By Charles T.M.J. Dube

IN The Patriot issue of July 21 2017, Dr Tafataona Mahoso wrote an interesting article titled, ‘Economic jargon and the need for common sense’.
The article reminded me of when I used to run economic literacy programmes under the auspices of the Zimbabwe Council of Churches.
From this programme, it became apparent that most of our so-called formal education or epistemological sophistication was nothing more than just an organised re-packaging of common sense.
‘If you cannot have it understood by a four-year-old, then it does not make sense’.(Anonymous)
It all began somewhere and all began as common sense.
We had written up to Part Three on ‘How relevant universities are to our needs’ and Dr Mahoso’s commentary comes in handy as whatever solutions or programmes we will bring to the national table must be owned by all of us and so must reduce to common sense and not mere jargon known and understood by a select few.
Back to my digression within a digression, that economic literacy programme was quite an eye-opener, in terms of how commonplace some of the things we consider exclusive to the educated are.
In some of my classes, I could be having students at the level of scantly educated old women who had gone as far as Standard One or Grade Three.
I could be teaching them economics in Shona and taking them through micro and macro-economics, including monetary policy and public finance.
I started off with ‘O’-Level Economics, only to discover they had full grasp and were full of own examples. I went deeper to ‘A’-Level sort of analysis and we were still all comfortable.
It was amazing that even when I went to university level types of discussions, it was still familiar territory, just that they did not have terms or concepts for the economic phenomena.
At the end of the programme, they could follow through the budget presentation; had a clue about operations of the stock and money markets; and were also comfortable with domestic as well as international trade including budget deficits and public finance.
Apparently, they already knew about elasticity of demand from their own indigenous knowledge systems without having terms for them.
They were comfortable with indifference curve analysis and understood rational expectations.
I have always held the view that if you read the works of a good communicator, you should only open a dictionary for interest’s sake and only to improve your vocabulary as the writings must be understood even if you use what we used to call jaw-breakers (big words).
The non-economist should be able to have his own opinion in reading the works of an economist, see shortcomings, strengths and weaknesses in the presentation which should not be hidden behind jargon, but read and interpreted in common sense language no matter the language used.
I would not agree more with Dr Mahoso when he writes that most of the press releases on economic matters should place the majority as the major benefactor or stakeholder, in which case whatever is written should not be mystified in jargon.
As a matter of fact, even policy and legislative pronouncements should not be beyond the reach of the majority.
It is most interesting that this economic discourse has generated a response from the academics as well as from the streetwise like Joe Goto’s contribution last week.
As a matter of fact, Goto wanted to continue with the conversation this week until duty called and he had to attend to his ‘business’
We hope our policy movers will take note of the feedback from both the street and academia.
Dr Mahoso has re-emphasised that as a nation we are supposed to work for ourselves and if we produce exports, we still do it as part of working for ourselves and not as an appendage to foreign economies.
Thus he contends our value and worth as an economy ought not to be exogenously determined so that our economy is not as strong or weak as our exports are, but as strong and weak as it produces for local and export markets and value addition chain.
Goto, ‘muchange-money and man-in-the-street’, contends that money, which should be working for the benefit for the majority, is being (mis)appropriated through smuggling, with our economy losing value in the process.
He gives details of how this is done and even suggests on way forward.
The authorities should therefore be able to come up with counter policy initiatives to arrest those situations.
Counter policy initiatives do not necessarily mean legal sanctions, but also incentives as to prevent the South African authorities and the Dubai market from (mis)appropriating what should otherwise be Zimbabwean multiplier effects through smuggling.
There must be a disincentive to smuggling through having right policies as border patrols, customs and police are not coming up with effective containment, but could also be part of the few gaining from rent-seeking behaviours.
A famous poem, Desiderata, urges people to ‘seek to understand more than to be understood.’
Now, for our writers and professionals, perhaps seeking to understand in order to engage many should be our motivation.
In an earlier article on indigenous knowledge systems, I indicated that because there was no patenting and licensing, our traditional healers mixed many potions and useless substances to protect their intellectual properties.
Maybe that is the case with our professionals who use jargon to create their own preserves.
The judiciary is most notorious for that and in a future article I should be able to explore how the majority are being denied justice through mystification of justice by lawyers, magistrates and judges through the emphasis on rules, regulations and procedures more than the justice itself.
I have had many a first-hand experience on this either directly as in this week or through helping others being denied justice through the same mystification of the justice system.
The creation of a guild structure is coming up even in academia where all of a sudden there are demands that a PhD be a prerequisite for obtaining tenure at our universities when some of us have had excellent professors with only one or two degrees as per my experience at the universities of Ottawa and Roma. These were renowned and well-published scholars and yet with only one degree as in the case of Prof William Birmingham and a Masters for Prof Jacques Henry.