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Zimbabwe, Africa’s struggle for economic emancipation needs constant
explanation
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
JUDGING from media
reports, there are serious rural and urban struggles going on in Kenya. The
rural struggles centre on the African majority’s demand for land redistribution;
while the urban conflicts reflect demands for a new constitution but only as the
surface explanation for deep-seated economic, ethnic and class contradictions.
Kenya became independent 41 years ago, 16 years ahead of Zimbabwe. Kenya
has been important in the history of the Zimbabwe struggle and it is interesting
that the struggle for land there now seems to echo Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga.
Kenya’s armed struggle, the so-called Mau-Mau Rebellion, centred on African
demands to reclaim land stolen by white settlers.
Kenya and Cote
d’Ivoire were for a long time used by the British and North American
imperialists as model economies which the Zimbabwean liberation movements were
supposed to emulate after independence.
Even as late as 2004, Kenya was
again being used by the imperialists and their neo-colonial agents as a good
example of political transition for Zimbabwe to follow. Instead of having a
liberation movement resisting a foreign-funded neo-colonial and neoliberal
party, as in Zimbabwe, Kenya had come up with a "Rainbow Coalition" which was
portrayed as more unifying and more democratic than Zimbabwe’s liberation
movement.
In the other country which Zimbabwe was told to emulate, Cote
d’Ivoire, there is a crisis far worse than in Kenya.
Africans must ask:
Why?
What these examples mean is that Africa’s struggle for economic
emancipation will be far more complicated than the struggles for independence.
Zimbabwe will be no exception. The reasons are clear.
In the struggle
for economic emancipation, the battle lines are obscure and always shifting
faster than those of the armed struggle. The fighters and the means with which
to fight are ambivalent and ambiguous. Too many African leaders, technocrats and
journalists, for instance, admire and emulate the US and British economies
enough to allow themselves to be co-opted into the G8 Summit and to discuss
there the so-called Commission for Africa and the so-called New Partnership for
Africa’s Development, which are, in fact, not original African projects at all.
What seems to escape these technocrats and leaders is that some of these
most admired and emulated economies are currently being subsidised through
outright military aggression and looting. Since Africa cannot go and occupy Iraq
and Afghanistan and take over western Asia to get its oil, the G8 examples
cannot be the basis for Africa’s economic development, nor should they be
projected in our media as models.
The differences between the struggle
for political independence and the struggle for economic emancipation expose the
weaknesses of current African leadership. The wars of liberation required
constant explanation and consistent information in order for the majority of the
people to understand the nature of the challenges they faced and the sacrifices
they were expected to make before political independence could be achieved.
There are no similar and consistent explanations of the struggle for economic
freedom. In fact, there are contradictory models, theories and doctrines, as can
be seen in African participation in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act
(AGOA), Nepad and the Blair Commission.
Now, a much more complicated
struggle against the global nexus of corporate cannibals is not being explained
as often or as clearly as the Second Chimurenga. This is a weakness.
Through the programme of National Strategic Studies which the President
called for a few years back, there is need to explain to the people why we face
the challenges we face today. There is need to develop a language and a new
discipline of political economy capable of dislodging the neoliberal doctrine of
market reform and rainbowism. What is going on? Why do the so-called
International Crisis Group and Crisis Zimbabwe Coalition engage in scapegoating
and methodological individualism without explaining why more than 100 countries
have gone through a crisis similar to Zimbabwe’s in the last 15 years?
Zimbabwe next month will be celebrating Heroes Day. This should be the
occasion to envision, construct and mobilise a new kind of hero for the economic
emancipation of Africa.
This new hero must begin by understanding that
the crisis is global, but it must be tackled locally. It is the crisis of what
David Korten called "corporate cannibalism" and the Committee for Academic
Freedom in Africa called "the new enclosure movement".
Before we explain
the new enclosure movement we must explain to the people the old enclosure
movement at the beginning of capitalism.
Capitalism rose from a movement
by early capitalists to enclose and make private property of assets which, in
fact, belonged collectively to communities. In Britain, land belonging to
communities and called "commons" was fenced off and declared private.
Now, the new enclosure movement is somewhat similar. The global
capitalist class in the 1970s discovered that it could not sustain the momentum
and growth it needed to survive. The effects of the expansion in "independent"
countries (former colonies) together with the massive expansion of the welfare
state in the capitalist countries were leading to a situation where there was
declining demand for mountains and mountains of manufactured goods. A mechanism
had to be designed to achieve corporate growth against the welfare state, the
socialist state and the mixed economy.
So the first strategy was to
dangle what looked like cheap money before governments in the South and East.
This created a huge debt crisis by the 1980s. A programme was then developed,
the structural adjustment programme, which was meant to demand public assets as
payment for the debts and to condemn public or collective ownership altogether,
so that most public assets were supposed to be privatised in a liberalised
economy.
