Economy: Soko Risina Musoro
GENTLE reader, I think it is a sheer waste of national time to focus on the collapse of ZimPF, spectacular though that may be. There was nothing unexpected about ZimPF’s dramatic finale, especially for you who have been reading this column. I gave enough hints. More important, the refrain of this column has always been to warn Zimbabweans that Joice Mujuru was, and could never have been a decisive factor in national politics, both before and after Independence. Her small significance lay in being a human illustration of the rearing capacity of the ruling Party, and the sheer tolerant generosity of President Mugabe. Nothing more, nothing less.
Man, know thy history
Equally, those she teamed up with to form ZimPF are well known small political timers, little men and women whose history subsisted in being invited as minor characters at crucial moments in the big drama of this country. The only trouble is that we are a society that is sorely divorced from its history. We don’t know our past, don’t know its personages, which is why we tend to panegyrise men and women on the margins of history and historical moments, while traducing Hamlets without whose presence the national play would never have proceeded. Poor Rugare Gumbo! Yet another coup on so small a matter, so small a cause! What would have gotten me to shudder was the prospect of a Joice Mujuru chance leadership of this country, simply by dint of hierarchical placement. But like I always tell people, chine vene vacho chinhu ichi!
Nyamutamba nemombe wabaiwa
However scientific we become, however developed, we should always remember there is that inscrutable realm that governs the affairs of this land. It is the land of Chaminuka, Nehanda, Kaguvi and other mediums. You may want to deny it in the name of sophistication or of the new faith, but the metaphysical factor which bears down on this land cannot be wished away. Beyond the material, we are one land moved by great spirits, a land with invisible guardians who lead up to the Creator. We have our guardians, our God and real Christianity will not break this great chain of spiritual being. Which is why neither pretences nor sophistry will change our pre-destined direction. Check all around you and just see how dummies are falling, one by one, one after another, so spectacularly. Until we get to election days, there will be more drama — bigger, riveting spectacles — as more charlatans tumble, leaving the real leader — the anointed one — standing! And again we shall all sing: Ahooo oha oha/Nyamutamba nemombe wabayiwa! The great bull-fighter has been gored.
God’s smile in the land
Things are looking good, very good and again quite soon we shall be singing ooh lala! Mighty God has repaid us a thousand times over and the land wears a green, verdurous smile. Zimbabwe is abuzz with life, as was attested to me by some BBC anchorperson who was in the country on some shooting project that wound up a few days ago. In typical Etonian English, she sang to the beauty of this land, praised “the good English” of its citizens! Kikiki, King Lobengula would have exclaimed: “the Inglish, the Inglish!” See what they have eternally wrought in minds of their former colonial subjects! Frankly I did not know whether to feel good or slighted by such an observation. But there it was, proof of a long colonialism!
The Zambuko year
I said the land is gay, bright and lively. We are set for a bumper harvest, all-round. My good journalist-friend — now a consummate farmer — renames 2016/17 season “Zambuko” — the Crossover Year. And that it is, however you want to look at it. The rains have been generous, thanks to the Almighty in whose infinite goodness and Justice all life abides. He tested us; today he rewards our hard-to-collapse, proven national will and spirit. Today his ledger shows a balance: the drought of the past now met with the dampness of the present. All happening a season before the country decides! Well, not quite decides: all happening a season before the country retains, re-confirms! Is the die not cast already?
The task on hand
But all this is no reason for us to sit on our laurels. We never do; never should, we a wayfaring people. Throughout our long journey from Guruuswa, the land of tall grass, it has been a struggle. That struggle continues! There is so much to do, fortunately so many to do it. The inputs have been successfully mobilised, and anyone who does not do well this season has little reason to remain on the land. The dams are full, which means an extension of the Command Agriculture Project into Winter Cropping — a broadening of the Programme’s crop repertoire — should see us hauling in a good wheat crop. Still, no stopping. In fact I run a little ahead. The current crop must be harvested well, and in time. The acreage under maize is large — too large for household labour. We need to mobilise combine harvesters so the large crop is carefully harvested. On time, too. The silos, another headache. Most of them largely derelict from many lean years, in a state of utter disrepair. These have to be fixed well ahead of the huge harvest. Grain processing companies need about 800 000 tones, which they are ready to pay for upfront; we project between another 800 000 to a million by way of surplus, and of which needs to be well stored, or for which markets have to be found, possibly in East Africa where the rains have not been so good. Of course the crop must be financed. But judging by the response towards the wheat crop, it is clear more players are coming on board.
