By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein wrote the following about the US Government institutions following the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon:

“The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture…the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions – the War of Terror – built to be private from start.”

This revolution in disaster governance required two steps: First, exploitation of the people’s sense of peril to justify the assumption of dictatorial powers at home and abroad by the executive branch of government; second, the outsourcing of the implementation of the same powers to private players identified and approved by the same executive. 

“The mantra ‘September 11 changed everything’ neatly disguised the fact that, for free market ideologues and the (big) corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda.  

Rather than subjecting new policies to fractious public debate in Congress or bitter conflict with public sector unions, the Bush White House (in 2001-2002) could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free pass handed out by the press to ‘stop talking and starting doing’.”

By ‘the Bush team’, the author is referring to the US administration of George W. Bush in which Vice-President Dick Cheyney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld were notorious for maintaining a corrupt and corrupting revolving door between the executive and corporate interests, especially those representing the ‘military-industrial complex’.

In Zimbabwe, one could argue perhaps that we do not face similar risks because with a comatose industry, there are no big corporations here to capture the state in a similar fashion.  That is true.  

But it only means that the issues present themselves in a slightly different form, otherwise risks may even be more hazardous.

Last week we pointed out that a second ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ was conducted by the Harare City Council without it being linked at all in the press or the public mind with the original ‘Operation Murambatsvina’. But something even bigger than the silence over the second ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ has happened.  

For as long as one can remember, Parliament has insisted that as the legislative branch of Government, it exists not only to make laws but also at all times to monitor and scrutinise their application by the executive branch.

Opposition parties, likewise, have always insisted that they are not just waiting to win the next election and become the government; on the contrary, they are an essential institution serving the people by shadowing every ministry run by the governing majority and by contributing to debate on every piece of legislation and regulation put forth by the governing party.

Yet, during this COVID-19 emergency, both Parliament and the opposition have disappeared under the pretext that the building in which Parliament meets is too small and too overcrowded to be used for normal business in the period of so-called social distancing!  

This is a logical rationalisation.  

But the irony or paradox is that the executive has declared and imposed a national COVID-19 lockdown without agreeing to lock itself down.  

On the contrary, the executive has freed itself from the office; it has unleashed itself upon the entire terrain of the country, moving up and down every day, in order to convince everyone else to stay home for the duration of the lockdown.  The most surprising feature of these developments is the opposition’s willingness to disappear for the duration of the lockdown.  

It means the opposition lacks sense of constructive purpose. The opposition seems to see its purpose for existence as merely to oppose the Government.  

So, since one cannot really oppose the fight against COVID-19, there is nothing for the opposition to do?  

In other countries, legislatures have not totally adjourned.  They have reorganised in order to comply with the social distancing requirements while actually contributing institutionally and constructively to the governance of the emergency programme.

As the document by African intellectuals cited last week points out, the formulation and administration of emergency programmes may pose new and unnecessary risks for the people because they may not be thought-through properly.  

In the case of the US after September 11 2001, the document which was used to justify a home front system of national surveillance contained really dangerous claims which were followed by costly military adventures aboard, such as the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.   

This is how the Homeland Security document posed the problem:

“Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, any time, and with virtually any weapon.”

The war on terror was to become an open-ended hunt. 

The scare and the rationale for endless war were to create a bonanza for all sorts of chancers with some security contraption to sell.  

According to Klein:  

“Through all its various name changes – the War on Terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, The Third World War, the long war, the generational war – the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged.  

It is limited by neither time nor space nor target.  

From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition.  

But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in a global economic architecture.”

And the main reason it became so bizarre was inadequate oversight.  

In fact, the wild-goose chase in which the US engaged after September 11 2001 to some extent explains the failure of the same country now to deal with a public health disaster in which the public health players required to fight back the coronavirus are completely outside the sprawling military industrial complex which has for many decades hogged both the limelight and the biggest budget.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Zimbabwe on the back of these preceding calamities; economic sanctions, HIV and AIDS, drought and Cyclone Idai. 

So, in the absence of huge corporations to capture state institutions, as in the US, the risk for the people lies in expanding the influence of foreign-funded NGOs and donors, especially in the rural areas. 

The confusion and contradictions surrounding our own national perspective on the first and the second ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ has to do with the influence of NGOs and donors on opposition politics.  

Donors and NGOs have always used calamities as opportunities to smuggle in values and mentalities contrary to those of the people.

Our own institutional base remains weak, as illustrated by the rhetoric surrounding the roles of Parliament and the opposition in contrast to their sudden disappearance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when the need is even bigger for all national institutions to adopt a real national approach to collective challenges facing the people.