By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ON February 20 2020, both NewsDay and The Daily News published a story based on one event; a meeting held the day before between so-called ‘captains of industry’ in Matabeleland and new Industry and Commerce Minister Sekai Nzenza.

NewsDay’s version was titled ‘Sanctions a cheap excuse for (Government) failure, industry tells government’, while The Daily News version was titled ‘Stop Moaning about Sanctions’.

According to the two papers, it was the view of both the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) and the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC) that Zimbabwe’s current economic situation was comparable to that of Rhodesia during UDI; that the UN-mandated sanctions on Rhodesia were comparable to the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (the US sanctions decree of 2001 on Zimbabwe); and that the only difference between the two cases was that Rhodesia triumphed and prospered while Zimbabwe is failing.  

Therefore, Zimbabwe’s failure or difficulties were due solely to the incompetence of the Government and had nothing to do with the illegal and racist sanctions typified by ZDERA.

The speakers did not attempt any actual analysis of ZDERA (imposed in 2001) in relation to the 1965 UN sanctions.  The speakers presented no factual analysis of Zimbabwe’s real time economic experience from 2001 to-date.

And what was the sole evidence for supporting this claim by the ‘captains of industry’?  

Well, it so happened that these ‘captains of industry’, on a previous tour of Bulawayo, had seen a few relics of ‘old beer brewing chambers’ bought from Europe and smuggled into Rhodesia despite sanctions. 

This was evidence of triumphant sanctions busting by white Rhodesia which Zimbabwe was apparently failing to carry out.

Readers of The Patriot may remember that on August 3 2018, this column dealt with the uses and abuses of false analogies under the title Impatience with History, False Analogies and Political Shortcuts.

The CZI and ZNCC officials, at the meeting with the Minister of Industry and Commerce, were in fact talking very familiar partisan politics and doing nothing new.

A single set of relics of beer brewing chambers from Europe or Mars could never in any respectable forum be employed as anywhere near sufficient evidence to draw an analogy between the 1965 UN sanctions and the 2001 ZDERA decree.

It might help readers to review some examples of similarly false analogies:

• In 1956, when the British Government wanted to overthrow the Egyptian Government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, they unleashed media propaganda to frame him as a ‘new Hitler’.  The Rhodesians used the same tired analogy and tactic against the late former President Robert Mugabe long before independence in 1980.

• It is interesting to notice that the MDC and its allies later recycled the same tactic of framing Mugabe as leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union which had been used before 1980. Mugabe was portrayed as an ‘African Hitler’ again by MDC supporters after 2002.

• When the people of Chile finally got rid of their CIA-imposed dictator and murderer Augusto Pinochet in 2000, the MDC and the British tried to create a false analogy between the late former President Mugabe and Pinochet, Zimbabwe and Chile.

• When Indonesian President Suharto resigned in May 1998, the forces who later formed the MDC tried to create an analogy between President Mugabe and President Suharto, Zimbabwe and Indonesia.

• When in 2001 President Didier Ratsiraka of Madagascar was defeated in a power struggle by Marc Ravalomanana, the MDC and its allies again tried to equate Madagascar with Zimbabwe, President Ratsiraka with President Mugabe and new President Ravalomanana with MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. But that is not how history happens.

• When, in April 2004, the US and the EU finally overthrew the government of former Yugoslavia after waging an illegal NATO war against that country, the MDC and its allies created a false analogy between Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe, President Slobodan Milosovic and President Mugabe.  They fantasised that they “…could do a Milosovic” against Mugabe just like the Serbian collaborators with Europe and America had done.

Indeed, the false analogies are endless and they illustrate two things: an attempt to gloss over the national state’s need for independence, to ignore or devalue the nation’s need for liberation and the people’s demand for revolution against the forces of imperialism; and a dismal failure to engage in independent, original readings of historical reality.  

The MDC’s readings and projections were mostly based on mass media speculation and propaganda.  

The most notorious one being The Daily News story of February 21 2001 predicting that the late former President Mugabe and his ZANU-PF Government would be overthrown by the opposition by June 2001.

All these analogies were wrong and have been proven wrong as bases for national political choice and decision. And in Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Robert Jervis suggests that:  “When interpretation of the past is strikingly incorrect it is likely that it was influenced by current preferences rather than the other way around.” 

In other words, it was not a deep understanding of the real histories of Indonesia, Madagascar, Iraq, Chile, Germany or Yugoslavia within the MDC which caused those ridiculous analogies to be made.  

Rather it was the publisher’s and the editor’s current preference for Euro-American aggression and hegemony which caused the papers supportive of the opposition to gloss over the profound significance of Yugoslavia, Milosovic and other issues so easily and cheaply.  

The prejudices of editors and opposition leaders happened to coincide, with the result that our history was grossly distorted.

The over reliance on one type of analogy over and over again in international relations is usually caused by ignorance and narrow- mindedness or by sheer propagandistic mischief or laziness.

In the words of Jervis, citing Norwood Hanson:  “Suppose no alternative systems or concepts were available with which to describe and explain a type of phenomenon, the scientist would then have but one way of thinking about the subject matter.  It would then always make sense to adjust (or force) the data (to fit) the theory (or ideology) because the latter could not be abandoned.  A decision–maker whose conceptual framework is dominated by a few (narrow) categories will fit events into them quickly and on the basis of little information.” 

This is one reason for the endless recycling of the false analogy between UN sanctions on Rhodesia in 1965 and the current ZDERA.

