By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE new dispensation in Zimbabwe has so far concentrated on setting economic and social ‘milestones’.

Vision 2030, re-engagement, debt-repayment and debt-clearance, together with The Transitional Stabilisation Programme, are all ‘milestone’-like indicators.  

But as one philosopher has quipped: mere stations of life and stations in life do not constitute life itself.  

Ernest Schachtel, cited by Professor Mary Daly in Pure Lust pointed out that “Adult memory (in advanced capitalist society) reflects life as a road with occasional signposts and milestones rather than as a landscape through which the road has led.” 

The landscape is a strategic concept requiring the matching of theory to local practice and conditions.

That social and political landscape, on the other hand, was described by David C. Korten in The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, as a value-filled and value-based field:

“The culture of human society is much like what physical scientists call a field… A field is a universal force that permeates space and exerts influence over matter… Fields are by definition invisible and may be detected and measured only by their material effects (on those occupying the relevant terrain).

Similarly, cultures are invisible organizing fields of societies. Though cultures permeate our social spaces, they (become) visible only in the behaviour of the (population) who share their values and perceptions. 

They are as essential to any explanation of the coherent function of a society as electromagnetic and gravitational fields are to explaining the organization of matter.”

Now, coming specifically to economic reforms and political reforms in Zimbabwe, too many leaders and followers alike do not seem to show economic astuteness to the same extent that they have shown political astuteness.

On a global scale, neo-liberalism is an overarching ideology which, since the early 1980s, has infected almost all sectors; politics, diplomacy, economics, culture and media.

The paradox for Zimbabwe is that the majority have been able to detect, recognise and reject the political agenda of neo-liberalism because of the form which this has assumed; an agenda to remove the Government as a liberation movement in power and to wipe away its whole legacy coercively and unconstitutionally.  

This agenda has been represented most clearly by the politics of the Movement for Democratic Change with its incompatible elements using foreign sponsorship and invited economic sanctions to glue together white settler-capitalist interests; the labour movement elite; disgruntled intellectuals; the financial elite; and the local representatives of foreign capital.  

These incompatible elements have become unstuck and the bankrupt nature of neo-liberal politics in a struggling Third World country has been exposed.  

Even the most ardent supporters of the MDC now admit that this party’s claim to represent democracy, transparency, accountability, human rights and common decency was a sham.  

The MDC was, in fact, characterised by intolerance, violence, anti-Africanism, self-hatred and double standards.  

This late awakening, especially among the corporate media supporters of the MDC is most welcome.  

The paradox for Zimbabwe, however, is that the popular rejection of the neo-liberal political agenda and ideology has not been extended to include a popular rejection of neo-liberal ideology masquerading as economic science. 

We have not yet taken on the economic pseudo-science of the equivalent of the MDC elites in the economic sector.  

This is astounding because the link between the two has at times been quite obvious.  

The industrial stayaways and so-called ‘final pushes’ were heavily subsidised and supported by the same forces in industry and finance who bank-rolled the MDC.

In short, Zimbabweans have been more successful at limiting neo-liberal political ideology to oppositional politics.  

They have not been as successful at preventing the neo-liberal economic pseudo-science from infecting the entire economic sector.  

The disastrous results stare us in the face today.

One reason for this failure to see the connection between neo-liberal political charlatanism and neo-liberal economic charlatanism is the poverty of economic reporting in our media.

Conventional journalism is almost useless when applied literally to economic stories: Who did what, when, where and how? Or who said what, when, where and how?  

That is the conventional mantra for reporting.

Without ideological grounding, we see conflicted positions and conflicting or competing interests as straightforward and harmonious when in fact they are not.

As Tom Koch demonstrates in The News as Myth, this formula insures that we accept a story as true just because the reporter has been able to attribute it to someone who can be placed in time and location.  

This formula substitutes attribution and facticity for truth.  

It is therefore most unhelpful to those people who seek information for understanding the world.  

And business and economic reporting is mostly useless unless it helps our understanding of economic activity, economic theory, economic strategies and their connection to politics.

Let us, as an illustration, take the story doing the rounds since 2006 in Harare, in which the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC) and the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) have been demanding the privatisation of strategic parastatals as a means of reducing Government expenditure and cutting down the deficit.

This demand to sell off more parastatals is made totally out of context and the reporters are also omitting the critical context, since they are satisfied that the formula: Who said what, when, where and how has been met.

There are considerations to take into account before taking seriously any businessman or business organisation calling on the state to privatise public assets.

The first consideration is whether the majority of the people of Zimbabwe, on whose behalf Government controls those public assets, indeed share the same assumptions as the businessmen.  

The businessmen are saying selling off 

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parastatals would attract foreign private partners to buy the assets jointly with local ones; cut down on state expenditure, since the state would no longer have to take over parastatals’ deficits and debts; create employment; generate economic growth; and earn Government tax revenue instead of unwanted debt.

What the businessmen and the journalists giving them coverage have not been telling the reader is that all these supposed great benefits are based on dubious neoliberal assumptions which have been tried for the last 40 years in more than 100 countries and have mostly failed.

Because of failure in most of those 100 countries, the originators and promoters of the theories and assumptions have been making minor and incremental changes to the same neoliberal economic agenda without questioning the whole basis.  

As the authors of African Voices on Structural Adjustment have noted:

“What is surprising, however, is that such ‘paradigmatic shifts’ and ‘add-ons’ have not been translated into any fundamental rethinking of the goals, designs, and policy instruments of SAP, nor have they led to any efforts to evolve an internally consistent framework.”

