The Sunday News
Limukani Ncube
“The shock doctrine” is the influential but little understood theory that in order to push through profoundly unpopular policies that enrich the few and impoverish the many, there needs to be some kind of collective crisis or disaster — either real or manufactured.
A crisis that opens up a “window of opportunity” — when people and societies are too disoriented to protect their own interests — for radically remaking countries using the trademark tactic of rapid-fire economic shock therapy and, all too often, less metaphorical forms of shock..”
The above is a snippet from a review done by penguinrandomhouse of the book, Shock Doctrine written by Naomi Klein. Joseph Stiglitzept, in a review of the book in the New York Times says, “The Shock Doctrine” is Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. “Disaster capitalism,” as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job. For example, Klein argues, the Asian crisis of 1997 paved the way for the International Monetary Fund to establish programmes in the region and for a sell-off of many state-owned enterprises to Western banks and multinationals. The 2004 tsunami enabled the government of Sri Lanka to force the fishermen off beachfront property so it could be sold to hotel developers. The destruction of 9/11 allowed George W Bush to launch a war aimed at producing a free-market Iraq (Stiglitzept, 2007).
The principle of the shock doctrine or shock therapy is however, not an alien phenomenon on the African soil and academic, Dr Tafataona Mahoso argues civic society and Non-Governmental Organisations have been using it to hoodwink the masses so as to pursue their anti-government agenda. And many civic society organisations have been accused of manufacturing a crisis on paper, so as to come up with proposals which they send to the West to get funding, funding which they then use the way they want. Many civic society organisations have misled people, and many have stolen from the very people they purport to serve.
In an article that critiqued the role of civic society during the GNU era, he wrote: “(…) the strategy of the US government was to provide through MDC-T- aligned NGOs and ministries, those services which the people could no longer get because of sanctions. The trick which was supposed to produce victory for the US-MDC-T ticket is based on the theory of what Naomi Klein calls “the love shock.” It is a form of criminal humanitarianism, whereby imperialism triggers a crisis which produces shock in the people. Later on, many NGOs are then funded and unleashed on the shocked people to provide some relief and a good name for the proxies of the same empire.” (Mahoso, “Why ask Goliath for a level playing field?”, The Sunday Mail, June 29, 2013).
The civic society in the country has long been associated with the opposition MDC, and as such, it has been used as a proxy to push the agenda of the opposition thereby abdicating its mandate of being development agents. For long, it has cried “crisis” where there is no crisis, in a bid to influence the masses otherwise by saying “we have sourced funding to solve this crisis.”
Another writer said: “The MDC is seen as a “child” of civic society in the eyes of the majority of its membership. But with the total subordination of the civic society leadership to the MDC the majority, who provide numbers but not leadership in return for resources, have actually been made the children of the MDC parent . . . This is compounded by the newly flamboyant living style of the civic society leadership. They must always have the latest cars, etc . . . The MDC’s ideological “spaghetti”, to use Morgan Tsvangirai’s words, abrogates the necessary ingredients for a vibrant, independent and effective civic society . . . The civic movement graduated into the political playing field at the cost of its independence (H Gumbo, 2005).
It therefore did not come as a surprise when Government last week said it will not hesitate to withdraw registration certificates of NGOs and Private Voluntary Organisations (PVOs) that meddle in politics. This is because the majority of the players in the civic society have abdicated their duties and are dabbling in politics, contrary to the laws of the land.
Acting Minister of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, Hon Kazembe Kazembe in a statement last week said; “All Private Voluntary Organisations (PVOs) or Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) are registered through the District Social Welfare Office in their area of operations. They are non-profit making organisations and they are apolitical. From this point of view, non-profit institutions are legal or social entities created for the purpose of providing assistance and services and whose status does not permit them to be a source of income, profit, or other financial gain for the units that establish, control or finance them. The same status does not permit them to engage in politics.
“The Government has however, noted with concern that some Private Voluntary Organisations and/ or NGOs have negated their objectives and are now meddling in politics. Should these organisations continue with this behaviour, the Government will not hesitate to withdraw their registration certificates. This is within the confines of the Private Voluntary Organisation Act section 10 which gives the government the mandate to de-register an organisation which fails to comply with its terms of registration.”
By definition, an NGO is any non-profit, voluntary citizens’ group which is organised on a local, national or international level. It is task-oriented and driven by people with a common interest, performs a variety of services and humanitarian functions, brings citizen concerns to government, advocates and monitors policies and encourages political participation through provision of information. This suggests that they simple play the role of service provider as so better the lives of the people and are no way political players.
Recently, there has been discussions on social media on the conduct of the civic society. One letter has been widely circulated, though its author remains a mystery, but the person is believed to be a member of the civic society and the writer concurs that the civic society in the country has broken the law and has negated its mandate.
“We run fake programmes where we just don’t care about impact on communities as long as we have done workshops and got the money. We then tell our colleagues in the MDC that we have done civic education in such and such communities and write fancy reports when there is nothing significant that we have done.
We have chosen to be partisan having friends and members of the cabal working in donor agencies such as USAID, EU etc who fund us exclusively so that we push a certain political agenda . . . We have lost it as civic leaders and we are the loudest on social media lying to all of you in the diaspora and creating negative perception about our country just to sustain our employment in civic activism while hoping to get positions in government, should (Nelson) Chamisa win or becomes part of a GNU. The US senators came to Zimbabwe and held meetings guess with who? Opposition leaders and us, myself included, what did we tell them?” reads part of the statement.
