus psychology without society is that it excludes 14 million MaDzimbahwe from mobilising for their own economic recovery.
The psychology being applied by the elites and the monetary authorities is a psychology without society and without history.
It is fugitive psychology brought to the aid of fugitive economics.
The most fugitive aspect of this economics is that it does not count the cost of the approach being taken.
Nowhere in Muza’s article or in the various monetary statements is any realistic accounting done to demonstrate the cost of the policy to the ordinary person.
All the cash restrictions in place at the banks are punishing the wrong people, the pensioners and salary earners who have no choice but to get their pay through the bank.
The big offenders are well-known to the authorities and they are not punished via such restrictions.