THE US has just renewed the 14-year-old illegal sanctions regime against Zimbabwe which it inherited from the first administration of George W Bush. This renewal brings to the fore my April 25 2010 warning to Madzimbahwe through the column ‘African Focus’ in The Sunday Mail where I asked whether Madzimbahwe would accept to describe themselves as: “an independent African country reeling under an illegal and racist financial blockade imposed by Anglo-Saxon powers and yet willing to tell the world and those same white powers that it has forfeited its sovereign power to create money and economic value on its own, to tell those same white powers that it will instead abandon its currency creation power and authority indefinitely and rely instead on the overvalued currency of the very same hostile power who is maintaining the illegal financial and economic blockade against the nation.” This is a critical question because both George W Bush and Barack Obama made it clear that the purpose of the ritual of repeating announcements of the same sanctions regime every year is to influence the people’s perception of their own government; to shape the people’s interpretation of their own fate in the world; to mould the people’s perception of US (white power) in relation to their own independence, their sovereignty and their livelihoods; and to divide the leadership of Zimbabwe over which fiscal and monetary policies to pursue and which to abandon in relation to those directly or indirectly imposed by the US and its allies through UNDP, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other instruments.Illegal and unilateral sanctions for the North Atlantic states have the advantage of serving both the purposes of economic and financial warfare and the purposes of psychological operations. The US Department of Defence Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations (PSYOP) defines strategic PSYOP as “international information activities conducted by US Government (USG) agencies to influence foreign (that is, our) attitudes, perceptions, and behaviour in favour of US goals and objectives during peacetime and in times of conflict. These programmes are conducted predominantly outside the military arena.” What I am observing is that the same forces who wanted us to postpone our elections indefinitely (using visions of so-called election violence in 2008) have also invested in efforts to terrify us enough to postpone even the debate on how we could easily come home to our own currency. The same Pentagon document defines the purpose of PSYOP as: “To convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences (meaning us) to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign (that is, our) governments, organisations, groups and individuals.” Twenty-first century economics is also about communication. One cannot know what to do about the need for national currency without also knowing how its destruction and removal were communicated, leading to clues about how the creation or restoration of such a value and instrument should also be communicated. The first time those who were alert to Zimbabwe’s internal and external projection noticed there was an external onslaught on the Zimbabwe dollar was in 1998 when the local press of the Rhodesian rump described the currency as ‘Zim-Kwacha’. This was in the context of the Rhodesian rump’s opposition to the recognition, remuneration and empowerment of Zimbabwe’s war veterans in 1997 as well as opposition to Zimbabwe’s leadership of the SADC intervention to stop genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998. But ‘Zim-Kwacha’ also communicated an on-going and simultaneous onslaught against the legacy of former President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and his UNIP party. Kaunda and UNIP had been ousted in 1991 and their fall was one outcome of the economic structural adjustment programme and financial war against Zambia in the late 1980s. So, the earliest phase of financial war against the Zimbabwe dollar was the unwitting participation of Madzimbahwe in the white media’s mockery of Zambia and its economic-financial problems which forced Zambians to flock to Zimbabwe to purchase food and other consumer goods which they smuggled back into Zambia and sold. Therefore the term ‘Zim-Kwacha’ was coined to signal the double attack on both Zambia and Zimbabwe, although Zimbabwe’s turn in the hell of financial terror was just around the corner. The second phase of war on Zimbabwe’s money was a massive campaign led by the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) to devalue the Zimbabwe dollar saying the currency was ‘overvalued’. There were several devaluations of the currency in response to that demand, but no matter how lowly priced the Zim-dollar became, the CZI and its supporting ‘economists’ and journalists never stopped crying that the Zim-dollar was overvalued! What is critical to note now is that the same ‘economists’, the same ‘experts’ and organisations shouting the loudest against the creation of a national currency today are the very same ones who led the mockery of the Zambian economy and currency in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as the massive campaign to devalue the Zimbabwe dollar until its destruction in 2007-2008.This fact cannot escape attention: The slogan that the Zimbabwe dollar was overvalued was supposed to mean that the economy would perform most optimally when the currency reached its lowest level, whatever that was supposed to be. Yet the very same forces today are saying a new Zimbabwe currency should not be introduced because its value (meaning its price) would be too low to warrant the effort of creating and protecting it! In other words, a currency of low value (meaning price) was a good thing from 1997 to 2007 according to these ‘experts’, which is why they fought for devaluation. But now, the same people say the demanded currency must not be created because its value (price) would be pushed too low to be worth the efforts. In other words, a currency of low exchange value is not good in the period 2009-2015; when it was supposed to be the best thing for optimal economic performance in the period 1997-2007! Both claims cannot be true. So, there is something else going on.