By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
THE US dollar is a world war currency still being used to this day to wage a subtle financial war against Zimbabwe.
At the heart of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) is the use of the US dollar as an instrument of financial war.
But due to the incoherence among our elitist and neo-colonial institutions causing disarray in the national value system, too many of our people do not understand the contradictions caused by the fetishisation of the US dollar in Zimbabwe.
In this issue, therefore, I use the matter of the US dollar to demonstrate the need for a clear national value system (ideology) which would make the common defence of the national interest based on historical reality a matter of commonsense.
According to the February 17 2020 Monetary Policy Statement of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), this is the official national policy position:
“Following the gazetting of Statutory Instruments 33 and 142 of 2019 that provided the de-dollarisation framework for the country to trade exclusively in local currency (mono-currency), the Bank is encouraged by the positive de-dollarisation process that has been taking place in the country.
The Bank believes that the macroeconomic signals that include fiscal and monetary discipline, prospects of positive economic growth and lower inflation are improving to support a gradual de-dollarisation process within a timeline of five years. This is in line with other countries’ experiences on de-dollarisation.”
What was missing from the whole RBZ statement was the role the Bank expected patriots to play in smooth and effective de-dollarisation: the place of popular support in strengthening the national currency.
The position articulated by David C. Korten concerning money in his book The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism is accepted by many economists, sociologists and historians; yet it seems alien to too many of our elites here, hence the incoherence within the institutions they lead.
Korten commonsensically stated that:
“Money’s value is based solely on a social contract – an agreement (silent or explicit) among a group of people that they will accept a particular tender in payments and debts.
A common currency not only facilitates exchange but also defines a community with a mutual interest in productive exchange among its members.
The community thereby affirms its own existence and creates a natural preference for its own products.
Bernard Lietaer estimates that (at 1999) fifteen hundred communities around the world issued their own local currencies to facilitate local commerce.
The idea is not to eliminate national (or regional) currencies but rather to supplement them, so that local workers and assets need never stand idle for a simple lack of the money to facilitate exchange.”
In contrast to the common situation described by Korten, Zimbabwe currently presents an absurdity whereby:
- The elite minority who have access to the US dollar claim falsely that the whole economy has already ‘re-dollarised’. These elites avoid use of the Zim dollar except for purposes of purchasing more US dollars on the illegal parallel market in order to advance speculative activity and not to engage in production.
- The overwhelming majority who have given Government’s re-introduction of the mono-currency the benefit of the doubt by accepting it are spending long hours queuing for inadequate amounts at the bank where the limit has remained $300ZWL per day despite the escalating inflation.
- National institutions who, under ordinary circumstances, would be in the forefront of advocating empowerment of the povo by strengthening a nationally accessible currency are themselves double-faced about the local currency, if not actually opposed to its continuation. This absurdity can be illustrated by citing two newspapers. The editors of The Herald on February 12 2020 felt compelled to publish an editorial titled ‘Enforce mono currency, bring offenders to book’. This editorial was still necessary despite the promise by The Herald’s sister paper, The Chronicle, on October 5 2019 titled, ‘Arrest for non-Zimbabwe Dollar Trading: $6 000 fine or jail’.
- In direct contrast and contradiction, NewsDay for February 17 2020 published a full interview with former Finance Minister and Harare East MDC Member of Parliament Tendai Biti which was titled, ‘The Market has redollarised: Biti’. It is significant perhaps that Biti does not represent Musikavanhu or Muzarabani or Tamandayi or Chiundura. Yet even in Harare East, the majority there queue for local money everyday of the week!
In a normal country, Parliament, as a national institution and as the representative body with oversight on Treasury and the RBZ, would censure the MP for undermining its authority.
Parliament passed the 2020 budget based on the mono-currency. How then does a Member of that same institution promote a minority position which amounts to a lie against the same budget and against the national currency on which that budget is based?
The practical consequences of lack of a clear national ideology can be illustrated clearly by contrasting the way the fast-track land reform project was conducted with the way the national currency (de-dollarisation) project has been carried out.
Readers might think that I am comparing incomparable projects. Yet there is no question that both projects had been made controversial by the very same detractors of Zimbabwe and Chimurenga.
In both cases, the detractors resorted to the use of Roman Dutch Law to protect minority enclave and interests.
In both cases, neo-colonial institutions and newspapers were used to arrive at a position which appeared national and popular but was, in fact, false and elitist.
On land, they declared that, ‘The people of Zimbabwe don’t want land; they want jobs’, meaning jobs working for white settlers who had monopolised stolen African land for a century.
On the issue of a national mono-currency, they are saying, ‘The people have rejected the Zimbabwe dollar and the economy has already re-dollarised’, even while the people are in fact queuing daily at the bank for the few notes and coins of the same currency which we are told they have rejected already.
Even more astounding is the fact that the same editors publishing and promoting the claim that the (sacred) market has already re-dollarised are at the same time, from the other end of the same month, telling us that there is no market in Zimbabwe in the free enterprise sense: There are only cartels which are not only corrupt but also benefiting from the US-EU sanctions imposed on the people.
So the ‘market’ only appears for the purpose of shooting down the Zimbabwe dollar but for all other purposes we are dealing with a rigged enclave economy dominated by a few rich guys who do not care a bit about the national interest or the welfare of the povo!
Now, if we had been clear ideologically in 2019 as we were in 1997-2005, we would have known exactly how to avoid empty theoretical arguments with detractors over whether the people want their money or not.
Contrary to all the declarations about the people of Zimbabwe wanting jobs without land, the final universal position adopted in the national interest was, and still is, that ‘land reform is irreversible’.
