By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN the last instalment, I promised to look at examples of ‘knowledge and information’ production by young people, especially those who sell themselves as young professionals, technocrats, economists and entrepreneurs.
Before doing this, it is important to point out that there is a direct link between the scandal of ‘knowledgeable ignorance’ demonstrated by this class of young persons and their misconception and consequent dismissal or devaluation of the study of history as redundant and irrelevant.
They believe they have discovered or just stumbled upon a new idea called the irrelevance or redundancy of history. They forget that this school of thought itself has a long history of failure.
That thinking began long ago and it is being repeated only because history has refused to die.
On May 25 1916, industrialist Henry Ford published in his Chicago Tribune the view that: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition.
We don’t want tradition.
We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a thinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
In 1957, Sir Karl Popper published his critique of the study of history in Britain called The Poverty of History.
Three points arise here:
– First, history as a subject did not become irrelevant in 1916 or 1957; otherwise we would not be debating it today.
– Second, both Ford and Popper were complaining about the particular form which the subject of history had taken in Britain and the US.
– Third, history is neither a catalogue of traditions nor a collection of relics. History is a philosophy of human agency in the world as well as a methodology for studying the role of human (social) agency in the world.
The examples I have chosen to review concern the economy and our living economic history.
These are:
– ‘How the Zimbabwe dollar was destroyed’, Francis Harawa, Financial Gazette, October 12 2017;
– ‘Zimbabwe’s currency crisis: When the market rules’, Matt E.T. Matigari, The Daily News, October 22 2017; and
– ‘Economics does not lie’, Daniel Ngwira, Chartered Accountant, Zimbabwe Independent, September 29 2017.
All three can be described as combative polemics offering singular explanations to complex historical problems, which explanations serve mainly to hide the glaring fact that there are other more plausible explanations which would become obvious to the writer and the reader only if both had a sense of history, including our living economic history.
‘How the Zimbabwe dollar was destroyed’
The biggest problem with this article is that it mixes up the devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar with the duping of the Zimbabwean people into rejecting the idea of a national currency altogether, leading to the demonetisation of the same. Harawa’s approach confused the price of the currency at stock exchanges with the historical functional value of the same currency to its own people.
The huge point being glossed over is the fact that Russia, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Zambia, Mozambique and many other countries have had their currencies depreciated/devalued badly but they have not proceeded to reject and demonitise their currencies.
This deliberate gloss over the difference between fluctuating price and permanent value is intended by the business class to avoid responsibility for the subsequent rejection and demonitisation of the currency to which all the three writers subscribed as members of the youthful urban elite guilty of perpetrating knowledgeable ignorance of our history.
It follows from this analysis that this article shares with the other two the deliberate habit/effort to avoid any description of the changing nature of capitalism at the time the Zimbabwe dollar was devalued and subsequently demonitised.
Glossing over the difference between fluctuating prices and social value also enables the writer to present as totally reckless and valueless the payment of a small gratuity of 50 000 Zimbabwean dollars per person to war veterans in 1997; the intervention of Zimbabwe Defence Forces in the war against RENAMO in Mozambique; and the war against the Western-sponsored UNITA in Angola!
A clear-headed reader cannot fail to see the underlying assumption beneath this sweeping gloss over living history.
The underlying assumption is that the Zimbabwe economy would today be thriving and the people prosperous if Zimbabwe had let RENAMO overrun Mozambique with assistance from apartheid South Africa and Western-sponsored mercenaries; our economy and our people would be thriving and prosperous if Zimbabwe had not paid war veterans just 50 000 Zimbabwe dollars each and if we had let the DRC be overrun by Rwanda and Uganda with support from the Western powers!
But any shrewd reader could turn the assumptions around: Do these young writers believe the RENAMO and UNITA insurgencies and the assault on DRC were meant to bring prosperity to us and to the region?
How would folding our hands and doing nothing serve our best interest?
‘Zimbabwe currency crisis: When the market rules’
While sharing the same features with the two articles cited, this article distinguishes itself as using literal textbook readings as if they are a replacement for the scientific study of the real existing economy.
As a result, the writer does not even notice a clear contradiction between his praise of the so-called ‘invisible hand’ in the economy and the purported ‘rationalism’ and rational economic conduct he introduces later.
Matigari writes:
“Through what he termed ‘the invisible hand’ (Adam) Smith suggested that an economic system is automatic, and, given substantial freedom, is able to self-regulate and drift towards efficiency … Every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry … Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can… He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.”
Yet, in the very same breath, the same writer abandons the idea of the unknowing merchant and the invisible hand to embrace its exact opposite as follows:
“The basis is rationalism.
Rationalism is the philosophy that knowledge or actions are driven by reason, logic and intuition.
This philosophy brought into economics the notion of homo economicus, or economic man or rational man; which suggests that humans are consistently rational agents (who) pursue narrow self-interests to maximise utility (satisfaction).”
While misleading his readers into believing that there is one body of consistent economic laws, Matigari reads Adam Smith as saying that the individual economic player does not really understand what he/she is doing but ends up doing the right thing willy-nilly because of the operations of the ‘invisible hand’ and then proceeds to read the ‘Rationalists’ as prescribing the exact opposite, but without noting the utter contradiction.
