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GIVEN a much higher degree of patriotism among our people, given a greater degree of solidarity and high public morale � inflation alone would not have produced a cash shortage to the extent we have suffered; given a different climate of public opinion and public morale against corruption, against racism, against greed, the fuel which Zimbabwe receives daily would be enough to go round; the harvests we have received this year, combined with international food aid, would have been more than enough for all Zimbabweans. How do we know all this? We know this because there are examples of countries which are far less endowed with natural resources than Zimbabwe but have survived worse economic sanctions and hostility. One of them is Cuba. Cuba has been under an economic blockade for 41 years and yet it is able to assist even rich countries like South Africa with medical doctors and other scientists. The patriotic and revolutionary discipline of the Cubans stretches the little that Cuba has far beyond its shores. Cuba is now an international centre for training experts in tropical medicine, for instance, with students coming from all over the world. In the case of Zimbabwe, we have eyewitnesses returning from Mozambique, Beira, to be specific, who tell us that the Zimbabwean products which are in short supply here are plentiful in Beira. They include soaps, cooking oil, margarine, sugar, mealie-meal, salt and maize. Zimbabwe is also losing trained personnel at the same time its basic commodities are being smuggled out. Both are needed here at home more than ever. Similar eyewitnesses have said the same thing about Zimbabwean products in Zambia. The same principle applies to the shortage of foreign currency. With less selfishness, less corruption, less greed, less racism and more patriotism and a higher degree of public morale � the foreign currency we get would be enough to meet our priorities. Without patriotism we do not have commonly agreed priorities. So no amount of foreign currency can ever be enough. Just recently a group of us visited a young woman farmer about one hour�s drive outside Harare. She told us about telephone calls she received from the white man who used to occupy the farm she is now using. This was in the period leading up to the June 1-June 3 "final push". This white man called the resettled woman telling her daily that it was only a matter of so many days before the Government was to fall and he and his CFU would be reinstated on the prime farmland they used to occupy. He told the young African woman that it would be in her best interest to surrender everything: the land, pumps, other infrastructure and even the agreements before the actual fall of the Government, since after June 3 there would be no mercy for people like her. The white man said these things despite the fact that Government has allowed him to keep one of the many farms he used to "own". He wants all the farms back so that the African farmers become squatters. This attitude prevailed not just in the neo-Rhodesian and neo-apartheid media in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia and Britain; there were many fools in industry, commerce, the church and the banks who also thought the Third Chimurenga would crumble to ashes in the first week of June 2003. When US President George W. Bush announced without much preparation that he was coming to Southern Africa, most of these conspirators thought he was coming to crown their achievement, the handover of power from the Third Chimurenga to "Chinja". It is, therefore, logical for a thinking Zimbabwean to see that people who entertained these delusions would not also prepare to assist the resettled farmers to harvest their first crop after the land redemption. Nor would they give proper advice to the Reserve Bank or anyone else on how best to support the land reform with cash liquidity. Patriotic citizens are, therefore, sceptical and even angry, because wherever they look they see too many greedy and shortsighted citizens who are Zimbabwean on paper only. Citizens are suspicious of the banks as well. Two weeks ago, the Bankers� Association of Zimbabwe published an advertisement telling their customers how to cope with the shortage of cash. It was clear from that advert that the A1 farmer is not counted among the important clients of the banks. We can tell from the focus on plastic money as a solution to the shortages of cash, when the association says plastic money is the future. This is a hoax, because plastic money in our type of economy can only supplement cash in the urban areas while clearly ruining the A1 farmers in rural areas. Most urban workers cannot afford cheques and credit cards either. To illustrate the basis of our scepticism, let us go back to similar promises the bankers made during their euphoria about structural adjustment more than 10 years ago. Apart from the wild idea that liberalising the Zimbabwe economy would mean that any citizen would be able to walk into his bank and order any amount of foreign currency he needed without referring to any State agency for approval, we were also told that automation of the entire banking system through computerisation would mean farewell to bank queues and bye-bye to all delays at the bank. Banking would be faster, friendlier, cleaner and cheaper for all. Foreign currency was also supposed to become easy to obtain and easy to spend according to one�s own priorities. The reality has been the opposite. What computerisation has done is concentrate all power in the bank manager who can now monitor, clear or block the bank teller from one desk. Even when all the computers are working, there is still a great deal of waiting for the teller and the customer. Much of the time the whole system breaks down and everyone, except the technicians, is completely grounded and paralysed. No one is allowed to revert to the manual system as a back-up. We must all wait for machines to come back on. A new reality called "down time" has emerged and is costing the customers a great deal, paying for tellers to wait for the machines to come back on. The first time we noticed the lie about faster, friendlier, cleaner and cheaper service was when the same videos, TV programmes and adverts we were watching at home were brought into the banking halls so that, maybe, we would not notice that the queues were longer and slower, and that even a new element of delay had been introduced in the form of "down time". It also took enormous amounts of foreign currency to put video and TV equipment in all banking halls in Zimbabwean cities. Yet we are told there�s no foreign currency! The second time we noticed the lie was when dozens of inexplicable bank charges emerged on our accounts threatening to wipe out the deposits themselves. There were so many of these charges with so many code names that it was a big chore to demand an explanation for each one, let alone to get the charge reversed when made in error. True, computerisation has many advantages, but they are usually not the ones put in bankers� adverts. The best explanation and achievement of automation at the bank has been centralisation of power by the bank managers. The
Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
