The Sunday Mail
African Focus by Tafataona Mahoso
ON September 23 and 24 2010, journalists and their editors got all worked up on account of Finance Minister Tendai Biti's yo-yo forecasts on the Zimbabwe economy.
Like Biti's 2010 budget, the forecast for the growth of the Zimbabwe economy for 2010 had been projected as 5,4 percent, with the International Monetary Fund suggesting 6 percent which was revised down to 2,2 percent before being raised again to 7,7 percent and now 8,1 percent.
Journalists and their editors are missing the real story which is about the Third Chimurenga (land revolution), the indigenisation and empowerment laws, and illegal sanctions.
The real story which creates ideology problems for Minister Biti, his party and its sponsors arises from the fact that the supposed growth of 8,1 percent year is being driven by resettled indigenous farmers who increased their tobacco production from 70 million in 2009 to 120 million kilograms in 2010 without proper support and against debilitating, illegal and racist sanctions imposed on the entire economy and people by the Anglo-Saxon powers at the invitation of Minister Biti's party.
So, the minister, his party and the so-called economic experts who also supported the sanctions while condemning African land reclamation and redistribution are in a quandary.
They are itching to be associated with the emerging growth and recovery trend in order to earn credit through the sheer fact of announcing good news on results produced by the often condemned party; but they are also nervous about linkages. If they honestly link the tobacco story to the land revolution, to resettlement and to the so-called quasi-fiscal activities of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which gave those farmers a start — then too many questions will be asked of the minister and his party.
Which economy is the minister saying is going to grow 8,1 percent in 2010? Is it the one from which land reform and indigenisation were supposed to have chased away all meaningful investors?
Is it the one which President Robert Mugabe destroyed, the one which Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai pronounced “doomed as long as Mugabe is around” in Tsvangirai's Megabuck interview of November 2000?
The entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby at home and abroad has been singing like a chorus that Mugabe and Zanu-PF killed agriculture. But why is it that the only sector which was killed is the one driving the expected recovery and growth? One would have expected sectors not touched by reform to drive growth and recovery! Maybe Mugabe should have done to the entire economy what he did to land and agriculture!
So, a communication technique has been adopted to try to cope with the dilemma. The minister and his party will claim credit for the growth and recovery indicators, by association; that is, without mentioning past causes, past policies or agents responsible for the growth trends.
This is called “agent deletion”, which means producing indices, symptoms and trends without naming the real drivers.
Therefore “tobacco” becomes the driver, the cause, but not the newly resettled farmers or the policy which put them on the land or the RBZ which engaged in quasi-fiscal activities to get farmers started when sanctions had wiped out all other sources of support.
But the dilemma is not just for Minister Biti and his party. It affects the entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby and its media industry groomed over the last 15 years around the so-called Zimbabwe crisis.
The conflict and confusion to which Zimbabweans have been subjected for the last 12 years arose partly because too many who called themselves national leaders, business leaders and experts on the economy had no clue what the Zimbabwe economy is or where exactly it is located.
Many simply thought that since they knew how to make money in Zimbabwe, they were fit to lead or to direct economic policy. But they do not know what that economy is or where it is located. That is why we have five divergent growth forecasts for the very same year.
One demonstration of this continuing problem is that these opinion leaders tell us daily that any new laws on indigenisation, African empowerment and the restructuring of the mining industry should be abandoned or neutralised because “we do not want to chase away investors”.
When some of these people were conspiring and colluding with white racists to agitate for and to impose illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, they and the media supporting them never stopped to think or say that even the mere mention of sanctions in association with Zimbabwe discouraged and chased away investors.
Indeed, what sort of economy would be destroyed by indigenisation and empowerment laws when it apparently was not destroyed by illegal economic sanctions?
Who are these “strategic investors” who did not mind illegal sanctions for 12 years but will suddenly be chased away as soon as there is a law requiring that Zimbabweans should own at least 51 percent of all national enterprises?
The question about which economy and whose economy is supposed to grow by 8,1 percent this year also leads to another question: Who has been in real crisis during the so-called Zimbabwe crisis?
Is it Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe and Sydney Chisi or the UDI economy of white Rhodesia, or the newly resettled farmers and the new indigenous companies in mining?
Given the meaning of crisis, one wonders why opposition groups in Zimbabwe would want to name themselves Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe.
Does this mean that they want the perceived turning point to last forever so that they will always have something to use to justify receiving donor funds, or does it mean that they will organise pseudo-events to prove that the crisis continues even long after it has gone?
These are not idle questions in our time and our situation. In “The Media and the Politics of Crisis,” Marc Raboy and Bernard Dagenais dealt with the role of mass media in publicising pseudo-events which may help to dramatise a non-existent crisis or to divert attention from a really critical turning point toward pseudo-events claiming to represent a crisis.