It was achieved because the povo became visible, the povo mobilised for it.
Likewise, today, we would go to the war veterans and war collaborators to ask them how the people were enabled to mobilise for fast-track land redistribution so that it became impossible to blame the President, Cabinet or the Minister of Lands for that project’s popularity.
Former President Robert Mugabe put it nicely when confronted with legal judgments from the Antony Gubbay judiciary and the Law Society of Zimbabwe telling him to send the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) and the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) to stop the so-called African ‘land invaders’.
He simply said he could not use war veterans in the ZNA and ZRP to massacre war veterans now occupying white-stolen land (with the help of peasants) simply because both groups were one.
Their main motive for joining the liberation struggle in the first place was land reclamation and redistribution.
Attempting to clear these people off their stolen land with guns and batons wold start yet another civil war.
Given the same ideological clarity in 2019, Treasury and the RBZ would have gone to the same war veterans to ask them how the interest of the silent majority in our own money could be made manifestly popular given the elitist nature of newspapers, radio, television, the courts, churches and even Parliament.
Lack of clarity in promoting Zimbabwe dollar traced back to the way bond notes were launched and promoted
- In 2016, the RBZ itself incited speculators against the Bond notes by announcing them more than seven months before there was anything on the ground, not even a definition or framework. This invited speculators and charlatans to provide their own definitions and frameworks.
- Second, the RBZ encouraged the storyline that Bond notes were going to be a special kind of currency which would end the cash crisis without suffering the problems which once bedevilled the Zim dollar and without causing the same difficulties for the ordinary person which the Zim dollar had, up to then, been falsely accused of causing
- Third, the RBZ temporarily sponsored the storyline that Bond notes were not a currency and not money to solve the cash crisis for all Zimbabweans but just an export incentive scheme for exporters alone.
- Fourth, as the daily pressures for cash intensified, the RBZ allowed public statements and media stories going back to the idea that Bond notes would end cash queues and solve production bottlenecks for all producers in the general economy.
- Fifth, at another time, the RBZ redefined Bond notes as tax-exempt debt instruments.
- Sixth, at the end of October 2016, the RBZ voiced doubts that Bond notes would ease the cash crisis and banish the cash queues which were lengthening by the day and in which bank account holders were receiving diminishing amounts of cash or being turned away empty-handed.
- Seventh, the RBZ then embarked on a massive advertising campaign in which the adverts clearly demonstrated that the central bank had turned its back on the bulk of its constituency and was now addressing exporters and those receiving foreign currency remittances from abroad. The role of the povo was nowhere in the advertising campaign.
The full economic context and its impact on the Bond notes campaign
Let me outline a few principles about the role of context in communication:
- First, context can produce unintended messages and connotations from one’s text. Because ordinary people are spending so much time queuing for cash or sitting around with goods they cannot exchange for lack of cash, the RBZ’s production of Bond notes messages speaking only to exporters in 2016 made the majority believe that the RBZ was a bank only for exporters. If they did not come to that conclusion, they might end up believing somehow that Bond notes meant the return of our own currency. This thinking was caused by the dire and glaring shortage of cash for ordinary people.
- Second, context can neutralise or turn the intended message into a joke. In May 2003, US President George W. Bush announced the end of the Iraq war which had started in March of the same year. But on the ground the war is still going on even today. It took years beyond May 2003 for the US to pull out the majority of its invasion force. So George Bush’s announcement became not just a lie but an obscene and cruel joke because the context undercut it graphically and daily on television.
- Third, it is not enough in communication to control certain platforms or to pay for them and use them to communicate. A platform’s credibility can be destroyed or compromised by its sources of information if they too turn out to be unreliable. The sources of observable daily economic intelligence in Zimbabwe, in 2016, happened to undermine and contradict the RBZ’s messages on Bond notes by demonstrating that the majority of its constitutional owners and clients were not exporters or receivers of Diaspora funds; by demonstrating that the cash queues were getting longer by the day but there was no message from the same RBZ for the people in those queues.
Likewise, in the 2020 monetary statement, the RBZ could have spoken to the situation facing the povo where even MPs are campaigning against the local currency; even churches are forcing congregants to support the illegal parallel market by demanding contributions in US dollars; even landlords are forcing tenants and lodgers to undermine Government policy by demanding rent in US dollars while hospitals cannot get a single US dollar to import medicines.
By looking at the mono-currency as a people’s project the way land reform was viewed, the RBZ would automatically stop its detractors who would have to take on the povo in order to continue with their elitist lies.
As things stand, H-Metro for February 14 2020 told us that some schools are forcing pupils to pay in foreign currency for extra lessons. Daily News for February 17 declared: ‘Showbiz has dollarised’.
In a story of that title, the paper told us: “Zimbabwe’s A-list entertainers are now charging for their shows in the elusive US dollar, putting a strain on promoters and ,of course, revellers.”
The ideological importance of these stories should not be lost on us.
Schools are among the most basic national institutions run by Government.
Bob Marley used his popular music to support and defend the masses of Zimbabwe fighting to free themselves from white racist rule.
The morale of African liberation fighters throughout our region was given a boost through popular music and the arts.
The African land reclamation and land re-distribution was popularised and supported through music, drama and fiction.
The RBZ and other critical economic institutions may ignore that history at our own peril.
Popular support is a fundamental pillar for meaningful economic progress.
The silent majority on the currency issue must be enabled to speak. This means reporters and editors going out where the people are. When cameras were forced to cover masses of people occupying former white farms, it became impossible to continue claiming that “The people of Zimbabwe don’t want land; they want jobs.”
Now the position is: “Land reform is irreversible.”