In some countries electricity, water, sewage services and even
prisons were sold to private corporations. Even public land was to be privatised
and given to global corporations to turn into export promotion zones.
This strategy had two immediate effects which we have experienced in
Zimbabwe. The first was the fast expropriation of the public sector by the
private sector, leading to massive growth in the latter. The second was the
shrinkage or weakening of the public sector and the state, so that it would no
longer be able ever to intervene in favour of the people and against
corporations. What happened to the old Zimbabwe United Passenger Company (Zupco)
here was a good example of corporate cannibalism and the privatisation of public
assets. Some managers at Zupco cannibalised and privatised Zupco assets before
they themselves became private transport operators.
Zimbabwe is in the
spotlight because politically it renounced structural adjustment in 2001 and
went on to embark on an African land reclamation programme in order to start
agrarian reforms with the African being slowly reinstated as a farmer for the
first time since the 1920s. The land which was supposed to go to global
companies went to peasants. In other words, Zimbabwe introduced land reform in
the place of the new enclosure movement’s market reform.
However, the
problem Zimbabwe faces now is that the political abandonment of structural
adjustment has not led to a corresponding abandonment of the knowledge base and
the neoliberal ideas on which structural adjustment was based. The majority of
the technocrats, academics, intellectuals and journalists who are supposed to
generate the knowledge to support the African economic emancipation movement are
still steeped in neoliberalism and hostile to the economic emancipation
movement.
University economics, law, political science, psychology and
sociology remain for the most part steeped in Eurocentric neoliberalism. There
is need to emancipate these disciplines as well as emancipate the land, the
minerals and the industries. This explains why the Third Chimurenga is not being
explained and supported with as much popular information and communication as
the Second Chimurenga. The technocrats and economists believe that the people
have no role to play in economic planning and mobilisation.
The local
technocrats and the economists serve the local comprador bourgeoisie and their
booty capitalism. Both are there to benefit global corporate cannibalism of the
type we observe in the occupation and looting of Iraq.
The local
technocrats, economists and journalists will always avoid discussing our
economic struggles in global context because that would make it difficult for
them to convince our people that they are alone and that current problems have
been caused by one man or one political party. Zimbabwe is being explained as
alone, under siege and groping in the dark.
A typical example of this
approach appeared in the Zimbabwe Independent on April 16 1999 — it was called
"Why we need IMF, World Bank support".
"There are elements within the
ruling party that would want to plunge this country into political and economic
chaos by resorting to populist choices for reasons of short-term political
expedience . . . It is this same clique that wants to introduce price controls
and embark on a destructive land acquisition exercise where law, productivity
and foreign confidence are of no account.
"And the overriding concern is
a childish desire to please President Mugabe . . . The stock market retreated
this week while severe foreign currency shortages brought trading almost to a
halt.
"The markets are sending a very clear message to the Government
and the party which we ignore at our peril. Put simply, the markets do not
approve of Government cutting ties with the IMF and the World Bank because they
understandably doubt whether Zimbabwe has the capacity to go it alone. Just as
importantly, the private sector is accurately aware of the magnitude of the
international fall-out should the Government decide to ditch the twin
institutions whose financial support underpins the whole [market] reform process
and provides a signal to other donors and investors . . . And this is the point
that the Government seems to completely miss."
It is clear that although
Zimbabwe has never demanded to go it alone, the comprador bourgeoisie tell the
people that that is what the Government has done. These are the very same people
who have asked global capital and the imperialist states to impose sanctions on
the country.
The Zimbabwe Independent’s opinion is most remarkable for
its refusal to include the people, dismissing all efforts to protect the people
as childish and populist. It is also remarkable for its benign view of the
global financial institutions, when it concludes that:
"What the IMF is
demanding is not as outrageous as the spurious revolutionaries in out midst
suggest. The majority of Zimbabweans share the concern raised by our
international partners . . ."
This view is contrary to reality, contrary
to proven historical experience. As David Korten has written: "The World Bank
has served as an export-financing facility for large Northern-based
corporations. The IMF has served as the debt-collector for Northern-based
financial institutions. GATT has served to create and enforce a corporate bill
of rights protecting the rights of the largest corporations against the
intrusion of people, communities, and democratically elected governments."
As Samir Amin pointed out in his Daily Mirror piece called "Brief
remarks on the Blair Commission Report": "The report should not be entitled
‘Report of the African Commission’. It is an initiative of the UK, controlled by
Tony Blair, with the contribution of selected Africans appointed by Blair, who .
. . represent neither African authorities nor the African civil society."
These Africans who allow themselves to be co-opted so that an alien
white report comes to be called African are one of the biggest challenges facing
the African economic emancipation movement.
They have to be stopped
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