The Sunday News
Tedious Ncube, Sunday News Correspondent
The Second Republic has committed to opening up the democratic space in Zimbabwe, it has went further to pursue a much more transparent and free market approach to economic development as espoused by the ‘Zimbabwe is open for business’ mantra.
In recent years Zimbabwe has witnessed serious legislative and political reforms aimed at entrenching democratic principles and promoting good governance.
Surely the world should consider a new approach in dealing with Zimbabwe other than using sanctions.
In light of the impending anti-sanctions march, I will arrange this article in such a way that it speaks to the local Zimbabwean.
I will arrange the article in a way that will remind every Zimbabwean that; in international politics every country is pursuing its own interests. By the end of this article, every reader should understand that the imposition of economic sanctions on Zimbabwe is aimed at promoting the economic interests of some sections of the international ruling class.
By the way, the slated anti-sanctions Gala is supposed to remind every Zimbabwean that the Republic still has very live enemies.
These enemies are not only concerned with suffocating the nationalist project in Zimbabwe; they are also seeking huge financial benefits that come with disrupting the economy of Zimbabwe using sanctions.
And for that matter I maintain that no amount of reforms will cause sanctions to be removed in Zimbabwe.
Sanctions will only be lifted after the international law enforcement bodies acknowledge that Zimbabwe being on sanctions is a business opportunity for some business elites. In this article I explain how these international cartels generally operate and why they would prefer the continued imposition of sanctions in Zimbabwe or anywhere in the world.
These very same cartels are at times involved in funding policy networks and Civil Society originations that lobby western institutions to continue imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe.
They have invested billions of dollars in soiling Zimbabwe’s image in an attempt to justify the imposition of sanctions on the Republic.
These cartels operate in a very subtle way, they have journalists on their payroll, they even have people who are always ready to take to the streets each time the interests of this cartel are threatened or are about to be exposed.
Each time Zimbabwe gets an opportunity to plead for the removal of sanctions, they always stage manage something or incite the public into protesting. Any local business person who threatens their interests is swiftly incorporated into the individual sanctions list and is further subjected to ridicule through corruption allegations or at the worst, state capture allegations.
But what is the objective of sanctions?
At first, the objective of sanctions was to totally cripple the economy of Zimbabwe. The move to cripple the economy was aimed at advancing the regime change agenda.
The international ruling elites just wanted to collapse everything in a bid to force Zimbabweans into a revolution that was supposed to remove the ruling ZANU-PF and replace it with a proxy government.
That strategy dismally failed because the ruling ZANU-PF proved to be a formidable political party which deployed very sophisticated responses to its political rivals.
Simbarashe Moyo (2014) argues that the ruling ZANU PF and its leadership have puzzled many political analysts and people by successively winning elections between 2000 and 2009 in the midst of serious economic and political decline.
Simbarashe Moyo (2014) goes to say that ZANU-PF has been winning elections not because of the popular explanation that it rigs them but because it is popular.
According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2007:3) ZANU-PF is led by veterans of the liberation struggle whose liberation war credentials are not questionable and because of this ZANU-PF and its leadership have been very popular since 1980, and this popularity continued even in the midst of the economic and political crisis induced by sanctions.
Likewise, prominent political theorists like Hon Cain Mathema (2017) have suggested that Zimbabwe’ defense and security forces also played a crucial role in resisting the regime change agenda.
Hon Mathema (2017) concludes that without a competitive and professional security force, Zimbabwe was never going to survive the regime change agenda which was superseded by the imposition of illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe.
What is clear therefore; is that the initial agenda for imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe was to facilitate regime change. But it is not a secret that the regime change agenda failed dismally.
One then wonders why the west continues to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe even after the regime change agenda has clearly failed.
After the birth of the new dispensation we have seen that Zimbabwe has taken a very aggressive step towards economic development. One can look at sectors like energy production, food production; gold production etc, there is just clear evidence that Zimbabwe is productive despite these sanctions. I maintain that the birth of the New
Dispensation and its subsequent conduct has divided opinion about Zimbabwe and in the process forced some sections of the international ruling elites to rethink their position on Zimbabwe.
Some sections of the international ruling elites have shifted from using sanctions to facilitate regime change into using sanctions to facilitate the exploitation of Zimbabwe for raw materials and cheap labor etc.
The effect of sanctions today; is much more criminal than it was 10-15 years ago. Today sanctions are aimed at pushing Zimbabwe into the dark world so that she can be exploited without anyone noticing.
Sanctions are imposed to block Zimbabwe from accessing international markets so that some middlemen (belonging to the same class imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe) can buy Zimbabwean goods at half the market price only to smuggle the products into the international market.
These middlemen are to a greater extent responsible for the market distortions in Zimbabwe today. The half price paid for our commodities because of sanctions, refuse our companies and businesses the chance to grow since capital that would have been otherwise invested in business growth is instead diverted into the accounts of these middlemen.
Zimbabwe is instead forced to get high interest credit lines from unruly financial institutions which at times belong to the same social class imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe.
These institutions exploit Zimbabwe by offering financial services using insane interest rates knowing very well that Zimbabwe does not have any other choice. These international elite thugs have used sanctions to project Zimbabwe as a high investment risk destination.
By the way, sanctions also prohibit companies from making huge investment commitments in Zimbabwe. These huge investment commitments are supposed to facilitate the opening of huge processing industries which are very key in the creation of jobs for the working class.
Firstly; huge companies are afraid of manufacturing from Zimbabwe because they think that sanctions will prohibit the traffic of the manufactured goods and services into the international markets.
Secondly; other potential investors serious enough to establish processing plants in Zimbabwe are driven away by these very same cartels that use sanctions to devalue Zimbabwean commodities.
A lot of investors thus find it necessary to avoid Zimbabwe as an investment destination in fear of the potential effects of sanctions on their business operations.
In the absence of a processing economy, many Zimbabweans have found themselves without jobs. In fact the absence of jobs has triggered an intense labor migration process which has seen millions of Zimbabweans leaving the country to work in the Diaspora where they are paid paltry salaries because of their immigrant status.
We all know that big companies owned by the international ruling elites are the ones that employ Zimbabwean labor immigrants to avoid paying competitive salaries to their work force and to evade the cost of paying corporate social responsibility which comes with employing legal citizens that have full political rights.
Tedious Teddy Ncube is a political scientist and a public policy analyst
