BEFORE the Easter period, we were looking at how it is important for wealthy African countries such as Zimbabwe to neither look West nor East but to look to themselves for economic sustenance.
This was once achieved by Libya under Muammar Gaddafi who managed to channel the nation’s oil resources directly to the citizens of his country.
Students were Government-funded.
No Libyan was denied access to land and a house after marriage and money was deposited into their accounts without necessarily having a job.
In 2009, I personally knew a Libyan student in China who received about
US$2 000 a month from the Libyan Government as student’s allowance.
Though all this ended with Barack Obama’s cunning and NATO’s war mongering, it is a sign that indeed, if African countries achieve the objective of channelling the resources of the land to its people first, we will indeed be prosperous.
Yet we are quick to look to other nationalities to exploit our resources for us and besides some minimal taxes, all the resources are taken away and processed/beneficiated in foreign lands which rip the true and added value of those resources.
For example, gold is found raw in Zimbabwe and at a very high quality of about 90 percent in places like Mberengwa.
The gold is sold legally and illegally to foreigners that turn it into jewellery.
The jewellery is then exported to Zimbabwe from say Europe and bought at up to seven times the price that the actual gold was worth in the first place.
The same goes for diamonds, chrome, platinum and other minerals that are sold in their rawest state without any beneficiation and value addition.
Even the mining of the minerals is now being handled by foreigners who often steal and forge shareholding statistics and are largely successful through bribery.
How then can the local people benefit from their resources from such a system which clearly favours capitalism and imperialism?
If the locals try to enter the mining industry, they are denied of legitimacy through costly and bureaucratic demands for licenses and so forth; hurdles that wealthy foreigners find easy to jump.
Thus the local people resort to illegal mining (kukorokoza) because it gives them a chance to participate in both the mining and the trade of their own minerals.
This is the opposite of what should be done.
In China, no foreigner, no matter how wealthy and powerful, can even think about owning Chinese land.
No foreigner can participate in mining and agriculture.
The natural resources belong to the nation and foreigners can only participate in secondary and tertiary industries like factories and shops. Deals to do with natural resources are offered by Government only to Chinese businesses.
They are much empowered and they have a healthy competition which benefits the nation.
The Chinese subsidise a great many things for their citizens and even employment at any level is reserved for the Chinese.
Foreigners can be employed by the Chinese companies only if they have unique skills like foreign languages that the Chinese could benefit from. This decreases unemployment owed to an influx of foreigners and this avoids prejudice against foreigners that we often see in places like South Africa, Europe and America.
To achieve self-sustenance, capacity is a factor that cannot be overlooked.
One should carry weight that he can manage.
Even among ants, we see the smaller ones carrying smaller loads and the bigger ones carrying bigger loads.
This approach of working according to one’s capacity increases efficiency and decreases fatigue.
When applied to economic development, say the Zimbabwean Government wants to offer a diamond mining company to a Zimbabwean company, it has to find one with the capacity to carry out the project.
If none have the capacity, foreign investment is not the only solution.
It is up to the Government to increase the capacity of its people and their businesses by funding and/or subsidising, educating and authorising them.
This is how things worked in Gaddafi’s Libya and in modern day China. The Government should not allow foreign entities to actively dominate its own people and must intervene by setting up reforms that favour its citizens.
Zimbabwe’s resources of copper, iron, chrome, tantalite, gold, diamond and so on are mined mostly and almost entirely by foreign companies.
A reversal of this situation is part of the answer to achieving self-sustenance besides farming.
These raw materials from our natural resources, if processed in Zimbabwe, will increase industries and in turn employment.
There is nothing we cannot learn and machines can be engineered or imported.
Why then do we need foreign nationals to do mining and smelting when history proves that our ancestors partook of such activities afore time; even before the Europeans?
Given that we are still knee deep in the situation, it is understandably hard to picture Zimbabwe behaving like Gaddafi’s Libya and directly channelling the nation’s resources to its citizens.
However, it is important to know that with a change of policies, this idea could really come into reality as it did for nations like China that were in more or less our situation just 40 years ago.
China was once a closed economy which was hated by the West, particularly the US for participating against them in the US-Korea War during Mao Zedong’s reign in the 1950s.
For this reason, the West had shut its doors on China which used to supply America with labour forces for constructing railway lines and so on in the 19th Century.
The US/China relations only began to improve in 1970 owing to the efforts of Zhou Enlai.
Almost all of China was rural and they were not keeping up with modern-day machinery and so forth.
This was until 1978 when Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Zhou Enlai as leader, opened up China by way of reform policies known in China as Gaigekaifang.
This would become a very important time in Chinese history because it transformed China into the modern giant we see today.
The process entailed building socialism with Chinese characteristics. They established a socialist market economy based on public ownership of the means of production.
Politically, Deng reformed the structures by transferring power to lower levels and developing a democratic style of work.
Special Economic Zones (SEZ) were set up and many economic regions were opened up including Shanghai which experienced much investment and has today grown into a busier and more modernised city than New York.
Deng emphasised that science and technology were the primary forces of production and urged people to respect and give opportunity to knowledgeable and talented or skilled people.
In this period, numerous Government-funded students left China for countries like Germany and would return with knowledge and machinery which would be used to improve their own economy.
There is no shortcut to self-sustenance but productivity.
Once a people produce enough for their consumption in their own land with their own labour, they would have achieved self-sustenance.
Any excess is further security and may be exported for foreign currency receipts but only after the children of the land have had their fill.
So it is possible for Zimbabwe, and Africa, to achieve economic self-sustenance once we implement policies of building a socialist nation with our own characteristics.
Socialism will ensure that people are fed by their own labour and resources and this would benefit the nation as a whole, not just a few individuals who are the faces of multi-national companies.
The best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago; the next best time is now. The setting up of reform policies such as the land reform of Zimbabwe is the planting of a seed that will take time to reach its fullness.
If the policies that China and Libya set up took 20 or 30 years to bear fruit, then patience and endurance are also important factors in this economic revolution.