“The tendency (in mass media) is, therefore, for the media to seek out a crisis where it does not exist, and to obscure the actual forces of change that threaten (corporate) media privilege along with entrenched social privilege in general. Paradoxically, this means that the media will tend to pay more attention to a fabricated crisis than to one which can stake a material claim to reality."
How can the only sector which President Mugabe allegedly destroyed be also the only one to lead the current recovery?
In the context of Zimbabwe, the white minority media and the white minority economy occupied the “mainstream” position in 1980. Beginning in 1992 there were concerted efforts to change the economic status quo in the economy, starting with land redistribution.
By 2000, there were concerted efforts also to change the status quo in the mass media by making local, national and Pan-African content a policy priority. This was followed by the introduction of statutory media regulation beyond broadcasting, to cover print and advertising.
By the end of 2005 the legal side of the battle for African land reclamation had been sealed. The transformation of the African land reclamation movement into a national assets reclamation movement is still going on.
Given this scenario, it is obvious which mass media services would be most prone to this tendency to divert attention from the real crisis by fabricating pseudo-crises and pseudo-events inflated to look like crises.The heart of the turning point is the loss of white Rhodesian privilege or the threat of it, on the land, in politics and to some extent in the media.
In a situation like that, it means that when people in Zimbabwe speak of or write about the “crisis” they are not likely to mean the same thing.
The failure of local oppositional forces and the local corporate Press to name and locate the crisis is linked to a real global crisis as well.
The North Atlantic states, especially the United Kingdom and the United States of America, are also facing an unnameable crisis from which they are eager to divert attention. It is no coincidence that Britain and the United States have led the way in helping the local oppositional forces to fabricate an alternative crisis to the crisis of white Rhodesian agriculture and Rhodesian media.
At this point it might help the reader to understand what we mean if we list some examples of oppositional efforts to displace the crisis or to create pseudo-events to stand in for the real crisis.
In 1998, British media claimed that the Government of Zimbabwe would fall as a result of urban riots and industrial stayaways orchestrated by certain industries working with some trade unions.
Instead of falling, the Government of Zimbabwe participated in the Sadc war to save the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Rwanda and Uganda. And the Zimbabwe Defence Forces returned intact from that war.
In 2000 the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) predicted a critical turning point by December, saying that President Robert Mugabe and the Government would be out of power by Christmas.
This prediction was amplified in the November issue of Megabuck magazine, in a feature interview entitled “Zimbabwe doomed as long as Mugabe remains in power — Tsvangirai.” The MDC leader was asked: “Do you still stand by your prediction that Mugabe will be out of office by end of year?” Tsvangirai answered: “Yes!”
This did not happen. So on February 21, 2001, The Daily News announced that President Mugabe would be out of office by the first day of July 2001.
Other media also chipped in, especially from South Africa. Norman Reynolds and others said that it was not only the President who would be out of office by July 2001. The whole country would have completely run out of food by that time as well. These doomsday predictions were being orchestrated as part of the campaign for the 2002 Presidential elections.
Still within 2001, The Financial Gazette came out on the side of the regime change forces and announced that 74 percent of the people of Zimbabwe would vote against President Mugabe and his ruling party in 2002.
This wrong prediction was based on a fraudulent opinion poll done by white South Africans with some assistance from activist academics in Zimbabwe. The fraudulent opinion polls were intended to create an alibi for the MDC which knew that it would not win the elections.
Sure enough, when the MDC lost the vote it rejected the results and urged its foreign sponsors to condemn and isolate the country. This then gave The Daily News the opportunity to publish a front page condemnation of the President as “Unelected Despot”.
The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and Crisis Zimbabwe Coalition then contributed to a big document called “Is Genocide Imminent in Zimbabwe?” They then proceeded to answer their own question: that there would be genocide in the country by January 2003. The genocidal war would be far worse than what happened in Rwanda in 1994. This did not happen.
The reader may wonder what these recent events mean?
* First, we must remain sceptical of predictions claiming to come from economists or expert polls.
* Second, President Mugabe is in power but the same economy which was supposed to be doomed as long as he was around is forecast to grow by 8,1 per cent by the very same people who said it was doomed.
* Third, the growth of African-grown tobacco from 70 million kilogrammes in 2009 to 120 million kilogrammes in 2010 is not a forecast. It is real. The tobacco is coming from the one sector which Zimbabwe’s detractors said the President and the war veterans had killed. And we do not see much recovery from manufacturing, the one sector which was not touched by the reforms.