‘Economics does not lie’
This article is equally contradictory.
It starts out saying: “As wants are unlimited in the face of scarce resources, it entails that people have to make choices.”
But the whole article is given to an outright rejection and condemnation of Zimbabwe’s historical and social choices.
It then goes further stating that ‘economic agents are rational’.
Based on the author’s own efforts to apportion responsibility for current problems, all economic players, including individuals, have behaved rationally.
The only exception is the Government of Zimbabwe.
Such an argument would make sense only if the author is suggesting that all economically significant decisions are made by the Government, which remains totally irrational while all other players are rational!
Living history
As already pointed out, all three articles demonstrate ignorance of economic history and the devaluation of history in general.
They are written as if the Great Depression of the 1930s and later depressions never happened.
They are written as if John Maynard Keynes and other economists never came to the scene after Adam Smith.
They are written as if Milton Friedman and the neo-liberal Chicago School of Economics never had their day.
They are written from a total ignorance of the global financial tsunamani which started in 2007 and is still not completely over. They exhibit such naiveté that even Western sanctions on Zimbabwe are treated as part of the operations of ‘markets’!
They are written as if John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman were simply a work of fiction.
They are written as if economic warfare, communications and the manipulation of perceptions do not matter.
In this regard, it is worthwhile for me to repeat the US position on the role of psychological operations in destabilisation and economic warfare.
According to Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Defence Department:
“Psychological operations (PSYOP) are planned operations to convey selected information indicators to foreign audiences (that is to us in Zim or elsewhere in order) to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organisations, groups and individuals. PSYOP are a vital part of the broad range of US diplomatic, informational, military and economic activities. …Strategic PSYOP are international information activities conducted by US Government agencies to influence foreign attitudes, perceptions, and behaviour in favour of US goals and objectives (including economic sanctions) during peace time and in times of conflict. These programmes are conducted predominantly outside the military arena…”
Since the US Government maintains sanctions against Zimbabwe, especially financial sanctions, its propaganda policies and intentions are relevant to any study of media manipulation and the economy here.
Rationalism is a bogus theory to start with.
But its hollowness also results from the fact that it assumes that all players in the economy, including individuals, have access to the same economic intelligence in equal measure.
The US doctrine just cited is meant to ensure that rationalist assumptions are invalid and dangerous for those who accept them.
Both the US psychological operations doctrine and John Perkins’ Confession of an Economic Hitman demonstrate that there is not even access to the same intelligence and that even where access is assured, interpretations and perceptions of what is accessed are subject to vigorous strategic manipulations.
Let us, for argument’s sake, accept the unanimous position of the writers of the three articles that Government and the state are solely to blame for the current economic problems.
If that is the case, how do these writers explain the following reality?
One reason why the British, the EU and the US State Department are able to claim that their sanctions do not affect the entire economy of Zimbabwe is because to-date there is no published account on the daily effects of sanctions on business from the Indigenous Business Development Centre (IBDC), from the Affirmative Action Group (AAG), from the Indigenous Business Women’s Organisation (IBWO), from the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC) or from the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI).
If all these business organisations were publicly explaining to their colleagues abroad the concrete daily effects of sanctions on their operations, then those who have imposed the racist sanctions would not continue to lie to the whole world and to their own people that only ZANU-PF politicians were targeted and affected by the sanctions. Do we today have separate and plausible positions from these business groups on the currency issue? If not, then how do we know that only Government is to blame for what has happened?
What we have seen instead is a shocking pattern.
It started with the introduction of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) where both IBDC and AAG joined white companies to urge Government to adopt this dangerous gimmick by the IMF and the World Bank.
But today the same groups will not accept responsibility for consequences of ESAP.
What the businessmen and the journalists giving them coverage are not telling the reader is that all the supposed great benefits of ESAP were based on dubious neo-liberal assumptions which have been tried for the last 30 years in more than 100 countries and have mostly failed.
Because of failure in most of those 100 countries, the originators and promoters of the theories and assumptions have been making minor and incremental changes to the same neo-liberal economic agenda without questioning the whole basis.
So, from the old ESAP bouquet of demands, we now get mainly one demand: to sell off parastatals. As the authors of African Voices on Structural Adjustment have noted:
“What is surprising, however, is that such ‘paradigmatic shifts’ and ‘add-ons’ have not been translated into any fundamental rethinking of the goals, designs and policy instruments of SAP, nor have they led to any efforts to evolve an internally consistent framework.”
In other words, the champions of privatisation have not tested their assumptions against the real economic reality and experience of Zimbabwe.
The authors conclude that there is a huge, yawning, gap between the day-to-day realities of African economic life on one hand and the neo-liberal assumptions made about it on the other.
The problem is that: “What one sees is ultimately dependent, not only on where one stands but perhaps also on what he chooses to see and how he does so with one eye closed or with dark glasses on.”
In other words, where some people lie through their teeth and lips, many others lie through the glasses they wear and the binoculars they buy and use!
Since there are several schools of economics, it is nonsensical for Madzimbahwe to be told by one accountant that ‘Economics does not lie’!