After Zanu-PF’s anticipated March 2008 victory

[XXPANTHAXX]

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso

THE anticipated convincing victory of the Zimbabwe African National
Union — Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) in the 2008 harmonised elections was
based on two factors: a concrete programme of action based on a
convincing historical record full of tangible results and achievements
which the opposition’s propaganda onslaught could distort but never
delete; and a coherent value system (ideology) based on the same history
and clearly consistent with the programme of action.

Although the MDC was poised to come in second to Zanu-PF in the same
elections, it no longer presents the main challenge to Zimbabwe’s
independence and sovereignty which it represented (as a proxy for
imperialism) in 2000, 2002 and 2005. The MDC’s performance, however
significant in terms of numbers, represents a decline that will
eventually lead to near-extinction.

This is because the MDC at its formation was premised on the presumed
dominance of a labour movement collaborating with foreign companies and
the Rhodesian land-owning oligarchy at the very same time that
structural adjustment was decimating workers and turning them into petty
traders and tuckshop operators.

To make matter worse, the African liberation movement was targeting the
other base, the Rhodesian oligarchy, with demands for land reclamation
and repossession. These facts combined with the MDC’s open collaboration
with the UK, the US and the EU against Zimbabwe meant that the MDC did
not have a long future.

In other words, the MDC based itself on three shaky foundations: the
presumed, permanent and global dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world; the
continued dominance of the Rhodesian landed oligarchy; and the continued
growth of industrial labour.

The presumed global dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world was already in
serious doubt as the MDC was being launched in 1999, because of the
emergence of China, India, Russia, Brazil and others.

The presumed permanence and dominance of the Rhodesian-landed oligarchy
was soon to be dislodged by peasants and war veterans. The presumed
growth of labour was a miscalculation since structural adjustment had
started in other countries as far back as 1980.

In other words, given the material foundations and the ideological
concepts on which the MDC based itself, it can no longer be regarded as
the main challenge for the future. It is therefore the Simba Makoni
model which should be seen as representing a future challenge to the
ideals of sovereignty, independence, autonomy, indigenisation and
empowerment.

Where the MDC pretended to be based on workers, civil society, students,
farmers and women — Makoni has discarded all these and assumed the
narcissistic posture of René Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."

Makoni is being used to repackage structural adjustment as "consultation
with stakeholders". What he means is that, if the people of Zimbabwe
were ever to allow him to win the presidential vote, he would go back to
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, USAID, Sida, Norad,
Danida, CZI, ZNCC and others. He would ask them how they would like the
economy of Zimbabwe to be run and for whom.

They would not take time to lift sanctions and to put in place a
blueprint for everything. Even his cabinet would come from technocrats
and managers already acceptable to these "stakeholders". That is why it
is totally unnecessary for Makoni to have a political party or movement.
That is why for him everything about the future of Zimbabwe is simple
and straightforward.

In other words, Makoni represents a very seductive approach based on
imperialist assumptions about the effects of sanctions. The MDC and the
sanctions were meant to soften the population through economic terrorism
via sanctions and real violence via stayaways and bombings. It is now
assumed that the people and the Government are now so tired and so
hungry that they will welcome any smiling face which promises pie in the
sky through capitulation to all the key demands of Western corporate
interests.

This is tempting because there are some within Zanu-PF who believe what
Makoni promises. In fact, that sort of belief was the basis for the
temporary adoption of the structural adjustment programme between 1989
and 2001.

Makoni therefore appears as a man who has no ideology, no political
party and no movement, exactly because the ideology was there and is
there from the introduction of structural adjustment. The blueprint is
also there and it has not worked as expected in those countries where it
was accepted — Kenya and Cote d'Ivoire being recent cases.

Makoni is saying the future Government of Zimbabwe will need only to
declare that it will be a good manager for Western interests and those
interests have assured him they will "re-engage" Zimbabwe and do the
rest on "behalf of the people".

Makoni is not only a "private" presidential candidate; he also stands
for rampant "privatisation" in opposition to what he calls the command
economy and command politics. These are euphemisms for strong
government, for independence and sovereignty.

The majority of the people are crying out for remaining State
enterprises such as the GMB, CSC, National Railways and Zupco to expand
their capacities and services, but a significant number of so-called
"technocrats" within the economic ministries and the Reserve Bank of
Zimbabwe continue to demand the privatisation of such parastatals.

