In late 2017, the new (and current) Zimbabwean government
announced a general amnesty for individuals/corporates that had allegedly not
accounted to the national Reserve Bank for foreign currency that they sent out
of the country in lieu of specific commodities/goods and services.
Against
the backdrop of the ‘coup-not-a-coup ouster’ of former president Robert Mugabe,
this announcement raised high expectations from ordinary Zimbabweans. The public was highly optimistic as to the
law eventually catching up with those that had benefited from the latter’s
presidents long drawn leadership of the state and by default, the national
economy.
This, as a result of a popular public perception of the ruling
Zanu Party as being corrupt and preoccupied with enriching its leaders via the
levers of state power.
So Mgangagwa issued the equivalent of an edict to what one assumes
are his companieros to, in South African political parlance, ‘pay back
the money’. Or at least prove it came back to country in cash or
kind. He even had the luxury of extending the ‘amnesty’ for a
further two weeks after its expiry in March 2018.
As promised he published a list of those who allegedly did not
account for the money, largely in US$ cash format.
It’s a list that it turns out has disappointed many a pundit and opposition
politician. It is also a list that has
angered those that are in private businesses who are either on the list or
sympathise with those on it.
Except that the list is as technical as it is political. Corporate
lawyers, individuals, political players and those close to all of the above have
decried the injustice of it all. Not only on technical grounds such
as the CD1 form and the inefficiency of both local and central banks
information capturing systems. But more ominously for Mnangagwa’s government,
the potential defamation lawsuits of having published such a list in the first place.
But Mnangagwa never intended for the list to be legally or
politically water tight. His intention was to
always to call the bluff of the wannabe middle and upper class. Not
by way of production. Instead more by way of ‘lifestyle
aspirations’. That is, to have house in the suburbs, or at least the equivalent
of the same. No matter how much it would cost, including the legal
risks associated with evading monetary exchange of control regulation acts.
So in the pub conversations that the list has wrought on, we must
ask ourselves serious questions about its broader meaning.
If we take the angle of querying the political economic culture
that informs what we understand as the ‘ease of doing business’, we would
argue, like defence lawyers, that there is nothing remiss in someone, with the
assistance of the state (Reserve Bank) taking his/her money out of the country,
by whatever means, in order to make a profit.
Unless we never understood how capital’s relentless pursuit of
profit has been the arbiter and cause of our current national economic crisis.
And also because of how opaque our private, public and national
wealth management systems are.
Some of us may not understand what national wealth is, so a
rejoinder might help. As the French economist Thomas Piketty
has posited: ‘national wealth=private wealth + public wealth’.
To be overly simplistic, what the Zimbabwean government has done
is to try and conflate what would be public wealth (the Reserve Bank for
example) with that of private capital (individually accumulated capital, for example, profit from a private company).
So the anger about the ‘list’ is not so much about a structural
understanding of what’s really going on in Zimbabwe’s political economy. Instead
it is about preference.
Defending those on the list may be now a matter for legal
minds. Either on the basis of
technicalities such as what happened at the Reserve Bank or accusations of
civil defamation.
The more significant issue is that those who sought and supposedly
got amnesty may have done much more serious ‘externalisation’ and justified it
in ways that we will perhaps never know.
What is apparent is that hazy nexus between public wealth and
private wealth. It is designed in such a
way as to ensure that the public wealth (land, minerals etc) is no longer being
used to create national but private wealth.
And that’s where the bigger problem resides. Even before we start
pulling out economic or legal expertise to explain this aberration away in the
name of the ‘free market’.
It is the instrumentalisation of the state to create largely
private wealth that is the biggest problem our country faces. Lists or no lists.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
(takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)
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