Error of analogy by CZI and ZNCC

• Rhodesia was a white colony of about 250 000 (one quarter of a million whites at most) using millions of enslaved Africans to enrich the white minority.

• This means that the whole economy was meant to cater for a white population about one quarter of the population of today’s Harare!

• The purpose of the UN sanctions against Rhodesia was primarily to enable Britain, the responsible imperial power, diplomatically to manage the Third World, especially African anger.  That was why Britain, Europe and the US were at the same time at the forefront of busting the same sanctions on behalf of their white kith and kin.  US violations of the UN embargo culminated in the Byrd Amendment of 1972 through which the US openly declared its white imperial interests to be an exception to UN sanctions.  That is why Mobil Oil Company became the chief supplier of crude and refined oil to Rhodesia with the British and the EU looking the other way. That is why Professor Gerald Horne titled his study of the US-led white interest in Smith’s UDI “From The Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980”. The white nations were, in real terms, at war against African liberation movements and in support of white rule; but they had to disguise that support because of the position taken by the Organization for Africam Unity, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee against UDI and apartheid.

• All the major white powers allowed white mercenaries to come to Rhodesia to fight Africans in support of whites.

• The Western media were not only predominantly supportive of white Rhodesia; but in the US, the Evangelical churches that now back Donald Trump, in fact, organised their media to support Rhodesia.

One such influential evangelist was Dr Carl McIntyre whose support for white Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa could be heard on more than 600 radio stations across the entire US for 30 minutes every day for six days a week.  The US hosted one of the biggest lobbies supporting Rhodesia, Katanga and South Africa throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

In fact, as late as 1979, former US Ambassador Elliot Skinner wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that: “Our (Western) tragedy is that, whether we like it or not, the United States has inherited the role of metropole or mother country of all the whites in Southern Africa.  This is not a role we welcomed, but it is one we cannot avoid… We are the ones who have led discussions about the future of these countries (meaning Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa).” 

Before they appoint themselves as competent authorities on sanctions in the 21^st Century, CZI and ZNCC officials should at least study 21^st Century analyses of sanctions.  

One of the reasons sanctions imposed in 1965 cannot be compared lightly with those imposed after 2000 is the transformation of US capacity for surveillance of all global payment systems, especially as a result of the events of September 11 2001 and the subsequent blanket declaration of permanent ‘war on terror’ fought mostly through surveillance of all international financial flows.  

One relevant source of data on contemporary sanctions is the Mises Institute for whom Ryan McMaken, for instance, wrote: “The World Looks to Abandon the US Dollar as US Sanctions Tighten their Grip.”

Another source is the Rice Centre, for which David E. Anderson and Joy Gordon did research demonstrating that 21^st Century sanctions clearly violate human rights by focusing on the destruction of economies and the livelihoods of whole national populations. 

It is astounding to realize that the CZI and ZNCC officials actually failed to acknowledge that the triumphant Rhodesian white regime they admire so much was in fact defeated by guerilla armies who had no air power and no tanks and who were fed and maintained by impoverished peasants.  In what way then does white Rhodesia continue to be cited and praised as a success story for CZI and ZNCC?

How Real ‘Captains of Industry’ Would Have Responded to ZIDERA in 2000-2001

From listening to Zimbabweans talking about the business sector, the following expectations stand out as things which should characterise a truly Zimbabwean business leadership:

• A Zimbabwean business leadership would have had enough strategic business intelligence to recognise as a threat to them and their customers the draft of the so-called Zimbabwean Democracy and Economic Recovery Bill (now an act) when it was being drafted here by white Rhodesians and the MDC in 2000.  That bill is now the US sanctions law on Zimbabwe passed in 2001.

• A Zimbabwean business leadership would have quickly put together a private sector strategy to kill the sanctions bill before it became US law and that strategy would have solicited the support of their US colleagues.  The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) is not only racist and illegal, it is also anti-business.  

• Even now, there would be no doubt among Zimbabwean citizens as well as politicians where the business leadership stood in relation to the US-UK sanctions and what this leadership was doing to defeat the same.  The absence of a collective business voice against ZDERA is the most striking comment on business leadership in Zimbabwe.  That was needed back in 2000 while ZDERA was still a proposal.

• Moreover, the same business leadership would be the first to acknowledge that the country is in a state of economic war and to provide detailed tips to business, to their own customers and to the state on how best to survive and win the war.  The absence of such a collective strategy is again a sad and striking comment.

• Instead of speculating about inflation, instead of raising prices on the basis of speculative guesses, the business leaders would design a national plan to retain their businesses and customers by sharing both costs and profits with customers, meaning that they would opt to reduce profit margins in order to retain market share, in order to retain consumer confidence,and in order to shorten the ‘crisis’.  Unfortunately, the approach which the business leaders took (and which the late Erich Bloch confirmed in his Zimbabwe Independent column on March 30 2007) was the exact opposite, guaranteed to stretch the crisis for as long as the Government and its majority supporters refused to collapse.  Instead, almost all significant businesses guessed and calculated inflation only upwards. 

• A true Zimbabwean business leadership would have recognised that a new economic situation requires the retraining of both employees and customers in order to maintain a good relationship.  Both employees and customers would be assisted to understand each other’s position and needs, thereby to become more courteous and considerate toward one another. On the contrary, business-customer relations in Zimbabwe remain truly barbaric.  

• Zimbabwean citizens expect business leaders to know how to create and conserve a business environment which will prosper businesses and the communities in which their customers live.  This is never the responsibility of the state alone in any country.  And this cannot be achieved through selective and often manipulative public relations exercises and charitable donations made in front of the camera.