This demand for privatising and selling off more State enterprises is
being made even as the same State is being forced by the current crisis
to create more State enterprises and parastatals in order to intervene
in the same "market" which is demanding more deregulation and
privatisation.

The extent to which the World Bank, the IMF and "economic experts"
deceived Zimbabweans about SAP can be shown by reading the magazine
Social Change and Development No. 28 of 1992 and the Megabuck magazine
issue of March 2000.

The whole issue of Social Change and Development was dedicated to the
coverage of a national workshop on SAP. The majority of speakers at that
workshop, including the Government representative and the then
secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Mr Morgan
Tsvangirai, accepted the basic claims made by economists about SAP and
neoliberal economics.

They differed only on tactics to be adopted in the case of Zimbabwe. In
other words, those who now lead the MDC agreed with the Government that
the SAP recipe would produce a big cake as promised by economists. They
differed mainly on how the cake should be sliced between the workers in
ZCTU and the rest of the nation.

The paper summed up the wonderful rewards which economic experts, big
business, the World Bank and the IMF said Zimbabwe would reap upon
adoption of Esap, as follows:

-Many more jobs will be created;
-Many more companies will be started (especially in the expanding export
sector);
-People will pay less tax;
-There will be no more shortages;
-There will not be any foreign currency problems (people would just walk
into any bank and get hard currency on demand);
-People will be able to buy anything in Zimbabwe that they can buy
anywhere else in the world; and
-Retrenched workers will be retrained and get new jobs in new companies
which will result from the growth of privatised enterprises.

We do not have to ask readers whether or not these promises were
fulfiled. The Government’s denunciation of SAP in 2001 was a reflection
not only of the fact that these promised results were false but also
that the Government refused to accept the Esap prescription for almost
10 years.

When it finally agreed to try the programme, there was already immense
pressure and lobbying especially from the private sector using
supposedly "scientific evidence" from economic "experts" about the way
Esap was inevitable and the way it would unlock the gates to universal
national prosperity.

While most Zimbabweans now agree that they were misled, there is little
discussion of the main "misleading" field of "expertise" called
economics, especially university economics. What this story reveals is
the dangerous power of those who can employ armies of "professional
experts" in order to change the destinies of entire nations.

The SAP was successfully marketed through the media as a
techno-scientific, neutral, benign and inevitable scheme and its
enforcement became more fanatical and zealous as failure became the only
option.

As Jeremy Seabrook wrote in Victims of Development: "The Western
economic system is an ideological construct . . . Economics in neither
science nor art, but ideology.

Its system of accounting is extremely selective about what it includes
and what it omits, in terms of both costs and benefits, profits and
forfeits, advantages and penalties.

This partial and fragmented view of human affairs is now the focus of
evangelising fervour by Western governments and financial institutions."

How exactly has neoliberal ideology operated in Zimbabwe? Like the
mediaeval church ideology it has replaced, neoliberalism has created,
falsified and promoted simplistic dichotomies. It creates a series of
straw-men or "others" which it then demolishes in order to fake its
superiority.

The feudal system of class oppression and exploitation was based on the
following dichotomies, among others:

-Superior birth versus inferior birth;
-Nobility/aristocracy versus peasantry or serfdom;
-Superior lineage versus peasant or serf descent;
-Divine right to rule versus inherent obligation to serve; and
-Superior service or career versus rigid position of servitude.

Neoliberalism has created and popularised its own binary opposites which
are just as arbitrary and oppressive as those of feudalism.

They include the following, for example:

-Civil society versus state;
-Personal choice versus community oppression;
-Free entrepreneur versus control freak;
-Free enterprise versus state monopoly;
-Individual initiative versus collective stagnation;
-Expert/technocrat versus ideologue;
-Entrepreneur versus bureaucrat;
-Good governance versus corruption;
-Open society versus closed society; and
-Corporate transparency versus state secrecy and corruption.

Now, as in mediaeval times, these binary labels do not in reality mean
what they claim to mean. The Daily Gazette, The Financial Gazette, The
Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard were among the vehicles used to
promote the neoliberal catechism in the 1990s.