By Reason Wafawarova
On September 18, Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister wrote a piece titled “It’s All About The Zanu-PF DNA” and made a detailed analysis of Nathaniel Manheru’s September 4 piece titled “Privileged proletarians: when the beautiful ones are not yet enough”.
In an aside dig at Manheru’s otherwise prolific art of writing, Biti accused collectively all members of Manheru’s generation for coming out of university so confused that it is Biti’s reckoning that the group does not know the difference between big words and intellect.
Biti wrote, “Of course, his writing style is loquacious and prolix which is typical of university students of his generation who thought that big words and verbosity are a sign of superior intellect.”
Why Biti did not use “talkative” for “loquacious” or “wordy” for “prolix” is a matter of Biti’s democratic right to choice, but Manheru must be wondering how a copycat of his style would choose to pretend to attack that which he so much admires without making an absolute fool of himself.
Away from attacking what one deeply cherishes, we may take interest in looking at the substance of what Biti wrote. Inter alia with Zimbabwe’s economic empowerment program, Biti also looked at the now concluded fight between Kingdom Bank’s Nigel Chanakira and Meikles’ John Moxon.
He argued that the middle class and elites of Zimbabwe are opposed to the economic empowerment policy because they associate the programme with “Zanu-PF’s DNA”, and he defined that DNA as “patronage and cronyism”. Zanu-PF as a party cannot exonerate its entire leadership from allegations of patronage and cronyism without being dishonest.
Biti is quite right in saying that black capital has been politicised and cantonised by some key leaders in Zanu-PF. What needs interrogation is Biti’s outrageous claim that this deplorable dent on the collective character of Zanu is in reality the DNA of the party. Zanu-PF is not made up of black capital, the middle class, or elites above them. That is incorrect and borders on mischief.
Zanu-PF is a product of a people’s uprising against colonial dispossession and humiliation. Zanu-PF is about rivers of blood and burdensome suffering for the emancipation of the masses and that is why the late Elliot Manyika sang “Zanu ndeyeropa . . . Zanu ndeyekushupika.”
Zanu-PF did not engage in a 14-year war of attrition so that it could form a club of black capitalists who worship at the shrine of patronage and cronyism. It is a revolutionary mass-driven liberation movement whose idea of liberation goes far beyond attaining flag independence and merely changing the name of the country and its various other places.
Zanu-PF’s understanding of liberation is about black consciousness, mental liberation, social liberation, economic liberation, mass empowerment and total sovereign rule. That is the DNA of Zanu-PF, and the errant behaviour of its leadership, however egregious, does not and cannot alter that DNA.
Reducing the economic empowerment programme to a mere act of patronage and cronyism is quite in line with Western rhetoric, and equally pliant to this rhetoric is the assertion that the land reform programme only benefited “Mugabe’s cronies”, whatever that means.
Tendai Biti is a high ranking worshipper at the altar of Western rhetoric and his attack on Zanu-PF is just one well launched missile on behalf of the god that blesses his party financially for its troubles in providing a black voice where a white one would be dismissed easily even by classical lunatics.
Biti says the black elites are the ones questioning the economic empowerment programme and this is because they are scared of precedence, not because they are anti-empowerment. But who said the black elites in Zimbabwe are the intended and targeted beneficiaries of this policy?
Zanu-PF’s DNA dictates that economic empowerment is about the masses and about the collective benefit of the nation, and not about a selected club of some middle-class that is aspiring to join privileged elites.
This is why Zanu-PF rubbished the argument that commercial farms needed to be given only to elites who could be trusted with capacity to capitalise operations, as well as with the skills to produce on the same farms. Zanu-PF said the land belonged to the people and the people could make elites out of themselves right from rags to riches.
Yes, post independence leadership in Africa inherited economies that had artificial GDPs calculated on the basis of minority economies that treated the majority indigenous populations as part of the flora and fauna. This legacy is the major inhibiting factor in the attainment of the goal to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
The economic growth figures for African countries and for countries like India are still only reflective of the interests of a minority few investing capitalists and these figures have no correlation with the needy masses on the ground. Yes, the African leadership has kept the gates for these skewed economies and in many cases tried to accommodate the masses without growing the same economies correspondingly as they ought to have done after flag independence.
Tendai Biti makes good analysis of this, but glaringly missing from his analysis are the machinations of Western countries in maintaining the economic status quo in former colonies — all in the self-interest of protecting the privilege of their profiteering investors.
For someone who so intensely quoted Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Biti surely knows what the West does whenever their colonial privileges are threatened. He also knows this from personal experience as he is the Secretary General of a party funded to maintain this status quo, and to look after the interests of Westerners in Zimbabwe.
He is a lawyer smart enough not to miss the intentions of his handlers, if only for their moneybags. This writer is tempted to say the DNA of MDC-T is treachery and puppetry, and no doubt such rhetoric would find buyers, particularly from Zanu-PF quarters.
However, the MDC was actually hijacked into treachery and puppetry from its original makers, the workers, and it was of course taken over by the mighty powers of Western moneybags. Zanu-PF is part of our past, as much as it is part of our present and our future. The MDC is part of our recent past and seeks to be our present and our future, and that the people appreciate.
When one is shorn of one’s past and does not see the direction of one’s future, and when one is very uncertain of one’s present, then one cannot tell from whence one comes and where he is going. The result is a tormented soul. When there is a manipulation of time and a manipulation of the past, there is also a manipulation of perception, experience and self-esteem.
