The Sunday News
Dr Mandla Nyathi
IT was in this column three weeks ago that the author warned of the risk and dangers posed by indifference to statements made by lunatics and those made by serious actors privileged with information and tools to process it.
The weight of this important distinction is obvious in information processing by outsiders and crucially, for decision-making by all the stakeholders in State building.
The State has privileged capabilities through use of its assets, resources and statecraft wisdom to respond to communication risk capable of undermining, weakening and bypassing the State by forces bent towards that objective.
Zimbabwe is not immune to such risk exposures, particularly so when some who sit in Parliament and outside the Parliamentary privileges, make reckless if not provocative statements to the excitable crowds and reporters.
The State actors should not allow the whole nation of Zimbabwe to be victims of that lunacy. You pursue a naked lunatic at your own risk.
Rather than focus on the ball in our court, the new currency, all hell has broken chasing after Job the political lunacy with a history of erratic performances inside and outside the political arena.
The obvious imminent risk is the opportunism through which the various agents in the Zimbabwe theatre of politics seek to exploit that unfortunate incidence of Job lunacy: both in the ruling party and some elements in the control radar of the opposition political actors.
The big risk, though, are the international political forces that are deliberately playing the foolish role of actors incapable of separating serious claims from those of exciting lunacy.
If all lunatics were pursued in every street and corner for their unmeasured claims talking to the members of the public, among each other (as lunatics) or indeed to themselves (as individual lunatics), this world would be void of lunatics for lunatics are an integral part of every normal society.
To that extent, those entrusted with the powers of the State should provide mechanisms and frameworks to allow lunatics to co-exist with us all in peace.
Simply put, there is no need to chase after them or spend scarce State resources seeking to disprove or prove the intentions of the lunatic, who scarcely has any meaningful capability to carry out what they claim in their utterances.
It is with that background that this article seeks to share on the falsity of the 2008 financial markets risk in view of the reintroduction of the local currency a couple of weeks ago.
First, we should lift and view the falsity of the 2008 reincarnation in the proper context in which its supporters, with a rather alarming degree of ignorance, assume the mere reintroduction of the local currency will recreate the conditions experienced in 2008.
So lacking in objectivity is that analogy that it lacks even basic common sense. For example, those fearing the return to the 2008 mayhem fail to acknowledge or at least realise that nation building progresses on foundations of learning from our mistakes and sound criticism.
Both are available abundantly to the extent that we would need to be foolish, collectively, to the zenith point to allow the market to drift back to the 2008 conditions.
The reintroduction of the local currency is a form of nation building. Naturally, as it were, there would be outside opposing forces, and some of such forces would continue to act against this new development until there is a balance: a balance that needs international diplomacy.
On the internal forces, like any other object the new currency will be unstable, doodling different images until a centre of gravity fixes somewhere: that would need support and confidence of both the outside world and we the Zimbabweans more than anyone else would.
In all this, nothing logical points to the obvious path towards the 2008 scenario.
Second, it is a bizarre assumption if an expectation that the future will always look like the past.
There is no philosophical, empirical or indeed scientific method(s) that support the notion that because it happened in 2008 it will also happen in 2019/2020. If the world were that simple, then the dinosaurs that lived a million years ago would still be roaming this world.
It is instructive to note that beliefs and expectations about the future tend to depend on our previous observations and experiences. For those people who claim the imminent recreation of the 2008 through the reintroduction of the local currency are misleading on two fronts.
First, they are using wrong evidence to support a wrong argument.
Second, the scale of observations is too small to make any meaningful scientific significance justifying their claims.
Thus, there is no difference whatsoever in intellect between claims made by lunatics who may think for example that they can grow gold in their backyards and the claims made by the people who claim that the local currency will bring back the 2008 risks.
The mere difference, in intellectual reason, is that they fall to the group of minority.
Therefore, in that order, the problem of the risk of returning to the 2008 situation becomes a psychological one that requires deployment of psycho-changing tools and resources available to the State.
Third, whether it is a case of blind selection or selective choice, it matters less to the observation that the relevant social actors in Zimbabwe have said nothing or little if at all about the serious risk posed by the foreign-funded non-governmental groups.
In terms of financial markets risk facing the country, the risk posed by NGOs funded outside the country is the more severe of the basket of risks.
For a simple demonstration, Zimbabwe sits on the highest table of countries with the highest per-capita rate of NGOs in the Sub-Saharan Africa.
So where is the problem? It is bare for all to see: operations of most of these organisations are often outside the State and critical data which is essential in keeping the State intact and functional, finds its way to the tables of hostile foreign institutions.
Bypassing the State alone is enough to weaken it: for example, State reputational risk financed from somewhere else with an objective to create the very conditions of 2008 that some people attach to the State building exercise of owning a national currency.
Rather than look outside and far for existential threats to our livelihoods, the simplistic mind looks inwards without ceasing.
In addition to the risks above, money to the NGOs often goes to the NGOs directly, not the Government. Money in an economy is like blood in your body.
Without homoeostasis, most of your bodily functions would simply not work just as an economy ignorant of how or unable to control money generated or flowing to it.
It is in that context, therefore that NGOs pose the risk that can easily push us towards the 2008 situation.
Fourth, and critically, some of the Western countries opposed to agrarian reforms would want to cease on fears of the return to the 2008 situation for very selfish capitalist interests.
Of particular significance is the realisation that when our farmers are starved of capital to invest on agrarian activities in the country, some foreign countries, notably the United States of America, will always seize an opportunity to provide their own food aid programmes.
They do not do this for altruistic reasons.
The interest and motivation comes from the Western farmers or their proxies who are heavily subsidised by their national governments.
The subsidised maize produce for example, will make Zimbabwean farmer produced (similar) maize uncompetitive (expensive) and therefore no rationale to continue in that agrarian activity.
Thus, the Western countries’ food aid programmes benefit the Western farmers more than they do to the local children and women in this country.
The risk, therefore, is the motivation of the Western capitals’ farmers to produce subsidised cereals and the like when the State of Zimbabwe cannot function as expected.
All this has nothing to do with the reintroduction of the local currency that some quarters would want the world to believe is the worst thing to happen ever since Adolf Hitler was born.
Last, the risk of returning to the 2008 can run if Zimbabwe were to allow the proponents of neo-liberal economics to take the opening of financial markets to foolish levels as suggested in some columns of the weekly newspapers this week.
Of particular significance, are the reckless calls to remove the State actors from the equation of managing our newly introduced local currency.
Any attempts to do so would be on the other side of extreme suicidal imagination.
If interbank markets were as useful as these people argue, countries like China would have removed State interference with the currency value long back.
In fact, removing the State actors from the currency equation would expose the whole country to the adverse manipulation tricks of some of the powerful Western nations who for whatever reason consider Zimbabwe an unfinished business.
The falsity of the 2008 debate is an obvious weakness that can give an opportunity to some of these hostile nations to stop the nation building of Zimbabwe.
To conclude, the State actors should focus their energy towards more serious risks that the nation of Zimbabwe faces.
The State should use its capabilities to assess and respond proportionately to the nuisances caused by lunatics who happen to be a normal existence of any nation.
In that regard, the jive in the political arena should be the new currency, not the political lunatic with no capabilities to act the play they wrote in front of the excitable crowd and reporters bent on generating interesting news that can sell quickly.
As usual, case closed for today!
– Dr Mandla Nyathi is a Zimbabwean academic based in the United Kingdom.
He taught financial markets at the National University of Science and Technology between 2011 and 2018.