* Lastly, the same detractors are still cooking up more and more false predictions about elections which are repeats of the false predictions of 2001-2003.
Citizens beware!
Like Biti's 2010 budget, the forecast for the growth of the Zimbabwe economy for 2010 had been projected as 5,4 percent, with the International Monetary Fund suggesting 6 percent which was revised down to 2,2 percent before being raised again to 7,7 percent and now 8,1 percent.
Journalists and their editors are missing the real story which is about the Third Chimurenga (land revolution), the indigenisation and empowerment laws, and illegal sanctions.
The real story which creates ideology problems for Minister Biti, his party and its sponsors arises from the fact that the supposed growth of 8,1 percent year is being driven by resettled indigenous farmers who increased their tobacco production from 70 million in 2009 to 120 million kilograms in 2010 without proper support and against debilitating, illegal and racist sanctions imposed on the entire economy and people by the Anglo-Saxon powers at the invitation of Minister Biti's party.
So, the minister, his party and the so-called economic experts who also supported the sanctions while condemning African land reclamation and redistribution are in a quandary.
They are itching to be associated with the emerging growth and recovery trend in order to earn credit through the sheer fact of announcing good news on results produced by the often condemned party; but they are also nervous about linkages. If they honestly link the tobacco story to the land revolution, to resettlement and to the so-called quasi-fiscal activities of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which gave those farmers a start — then too many questions will be asked of the minister and his party.
Which economy is the minister saying is going to grow 8,1 percent in 2010? Is it the one from which land reform and indigenisation were supposed to have chased away all meaningful investors?
Is it the one which President Robert Mugabe destroyed, the one which Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai pronounced “doomed as long as Mugabe is around” in Tsvangirai's Megabuck interview of November 2000?
The entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby at home and abroad has been singing like a chorus that Mugabe and Zanu-PF killed agriculture. But why is it that the only sector which was killed is the one driving the expected recovery and growth? One would have expected sectors not touched by reform to drive growth and recovery! Maybe Mugabe should have done to the entire economy what he did to land and agriculture!
So, a communication technique has been adopted to try to cope with the dilemma. The minister and his party will claim credit for the growth and recovery indicators, by association; that is, without mentioning past causes, past policies or agents responsible for the growth trends.
This is called “agent deletion”, which means producing indices, symptoms and trends without naming the real drivers.
Therefore “tobacco” becomes the driver, the cause, but not the newly resettled farmers or the policy which put them on the land or the RBZ which engaged in quasi-fiscal activities to get farmers started when sanctions had wiped out all other sources of support.
But the dilemma is not just for Minister Biti and his party. It affects the entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby and its media industry groomed over the last 15 years around the so-called Zimbabwe crisis.
The conflict and confusion to which Zimbabweans have been subjected for the last 12 years arose partly because too many who called themselves national leaders, business leaders and experts on the economy had no clue what the Zimbabwe economy is or where exactly it is located.
Many simply thought that since they knew how to make money in Zimbabwe, they were fit to lead or to direct economic policy. But they do not know what that economy is or where it is located. That is why we have five divergent growth forecasts for the very same year.
One demonstration of this continuing problem is that these opinion leaders tell us daily that any new laws on indigenisation, African empowerment and the restructuring of the mining industry should be abandoned or neutralised because “we do not want to chase away investors”.
When some of these people were conspiring and colluding with white racists to agitate for and to impose illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, they and the media supporting them never stopped to think or say that even the mere mention of sanctions in association with Zimbabwe discouraged and chased away investors.
Indeed, what sort of economy would be destroyed by indigenisation and empowerment laws when it apparently was not destroyed by illegal economic sanctions?
Who are these “strategic investors” who did not mind illegal sanctions for 12 years but will suddenly be chased away as soon as there is a law requiring that Zimbabweans should own at least 51 percent of all national enterprises?
The question about which economy and whose economy is supposed to grow by 8,1 percent this year also leads to another question: Who has been in real crisis during the so-called Zimbabwe crisis?
Is it Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe and Sydney Chisi or the UDI economy of white Rhodesia, or the newly resettled farmers and the new indigenous companies in mining?
Given the meaning of crisis, one wonders why opposition groups in Zimbabwe would want to name themselves Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe.
Does this mean that they want the perceived turning point to last forever so that they will always have something to use to justify receiving donor funds, or does it mean that they will organise pseudo-events to prove that the crisis continues even long after it has gone?
These are not idle questions in our time and our situation. In “The Media and the Politics of Crisis,” Marc Raboy and Bernard Dagenais dealt with the role of mass media in publicising pseudo-events which may help to dramatise a non-existent crisis or to divert attention from a really critical turning point toward pseudo-events claiming to represent a crisis.
