By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE recently concluded congress of the National Liberation War Veterans Association in Masvingo was a classic demonstration of how people can be inspired to ‘break through the nexus of terror, deprivation and escape’ in order to reclaim and assert their own narrative of the reality in which they live and work.
Among many critical decisions, the liberation war veterans resolved no longer to confine themselves to the role and status of a welfare organisation.
They vowed to fight corruption and pursue an active role in economic debate and decision making.
The hostility of the Rhodesian rump economy to Zimbabwe’s land revolution still lingers among economists today and has been generalised so as to blame all economic difficulties on the radical nationalism represented by war veterans.
The sample stories included the following among many:
‘Black Friday 17th Anniversary’, The Herald Business, November 14 2014, being an economistic and financialist interpretation of the decision by the state in 1997 to pay a gratuity to vetted liberation war veterans and to put them on a pension scheme.
The Herald Business story compared that 1997 state decision on war veterans with Zimbabwe’s equally momentous 1998 decision to lead SADC forces into the DRC war against a Western-sponsored genocidal invasion of that country and concluded that:
“(The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) angrily reacted to the unbudgeted expenditures by stopping financial aid immediately thereby leaving Zimbabwe’s economy in an unprecedented free-fall.”
In other words, the day Zimbabwe gave a token of appreciation to its liberation war heroes is condemned by so-called economists as ‘Black Friday’.
The value of society’s relationship with its liberation war heroes is reduced to a mere cost or price.
‘Zim’s Poverty-Datum-Line (PDL) too high – – Mangudya’, Zimbabwe Mail Business, November 18 2014, in which Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Dr John Mangudya regretted the fact that Zimbabwe’s poverty-datum-line is the highest in the SADC region just, as the country’s government wage bill at 75 percent of total expenditure is also way above the regional average of 18,4 percent. The RBZ Governor said this while avoiding to explain that the key reason for this discrepancy is that all the SADC neighbours use their own currencies for internal expenditure while Zimbabwe continues to use as disposal income its US-Dollar earnings which should be valued strictly as foreign currency reserves. The reporter included in the story the following unchallenged reason given for the high wage bill average and the PDL in Zimbabwe:
‘(Dr Mangudya) said salaries in Zimbabwe were too high because they were calculated per family and not per individual, which makes them higher that the rest of the sub-region,’ he said.
‘It is an opportune time for Zimbabwe to move away from referencing PDL for a family of 5 to individual PDL in line with international best practice given the change in the structure of the economy.’
Yet calculating PDL on the basis of an average family of five cannot be the fundamental problem and cause of the high wage bill average and high PDL.
This was the practice during the Zim Dollar era but it did not result in such a big difference then between Zimbabwe and SADC.
Secondly, how can the Governor argue that it is international best practice to calculate PDL based on the individual (not family) and not go further to say that it is also international best practise for nations to use their own national currencies for internal payments, unlike what Zimbabwe has been doing since 2009?
Then there were stories on the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority’s assumption that it could continue to beat its own records in revenue collection through the intensification of harsher and harsher methods of collection, again with no thorough look at the nature and location of the whole economy.
Yet revenue collection continued to decline despite ZIMRA’s adoption of harsher and more rigorous techniques of revenue collection.
It was not surprising therefore when cross-border informal traders meeting First Lady Amai Dr Grace Mugabe on November18 2014 singled out ZIMRA as a threat to poor people’s livelihoods, as an aggressive agency which did not really understand the realities of the economy in which it sought to tax people.
ZIMRA zimurume rinosimbirira kukohwa gowo guru paminda isina kurimwa kana kudyarwa nokusakurwa, minda isina kuiswa mufudze.
Financialism/Financialisation: Price everything, value nothing
The common thread tying all the articles and stories cited here is the neoliberal use of price to distort or destroy value.
Price is a nominal toss; value is an enduring relationship.
The story on the 1997 gratuity paid to war veterans sought to destroy the value of our war heroes’ relationship with society by reducing it to a mere cost and framing it as ‘Black Friday’.
How do we explain enduring value as opposed to cost?
In Genesis 3 verse 8, God says, for instance:
‘I know the sufferings of my people;
and I have come down to
deliver them out of the land of
the Egyptians and to bring
them up out of that land to
a good and broad land,
a land flowing with milk and honey, to the land of Canaan.’
Here, milk, honey and Canaan are values not prices, not trophies.
They are collective values representing the optimal relationship between the nation and the Creator.
How can the nation’s first efforts to value liberation war veterans be referred to as ‘Black Friday’ the 17th?
The Herald Business story on November 14 2014 indirectly blamed the war veterans for the destruction of our national currency and, by implication, for the failure of the economy to recover fully.
It failed to give the reader the full historical context of the year 1997 in terms of the failure of ESAP; the resurgence of the popular African land reclamation movement against the Lancaster House constitution; the racist provocations by the internal Rhodesian rump encouraged by the British Labour Government’s Minister for International Cooperation Ms Clare Short, who declared that Britain bore no responsibility at all for the dispossession of the African nation by British settlers in Zimbabwe; and the fact that, contrary to the neo-Rhodesian caricature of the war veterans, the majority of the recipients of the gratuity in 1997 in fact put the money to excellent use.
Many built houses in which their families live to-day.
What is even worse, The Herald Business failed to research the reasons why it took from 1980 to 1997 for the state to offer something substantial to the liberation war heroes and why this first gesture took the form of a gratuity.
An explanation of that history would have made The Herald Business readers understand even better why the same liberation war veterans have adopted a strong anti-corruption posture in the run-up to the 2014 ZANU PF Congress next month.