Our time is being manipulated when we are told we live in the era of “democratisation and human rights”; concepts only valid in the perception and interpretation of a minority group that only makes up 10 percent of the world’s population; the Westerners.
Our past is being manipulated each day as we are told that the liberation movements that brought us freedom from colonial rule are no more than tyrannical movements.
We are lectured that the founding fathers of our nations do not even rise to the level of such brutal men as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, or Captain James Cook of Australia, men who are highly honoured despite the indisputable record of genocide by some of them. Cook and Washington are honoured over the dead bodies of millions of Aboriginal people and Amerindians respectively.
Why does the West delight in denying Zambians the privilege to give the honour of a founding father to Kenneth Kaunda, Mozambique to Samora Machel, Zimbabwe to Robert Mugabe, Congo to Patrice Lumumba, Ghana to Kwame Nkurumah, and so on?
Our African youth sometimes completely embrace the demeaning of their founding heroes, that way blissfully promoting the demeaning and distortion of African history at the expense of the continent’s future. This writer recently attended a Kenyan function where Kenyans in Sydney were celebrating the recently introduced new constitution.
An Ethiopian gentleman and a white lady in his company went to length praising the legacy of Jomo Kenyatta, providing a few quotes from Kenya’s founding father. The silence from the Kenyan audience was deafening and disturbing to this writer, until one young man broke the silence by asking, “Was he that good?”
Ironically, the Ethiopian gentleman said he was not happy and comfortable mentioning the name of the Ethiopian leader who was there when Kenyatta, Nkurumah, Kaunda and others founded the OAU and headquartered it in Addis Ababa.
So you have an Ethiopian who cannot even say Haille Sellassie in public and Kenyans who are absolutely flummoxed to hear that Kenyatta was a man of great honour. When Westerners play with our history they are playing with our sense of time, playing with our sense of place and who we are, and what we are about.
History is not just an elective subject in high school. It is the foundation of life and the cornerstone of nationhood. Who deserves to be immortalised between George Washington or Jomo Kenyatta, between Captain James Cook or Haille Sellassie, or Kwameh Nkurumah? Washington and Cook would have overwhelmingly carried the African vote if we had decided to carry out one that evening.
They are admired because their descendants have become a symbol of civilisation and prosperity — all covering their oceans of iniquity and brutality. So a US-based near anonymous human rights group takes it upon itself to define as genocide what happened during the civil conflict that happened in Midlands and Matabeleland after Zimbabwe’s independence.
They boastfully announce that this they have done to pin down Robert Mugabe for his iniquities against white commercial farmers from whom he took colonially stolen land, and surprisingly they have admirers from the Zimbabwean folk.
Being robbed of a future makes a people lose identity and they become euphoric and mystical — free of both anxiety and motivation. A people robbed of a past become infantile and they live in a torpid state, they become egocentric and inhibited.
Being robbed of the present makes a people catatonic, depressed and even schizophrenic. This is when one gets the feeling that the “world is moving on but we do not”. Life must carry a sense of direction, from past to present, to the future. That way life is worth living. People with a present shorn of a past and a future become preoccupied with death and failure and they behave like schizophrenics.
What this means is that when our attitudes are manipulated toward our past, our consciousness, capacities and abilities are also manipulated. Tendai Biti must take note of this when he correctly blames the colonial education system for creating a dependant African.
Our history not being taught to us correctly ensures that our potential will be forever undeveloped as a people and that we will not challenge those who dominate us. Intellectual structures and powers are undeveloped when we suffer from amnesia; they are restricted and alienated.
Not knowing much about one’s history does not spare one the harm brought about by being taught wrong history. Those who boast that they do not know any black history but they know science, mathematics, accounts and so on must not think they have escaped the harm of having no history, or having the wrong one.
Being cut off from one’s past only means that one has gained knowledge at the cost of being alienated, effectively it means one has gained an alienated knowledge. Alienated knowledge can only be positively used in the interest of aliens. Democracy taught by aliens when one is cut off from their own history is only good for the interests of aliens.
Who do those who have computer science knowledge work for? Who do those who have degrees in political science work for? Who do those who have Harvard knowledge about governance work for? These are the unwritten rules. They teach us Mathematics, science and democracy to the degree that we forget who we are and what we are — we forget our history; we forget our connectedness with our own people.
One cannot use alienated knowledge for themselves or for the benefit of their own people. Knowledge must be connected and contained in a historical structure, in a cultural structure and this is why youth national orientation is not a “militia” idea but an essential aspect of nation building.
Otherwise we have a people with the highest levels of degrees in business administration and yet they build no businesses themselves. We have people who become CEOs of Microsoft or Coca Cola yet they have no idea of building their own business.
These are the foundational requirements that one cannot bypass and it is futile to dream of an economically free and prosperous Africa when our leadership still operates on alienated knowledge. Learning about Western democracy is not going to free and prosper post-independent Africa and Biti knows this from the Chinese and Singaporean experience.
But he is totally wrong to say these two countries are not democratic. They are democratic because they are building strong economies for and on behalf of their people, not for the benefit of Western corporations and capitalist elites. When politicians make friends with Westerners in order to safeguard the privileges and benefits of imperialism and neo-colonialism then we have a serious problem.
When such politicians win elections what we have is government by the people for the politicians and their masters, and one needs to look at urban councils in Zimbabwe today to see what happens when politicians loyal to foreign interests are brought to power. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer for the state owned media in Zimbabwe and writes from Australia. He can be contacted on [email protected] or reason@rwafa warova.com.
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