A culture of hard work
After wheat, we need to prepare for the next season whose fortunes remain unknown, uncertain. That means more investments in irrigation systems, now that water bodies are full, and Tokwe-Mukosi is finished, virtually. More power units are coming on stream. Irrigation is the lasting answer to climate change. The country is dammed, the most dammed part of this southern tip of our Earth. Let us not be damned. But far more important than a good harvest is cultivating into the national character a personality of persistent diligence. Of hard work. Not this horrible trait of loafing, chafing and complaining which nose-long politicians of the tajamuka ilk were beginning to engraft onto the national personality. It was horrible, baneful!
Basket profiling
Much more, this should be the year — the season — we put behind us the horrible tag of “basket case”: Zimbabwe, once the bread-basket of Southern Africa, now turned into a basket case! So went the terrible pot-boiler that fastened on us like a tick well and securely embedded in thick bodily fur, one that would not go away, one harder to shake free. It was a terrible moniker for this Land of tall spirits, taller fighters. Never again should that pot-boiler stalk us, merely because we cannot look after our stomachs. It was shameful, but worse, a dignified cover for a racial slur. From 2000, we embarked on a dramatic Land Reform Programme that recovered land from white farmers, largely of British stock. The western world wasn’t too pleased, in fact was infuriated that a black people had dared taken away from, and reversed gains of, colonial white conquest and gain. An abomination in international relations. That abomination and rupture took place here, to great anger in the white world. Something had to be done, and done urgently lest more natives would grow snotty and challenge the colonially-ordained global geo-economic and political setup.
A revolution that had to be stopped
Invasion scenarios were drawn up. And abandoned. Regime change plans were implemented. And foiled. But the anger remained, as did, too, the urge to demolish, to reverse this terrible happening. Beaten but still hopeful, imperialism settled on massaging internal conditions in the hope of building internal pressures for reactionary change, so it would appear like a local social revolution. This is an abiding strategy of neo-colonialism: imperial interests are managed in such a way to look and appear like local processes. The myth of Arab spring, when in fact there was nothing Arab about it, no spring in the desert! Hoow! The idea is to localize in order to confer local causation, to confer legitimacy, to hoodwink the local eye into believing the anger is endogenous. Our sapped belly, underfed stomach, provided the most promising soft under-belly for disguising this patently external imperial assault. Did not Fanon predict that a people pushed to desperation ends up acting against its core interest? Imperialism knows that an unfed stomach honours no principle, indeed has no time for ideals. The revolution, the republic, was in danger, which is why it is no coincidence that this country has always seen most intense meddlesome political dissent in those years of drought and hunger. In those years we wait for the rains. Check that out, gentle reader.
Lesson from Ghana
“It has been said that the fabrication of the “big lie” is essential in the planning of any usurpation of political power,” so wrote Kwame Nkrumah as he reminisced on the heady Conakry days, soon after his ouster. For his Ghana, the “big lie” told the world was that Ghana needed to be rescued from ‘economic chaos’. Interestingly, the so-called economic chaos had been engineered by the same forces who told the lie: the British and the Americans who ousted him. And this is not a matter of conjecture: just read CIA declassifieds, and you get to know what propaganda brief the US mission had on Nkrumah’s Ghana. And what the CIA did to oust him. More important, the years that followed Nkrumah’s demise were hardly years of plenty. The Ghanaians continued to wallow in poverty. Yet the remedy that cured the so-called Nkrumah malady — economic chaos — was neither summoned nor administered by the same forces against unsuccessful successor governments who betrayed, who never served the Ghanaian people. No, this was legitimate poverty, democratic poverty! An international conspiracy and coup against Nkrumah, local putsches for the rest; imperialism had securely ensconced itself in the driving seat, leaving the apoplectic native to bicker, to tussle, to fight, but without seeing the real enemy. Even Ayi Kwai Armah — that famed Ghanaian writer who still lives, spoke of the ‘beautyful ones’ as not yet born. But how could they be born in circumstances of neo-colonial ugliness. There is a way in which what is local in Africa is often foreign. Caveat emptor!
Black poverty, white salvation
In our case, the lie had very strong, seemingly demonstrable and plausible props. Like all good lies of course! The country was facing a net cereal deficit; most reclaimed lands stood fallow, untilled; the Agro-leaning economy was on a tailspin. Much worse, this compounded crisis seemed to neatly coincide with the fall and departure of colonial whites in the agro-economy! America had not slapped us with sanctions, only with an Act for democracy and economic recovery! Beautiful America! Very portent considerations for making the lie believable, more so on stretched, buffeted and impressionistic minds of the unemployed, themselves the raging, roaring force and raw material for the regime-change agenda! The disengagement of Bretton Woods institutions, coupled with the drying up of aid and loans from the West, simply sealed the grim picture. I said all this was a way to dignify a racial
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