The Zimbabwean government has, through the media, announced that
it is reviewing it’s much talked about economic indigenization and empowerment policy. The
review, again according to contested media reports, its either a ‘climb down’
or a ‘climb up’. The latter phrase meaning an escalation of the radical nature
of the policy as opposed to what columnists and opinion leaders have been hoping
to be a de-radicalisation of the same.
Both perspectives are emerging more as a result of either turf
politics in Zanu Pf or ‘we told you so’ perspectives from the mainstream opposition
and even advocates of neo-liberal free market economics. These counter perspectives tend to be more in
keeping with shrill but shallow ideological standpoints that do not reflect an adequate
appreciation of the context of indigenization in Zimbabwe. This also being a
characteristic that is most unfortunate where and when it is reflected in the
opinions of different leaders in cabinet, at least for now.
What would be important to recall however is that indigenization
or economic empowerment as outlined by the Zanu Pf government is not a recent
development in our economy let alone our politics. The language may have been different but it
began with land reform in the early 1980s.
Specifically with the functional adage ‘from the few to the
many/majority’. It was also not limited
to land but the socio-economic rights of the same majority. These included
access to health, education, water and basic
infrastructural services such as transport.
It is the basic philosophy of ‘from the few to the many’
that informed our initial indigenization programmes. Their end effect was to
have all Zimbabweans feeling and living in state that empowered across all
necessary aspects of their existence.
What however occurred with the adoption of World Bank funded
and determined economic structural adjustment programmes (ESAP) in the late 1980s
through to the late 1990s was a significant ideological shift in understanding indigenization. It was no longer from the ‘few to the many’
but ‘from the few to a nascent black free market oriented few’. Whereas prior to the onset ESAP, empowerment was
interpreted in the broadest social democratic terms, in its aftermath, it was
more about the creation of a new black economic elite or as the World Bank
would continue to put it, a new ‘African middle class.’
This is in part what informed the creation of the Indigenous Business Development Center in the
early 1990s. It became one among a number of organizations that led to the initial rise of many a business maverick
some of whom now no longer have the companies that they got empowered to create
or own.
Where we fast forward to the contemporary version of indigenization
and economic empowerment there is still that 1990s thread of the empowerment of
a new black elite as opposed to the broadest empowerment of the many. If we take the radical land reform programme
at the turn of the century, the initial frenzy of empowering a majority
landless has since been overtaken by either 'replacement ownership' of massive farms
by an elite few, the little noticed eviction of the initial beneficiaries or in most cases, without any significant changes to specific land use that
reflects broader empowerment.
Or where we look at issues relating to mining, the
empowerment model has sought more to make state elites or politically connected
persons undertake the very same extraction without the much lauded' beneficiation'. Or with Community Share Ownership Trusts which have been reported in the media as being penniless. All of this within the
context of not changing the structural tenets of the neo-liberal system that
informed minority resource ownership.
In the new review strategy that government is intending, the
principle of a Production Sharing Model, or the Joint Empowerment Investment
Model, do not change the structural and neo-liberal intentions of its original
policy. It only appears to seek to rationalize
it further by giving the state and its well connected elite latitude to
negotiate without instilling fear in international conglomerates. Where examples of other states implementing a
similar model are given, their specific contexts and whether indeed the end-benefits
of such frameworks are enjoyed by the majority poor are conveniently left out. Or the fact that we have neither oil nor as
vast reserves of any other high in global market demand mineral.
Admittedly these are trying economic times and any
investment luring overtures from government should be welcome. The challenge
however is whether these proposed investments are linked to an economic
revolution that empowers a majority of Zimbabweans or are merely intended at
accentuating elitist state capitalism.
The experimentation being undertaken by the government is unfortunately less
primed to meet the socio-economic needs of the ‘many’. Instead, what government appears to be much
more keen on is a structural state capitalism that leads more to the creation
of oligarchs than it democratizes the socio- economic fabric of Zimbabwean society. And therein lies the problem. We would be
better off if we approached the whole matter from the holistic lens of the
1980s.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
(takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)
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