By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
THE unforgettable and humiliating pictures
associated with the destruction of
the Zimbabwe dollar were definitely not
the purpose for which the currency was
created.
In the same way, the jumbo jets which
were flown through large windows of sky
scrapers in New York City on September
11 were not built or fuelled for such a
purpose.
Yet that is what the spectacle of terror
forces people to remember.
In The Zimbabwe Independent of
March 30 2007, the late businessman,
Eric Bloch showed that it was a small minority
of operators who pursued a bizarre
and rare form of hypercapitalism which
risked destroying the whole economy
using equally bizarre assaults on the Zimbabwe
dollar:
“Since the beginning of February
(2007), much of commerce and industry
has been pursuing operations in a
manner that can only hasten the Zimbabwean
economic collapse. The captains of
business…are apparently now driven to
pursue self-destruction or, in other words,
to commit hara-kiri, but to do so with
the same philosophy to destroy not only
themselves, but also all others. They have
resorted to calculations based on anticipated
replacement costs, plus a forecast
inflation-adjusted profit margin.”
Mr Bloch said the minority who participated
in the destruction of the Zim-dollar
were just like suicide-bombers.
American scholar and cultural critic,
Henry A Giroux says terrorism succeeds
by turning us from normal life, from normal
human relations, from normal transactions
and even from human dignity and
morality.
Instead it confronts us with the repeatedly
broadcast spectacle of terror which
causes us to gaze and to stare at ‘a viscerally
moving (but temporary) presence
of elemental fear’ which has been set up
and even choreographed by a few suicide
bombers.
He proceeds to say: Once we allow ourselves
to be paralysed by the endless repetition
of that spectacle, we find ourselves
willingly sharing our fears in the place of
our common responsibilities.
If we apply these findings to the national
currency debate, we notice several
shocking similarities to situations in the
aftermath of a terrorist attack:
First, fear is the most common reason
given by the policy makers to justify their
refusal to even consider the merits of
introducing a national currency.
But fear is not policy.
Second, the policy makers and the journalists
defending them refuse to combine
the concept of sovereignty and innovation
and come up with a new currency with a
new name.
They can think only in terms of the
Zim-dollar and its ‘return’.
So, to them, to think of a national currency
can only mean returning to 2007-
2008! This is incredible!
Third, because of the compulsion to
share fears instead of responsibilities,
the policy makers have not gone beyond
dismissing the whole idea out of hand,
thereby forgetting the fact that together as
a nation we have a responsibility to conceive,
create, present and project the type
of currency which can provide universal
liquidity and serve as a common local language;
facilitating transactions among our
own local business units so that they do
not have to wait for North American (dollar)
translations to speak to each other.
“Money speaks” means exactly that.
The confidence which we want outside
investors to have in our economy has
got to start with us having confidence in
our policy-making capacity and our own
money the same way we should have
confidence in addressing one another in
Shona, Ndebele, Venda and Tonga and be
definitely sure we can understand each
other without an external translator in
the form of Barack Obama’s over-valued
dollar.
Just as people have realised that jumbo
jets are not daily manufactured and daily
flown to go through windows of skyscrapers,
Madzimbahwe should also realise
that we never intended for our currency to
be ‘burned’ by hustlers and speculators or
to be smuggled across the border in truckloads
as happened in 2007-2008.
Such were the antics of economic suicide
bombers which the reactionary media
immortalised as permanent and inescapable
features of our condition.
So we shall not allow those bizarre and
anti-life practices to deter us from our
policy responsibilities for the future.
What the policy makers have been doing,
trying to make universal the fears generated
and made spectacular by a few, is exactly
what the financial and economic warfare
against Zimbabwe was intended to achieve.
The negative slogan ‘Zim-dollar return’
is meant to replace the value of a national
currency to its people by a singular image
and a singularly depressed price of that
currency at one particular time.
The key lies in holding on to the use value
of our money as the facilitator of our own
transactions and payments to one another,
which value may be related to, but cannot
be the same as the image in the spectacle
nor the same thing as the price set by our
detractors through their stock markets.
Scholars who have studied the consequences
of mass fixation upon the spectacles
of terror associated with September
11 2001 conclude that Americans have
been made to believe that their duty is
to share a globalised fear of what happened
on September 11 2001 ignoring the
damage inflicted upon their society and
the rest of the world through ‘the war on
terror’; the illegal invasion of Iraq by the
US and UK in 2003 under the pretext of
removing non-existent ‘weapons of mass
destruction’; the invasion of Afghanistan;
the mass bombings of Libya and Yemen as
well as the unleashing of state-sponsored
terror and torture programmes at Abu
Graib and Guantanamo Bay.
The consequences of the post-September
11 2001 activities are going to be more
far-reaching and more damaging to US
society than the tragedy of September 11
2001 itself.
In the same way, it is irresponsible to
justify the damage and distortions being
caused by the prolonged use of the overvalued
US-dollar in Zimbabwe through
fear-mongering using spectacles of terror
from 2007-2008.
More could be shown to quantify
the actual damage being caused by the
prolonged use of the US-dollar but the
climate of neoliberalism, neo-colonialism
and imperialism ensures that journalists,
editors, finance houses and politicians
benefiting from the damage will never create
similarly unforgettable spectacles the
same way they created spectacles of terror