The Sunday News
Dr Mandla Nyathi
THE seismic announcement of the return of the Zimbabwe dollar this week has ignited a plethora of arguments in various forums.
For illustration purposes, the volume per articles written on Zimbabwe on Google search’s first 20 media sources in which the Zimbabwe dollar appears suggests that there is a problem. The problem at hand facing all Zimbabweans today is not what the adoption of the local Zimbabwe dollar will do or not do to the livelihoods of its nationals. Neither is the problem the opponents of normalisation of the finance situation as his Excellency, President Emmerson Mnangagwa put it.
The real problem is the risk that the nation will talk itself to a crisis. Worrying, perhaps more than anything is the attack on the policy pronouncement before any meaningful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the same policy: not to mention the foolhardy of ignoring the potential opportunities that underlie the policy.
In modern democracy, as a fundamental expectation, the citizens should have access to alternative independent sources of information outside the control of Government. The interest from and contributions by experts, politicians, social media platforms and many other sources in the last few days is testament of that realisation in Zimbabwe.
Disappointing, though, there has not been a robust system of sieving information shared in all those platforms to enable citizenry and other stakeholders to make fully informed decisions about the way the newly introduced Zimbabwe currency would most likely play out in the financial markets and its effect on the daily lives of the people of this country. It has been a free for all in opinions this week: that has motivated the origination of this article.
Where are the deans and professors from the country’s faculties of Commerce, Economics and mathematical sciences? Is it not the time they stood up and provided credible analysis of this policy change. Failure to play their part makes them complicity to the slander and slaughter of the truth by forces bent on poisoning public beliefs and attitudes towards a particular agenda.
To minimise damage, with an immense potential for social upheaval, the institutions that support democracy in this country should arise and inform the public about the 360 degrees truth required to understand the intended and envisioned operational objectives of the re-introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar.
So far, they have not done so! They have relegated an important function mandated in the Constitutional provisions of the country to the dangerously unguided social and political commentators. To the credit of the latter, some of the comments have resemblance of truth. However, you and all know that resemblance to truth is not the same as the truth itself. Without any doubt, some of these commentators made their conclusions about the policy before reading and applying their minds fully, and thereafter sought to find the evidence to support their standpoints.
It is ridiculous and sad for all the good and bad reasons for citizens of a country to talk themselves into a crisis using spurious evidence unsupported by the most basic logic of ideological strength, national interest and developmental agenda.
The imminent risk of the nation talking itself to a crisis needs immediate arrest. Clearly, we have a case of wrong dogs barking at the wrong tree. For a start few, if any of us, can make a distinction between statements criticising the new policy made on one hand by a class privileged with information and tools to analyse it and those statements made by the disenfranchised lot, vulnerable due to lack of information and inability to apply relevant tools to make meaningful decisions. Thus, in that context, more so given lack of robust evidence, there is hardly any difference in claims made by the political elite opposed to Professor Mthuli Ncube’s economic paradigm re-engineering and statements lunatics out there make affirming or denying that the new policy will work.
Let those that argue that it will not work bring the evidence. It is not enough to make claims based on individual selfish interests. To allow that to happen would be akin to embracing both political and economic witchcraft: two phenomena with no place in post modernity driven by statistical figures.
The 21st world depends so much on figures, probability, forecasting, Chaos theories, and Bayesian, you name it, to the extent that all post modern thinkers are virtual slave to it. To that extent, responsible citizens, in particular those in positions of trust in public institutions like the Parliament of Zimbabwe should not just make ridiculous claims in the comfort of their bathrooms, without first assessing the validity of their claims: with no shred of a near figure to support their claims.
It particularly stinks when viewed in the context of the claims that some elements of the outmanoeuvred G40 sponsored some political parties in the 2018 elections. Thus, that argument as evidence is essentially irrational. We see the irrefutable blunders exposing its weaknesses in the manner in which its proponents attempt to link anything and everything in their memories about the economic history of Zimbabwe: social housing programmes, mining ventures, land reform, war in Congo, etc. That presents a logical problem for those willing to engage in rational debate supported by the wealth of knowledge in modern economic thinking.
By way of example, every government programme is a project with a finite life cycle. How does a self respecting individual justify linking the unlinked 1990s dots to last week’s introduction of a new currency? To perpetuate some of the unfortunate events and conversations that happened long ago, risks dragging the nation to a crisis.
Then there is the argument of the rand. It is not used as the evidence to support the thesis that the new financial policy will fail, but to argue that there is a better alternative across the Limpopo.
The sheer madness and flaws in this school of thought is that it negates the fundamental responsibility of trust bestowed in the democratic institutions of the country.
The custodians of trust in the Zimbabwe currency are the Zimbabweans themselves: through elected executive or otherwise, citizens should differentiate and understand the difference between real and ideal things.
ν To be continued next week