“The tendency (in mass media) is, therefore, for the media to seek out a crisis where it does not exist, and to obscure the actual forces of change that threaten (corporate) media privilege along with entrenched social privilege in general. Paradoxically, this means that the media will tend to pay more attention to a fabricated crisis than to one which can stake a material claim to reality."
How can the only sector which President Mugabe allegedly destroyed be also the only one to lead the current recovery?
In the context of Zimbabwe, the white minority media and the white minority economy occupied the “mainstream” position in 1980. Beginning in 1992 there were concerted efforts to change the economic status quo in the economy, starting with land redistribution.
By 2000, there were concerted efforts also to change the status quo in the mass media by making local, national and Pan-African content a policy priority. This was followed by the introduction of statutory media regulation beyond broadcasting, to cover print and advertising.
By the end of 2005 the legal side of the battle for African land reclamation had been sealed. The transformation of the African land reclamation movement into a national assets reclamation movement is still going on.
Given this scenario, it is obvious which mass media services would be most prone to this tendency to divert attention from the real crisis by fabricating pseudo-crises and pseudo-events inflated to look like crises.The heart of the turning point is the loss of white Rhodesian privilege or the threat of it, on the land, in politics and to some extent in the media.
In a situation like that, it means that when people in Zimbabwe speak of or write about the “crisis” they are not likely to mean the same thing.
The failure of local oppositional forces and the local corporate Press to name and locate the crisis is linked to a real global crisis as well.
The North Atlantic states, especially the United Kingdom and the United States of America, are also facing an unnameable crisis from which they are eager to divert attention. It is no coincidence that Britain and the United States have led the way in helping the local oppositional forces to fabricate an alternative crisis to the crisis of white Rhodesian agriculture and Rhodesian media.
At this point it might help the reader to understand what we mean if we list some examples of oppositional efforts to displace the crisis or to create pseudo-events to stand in for the real crisis.
In 1998, British media claimed that the Government of Zimbabwe would fall as a result of urban riots and industrial stayaways orchestrated by certain industries working with some trade unions.
Instead of falling, the Government of Zimbabwe participated in the Sadc war to save the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Rwanda and Uganda. And the Zimbabwe Defence Forces returned intact from that war.
In 2000 the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) predicted a critical turning point by December, saying that President Robert Mugabe and the Government would be out of power by Christmas.
This prediction was amplified in the November issue of Megabuck magazine, in a feature interview entitled “Zimbabwe doomed as long as Mugabe remains in power — Tsvangirai.” The MDC leader was asked: “Do you still stand by your prediction that Mugabe will be out of office by end of year?” Tsvangirai answered: “Yes!”
This did not happen. So on February 21, 2001, The Daily News announced that President Mugabe would be out of office by the first day of July 2001.
Other media also chipped in, especially from South Africa. Norman Reynolds and others said that it was not only the President who would be out of office by July 2001. The whole country would have completely run out of food by that time as well. These doomsday predictions were being orchestrated as part of the campaign for the 2002 Presidential elections.
Still within 2001, The Financial Gazette came out on the side of the regime change forces and announced that 74 percent of the people of Zimbabwe would vote against President Mugabe and his ruling party in 2002.
This wrong prediction was based on a fraudulent opinion poll done by white South Africans with some assistance from activist academics in Zimbabwe. The fraudulent opinion polls were intended to create an alibi for the MDC which knew that it would not win the elections.
Sure enough, when the MDC lost the vote it rejected the results and urged its foreign sponsors to condemn and isolate the country. This then gave The Daily News the opportunity to publish a front page condemnation of the President as “Unelected Despot”.
The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and Crisis Zimbabwe Coalition then contributed to a big document called “Is Genocide Imminent in Zimbabwe?” They then proceeded to answer their own question: that there would be genocide in the country by January 2003. The genocidal war would be far worse than what happened in Rwanda in 1994. This did not happen.
The reader may wonder what these recent events mean?
* First, we must remain sceptical of predictions claiming to come from economists or expert polls.
* Second, President Mugabe is in power but the same economy which was supposed to be doomed as long as he was around is forecast to grow by 8,1 per cent by the very same people who said it was doomed.
* Third, the growth of African-grown tobacco from 70 million kilogrammes in 2009 to 120 million kilogrammes in 2010 is not a forecast. It is real. The tobacco is coming from the one sector which Zimbabwe’s detractors said the President and the war veterans had killed. And we do not see much recovery from manufacturing, the one sector which was not touched by the reforms.
* Lastly, the same detractors are still cooking up more and more false predictions about elections which are repeats of the false predictions of 2001-2003.
Citizens beware!
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