Indeed, what has been lacking since 1990s is this “internally consistent framework.” 

The champions of privatisation have not tested their assumptions against the real economic reality and experience of Zimbabwe.  

They even ignore the very sanctions which we are supposedly united to resist.

The authors conclude that there is a huge, yawning, gap between the day-to-day realities of African economic life on one hand and the neoliberal assumptions made about it.  

The problem is that: “What one sees is ultimately dependent, not only on where one stands but perhaps also on what he chooses to see and how he does so with one eye closed or with dark glasses on.”

In this case, the reporters should always ask on behalf of their readers: Who are the CZI and ZNCC?  What is the profile of their membership? What is the orientation of their leaders and followers?  What do they stand to benefit individually from privatisation even if such privatisation does not benefit the majority?

Next, is the task to explain neoliberal privatisation in context.  What is privatisation?  How did it become necessary and for whom?  How, why and by whom was it put on the African agenda?

Privatisation is a strategy employed by capitalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s to get the global capitalist economy out of what political economists call the crisis of over-accumulation.

Capitalism is dynamic as long as there is constant and continuous movement in economic factors.  

The capitalists call this economic ‘growth’. 

But in the 1980s the global system stagnated.  

It was characterised by a glut of manufactured goods which no one was buying.

The first strategy was to entice hundreds of countries into debt.  

The loans would be used first to buy the huge inventories no one was buying.  

The next strategy was to deepen the debts through high interest rates so that they could not be sustained.  

Many countries were bankrupted.

Then, when debts became unsustainable, the public assets of the debtor countries were forcibly privatised as a pre-condition for further ‘aid’ or debt rescheduling, as it is often called.  

Hardships resulting from sanctions are being used as a good reason to sell the parastatals and make quick foreign currency.  

Yet our ancestors told us never to go shopping for clothes when we are already naked.

The global corporations and financial institutions which were once faced with a stagnant glut economy suddenly acquired both new markets (financed through borrowing) and new cheap assets through coercive privatisation of the public assets of debtor nations.  

In other words, the so-called privatisation of unproductive or uncompetitive public assets is in fact the looting of public assets by uncompetitive and unproductive private corporations who suddenly begin to grow again at the expense of the public, once privatisation has been implemented.

Why do we use the term ‘looting’.  

We use the term looting because the clamour for privatisation comes after the clamour for and implementation of currency devaluation.  

The devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar in 2006-2007 (from where it was worth 3 US dollars to where more than 100 000 Zimbabwe dollars became equal one US dollar) meant that our assets and our labour became dirt cheap for those who held foreign currency.  

It meant our currency was devalued by 300 000 times between 1980 and 2007.  

In 2018-2019 new devaluations happened again.

In other words, from a strategic long term perspective, this is the worst ever time to privatise public assets.  

The foreign market value of the Zimbabwe Bond Notes, and RTGS is at its lowest since 2009.  

This also means that the foreign market value of the labour and skills of our people is also at its lowest since 2009 in relation to those who hold foreign currency.  It is the best time for foreign currency speculators and saboteurs to rip us off.

Those among our people who clamour for the quick sale of our assets to the highest bidder are either speaking on behalf of foreign interests or they have been promised exclusive access to foreign currency which can make it easy for them to get the privatised assets for a song.

In short, journalists in Zimbabwe have done a poor job of reporting economic issues.  

They have shied away from criticizing neoliberal economic fallacies, unlike the ways in which they have tried to criticise neoliberal political fallacies.  

The problems of economic reporting can be summarised therefore as follows:

First the stories lack historical and macro-economic context.  

There is absolutely no sense of political economy in the reporting. How are the already privatised parastatals, such as Dairy Board, behaving towards the people?

Second, there is always a glaring lack of a conceptual framework which helps to organize and structure the economic activities and outcomes being promised.  Most commentators know only about economics but they do not have any real regard for the real-life economy of Zimbabwe.  

Parastatals in history have been created to provide service or production in an area where private companies have refused to invest or have failed to invest.  At present there is a massive failure by private companies to meet the basic needs of the majority of Zimbabweans.  Why should those same companies buy and control even more assets?

If there is no law actually barring the private sector from investing in the sector or area where there is a glaring need, then the cry for privatisation is really a demand to loot the stock which government has already built up.  Why privatise a public hospital system?  

If the private sector believes it can do a better job at health provision, let it build its own hospitals.  

Let the existing private hospitals provide cheaper and better services than state hospitals.

One does not have to be an economist to realise that high inflation and interest rates make it too risky and too expensive for companies to build new buildings, roads, railways and steel factories.  

That is why the private sector must clamour for ready built parastatals with infrastructure which is solid and durable.  

The market value of such ready-built stock is relatively negligible, given the massive currency devaluations.

In conclusion, while neoliberal capitalism has made itself global and almost universal, Madzimbahwe must always remember what Rachel Carson has said about tides:

“The tides present a striking paradox, and the essence of it is this: the force that sets them in motion is cosmic, lying wholly outside the earth and presumably acting impartially on all parts of the globe, but the nature of the tide at any particular place is a local matter, with astonishing differences occurring within very short geographical distance.

Now, neoliberal economics and its ideology are not even cosmic like rules of gravity.  

Which is the reason why these must at least be scrutinised for applicability to local conditions, if not resisted altogether!