Economic lesson from a dog
I have said this before. I will say it again. Someone must tell our Finance Minister who is a lawyer by training that one important curve which the dismal science called economics has given mankind is called the consumption curve.

Basic textbooks on economics will tell you that what makes this one curve stand out above all other curves - animate or inanimate - is its unique and stubborn trait of refusing to dive to the zero point of any graph, let alone to venture into the minus zone. It may meander and mend, twist and turn but no, it never hits point zero or below. When it comes to a downward trend, it is very stubborn, more stubborn than Minister Biti, with all his self-vaunted ghetto intransigence.

Its resilience is not hard to discover. Even a beggar whose pocket is totally empty, still incurs consumption-related expenditure. He must live, and the will to live compels that he borrows for survival, well beyond his savings.

This is why people get over-borrowed, including those living on or beneath the threshold, who thus should be reckoned as unable to spent.
That way the consumption curve imposes its will on mankind. The Shona have a good proverb that reckons with this phenomenon of survival economics. It says "Imbwa haihukure sadza".
Roughly translated this saying means no dog barks at food.
Only a man on a full stomach affords the luxury of drawing up a budget, affords the luxury of postponing consumption. This is one simple lesson Minister Biti might have to learn, sooner than later, amidst furious barks and even bites.

Beyond the alchemy of dreams
Or maybe the dismal science is too esoteric for the minister, too hidden and opaque to reveal its hidden ways. Let me be nearer him.
The minister claims to have been a diligent student of Marx and Engels, in his own words, during his "mistaken" student days.

Today he says he has recovered from the dashing idealism of those tumultuous days where the alchemy of militant idealism turned boys' toys into fuel-free Ferraris. He has discovered new bodies of knowledge, new rules of life, including one that politely advises that this earth has its guardians, all hailing from a clan of fairer, white skin colour. He has new teachers, new textbooks from some university called Bretton Woods.

He is also quick to add the real world is hard on the soft, harder on the dreamy. He says he is now a down-to-earth man, a hard-nosed politician-minister. I hope he is all that. For the sake of this article I take comfort from the sheer longevity of matters learnt in youth.
Such lessons tend to linger on, dominate even in later life. They tend to colour lifelong sensibilities thereby shaping outlooks. So the Honourable must remember basic Marxism, surely?

The one lesson in capitalism
The radical duo, that is, Marx and Engels, makes it commonsensically clear that the bloody capitalist, no matter how depraved, greedy and evil, is sensible enough to know that he cannot fleece his exploited and downtrodden worker right down to the marrow, pare him to the bone.
He must allow that barest minimum reward to his victim to allow the same victim to afford a morsel not just to survive, but also to get strong enough to be able to copulate with his wife, so another brood is generated and raise under the same conditions of subsistence to allow capitalism, in all its exploitative social relations, to exploit viably and thus subsists eternally.

Capitalism cannot deny its victim - the worker - the ability to reproduce his life and his class-kind, without imperiling itself.
It is clever enough to know that its sustenance rests on repeat exploitation. Surely this level of explanation should be accessible to his Honourable the Minister?
Does he eat from his pot?

Zimbabwe's national statistics are compiled by a department under Minister Biti's charge. He is about to replace that department's leadership, fortuitously giving its reigns to an officer who once upon a time was his high school teacher. This is the department which tells us what threshold earnings for our society should be, all to
allow the abused Zimbabwean civil servant to be able to eat, make furious love, rest a little before making it back to workplace for another working day, indeed before siring the next generation of workers for the continuance of the system which exploits him.

The worker himself does not invent figures that gauge the poverty datum line. Biti's Zimstats -renamed after the old CSO, reshaped after a blueprint and on orders of the ubiquitous International Monetary Fund (IMF) - does.
I want to believe the Honourable eats what his pot, hand and stick cooks. If not, may God the Almighty please be with us!