Opinion / Columnist
Give it to him, Tendai Biti has seen the light
04 Mar 2012 at 00:27hrs | Views
This week I propose to build my case through information vignettes. But first, let me pay my bills. I am grateful to one of my readers from Masembura who wrote to The Herald from the United Kingdom. If I am not mistaken, his letter was published in the Monday edition of The Herald. His submission was to illustrate and validate my thesis in last week's instalment by exposing the grab, grab outlook of companies like Bindura Nickel Corporation which have been scooping our resources without exercising any modicum of community responsibility.
The piece in The Herald was figurative, poignant and mordant. Mordant against those Zimbabweans in possession of knowledge, in positions of leadership, but who are unable to use either or both to defend the national and people's interests. The imagery used by the writer was particularly poignant: Mr Prime Minister why abuse and collapse the adder of just this one cow (Marange Diamonds) while leaving the rest of the herd (mines under various multinationals) to roam un-milked, or milked by outsiders? It was an apt imagery, one that drew the notice of people who matter, get it from me. Thank you for that one mate!
A pittance from billions
More information continues to come through, and it is important to keep the searchlight on this one matter which is bound to shape politics of the country, indeed bound to shape political careers of many. A new statistic now with us is that Implats is collecting more than 100 000 ounces of platinum from its Zimbabwean interests each year. I have just googled the price of platinum per ounce and it's given as US$1 699 or Eur1 285,29. Work it out and tell me how much Implats gets from Zimbabwe yearly, and then tell me how that compares with the paltry US$10 million given to communities of Ngezi, Mhondoro and Zvimba as belated compensation.
Matted weight, never value
But we should not abort a larger point. The above price relates to recovered platinum. From Zimbabwe, Implats does not ship out platinum. It ships out platinum ore and/or mat. Platinum ore carries at least five other metals which are ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium. In our case I hear we need to add gold, with chromium coming as an impurity. Silver, too, could come together with rhodium.
Out there in South Africa and beyond, the matted ore gets processed to recover all those minerals which get sold separately as a frill for the trouble of digging so shallow in Zimbabwe. I hope you begin to get an idea of what we have gone without since platinum mining started in Zimbabwe, what we will continue to go without for as long as platinum mining proceeds on the basis of the current neo-colonial framework.
Here in Zimbabwe we charge weight of ore shipped out, never value in the ore shipped out. We simply ask Zimplats how many tonnes of ore or mat they ship out and then compute what this translates to by way of royalties! Or we simpy wait for them to volunteer returns of value they are comfortable to declare to the natives, these most sincere whites! As if we do not know that even Jesuits â€" the holiest ones â€" have in history suffered monumental capitulations of conscience! That is how primitive we are, how naive we the sons of Munhumutapa and Lobengula are!
The game we in fact started
Are you aware that most of the mines we have in Zimbabwe were simply prospected from pointers by way of works left behind by our forebears, well before the British ever knew how to get here? We provided the lead to imperialism because we mined gold, iron, silver and other minerals well before the onset of colonialism. We traded with the Phoenicians, with the Chinese, with the Arabs well before we traded with the Portuguese, themselves the first Europeans to do business with us well before Rhodes and his gang.
That puts mining in our DNA, does it not? Now, where has that gene one? Why this level of ignorance, this faith in the righteousness of greedy upstarts we taught to mine, we taught to locate minerals in the country? Why?
The bogey of scared investor
Now, spread this simple argument over all the minerals we have ceded to foreign mining magnates in Zimbabwe and you get an idea of the degree of prejudice to Zimbabwe, indeed an idea of how far back we hit the US$100 billion economy we will always have without ever controlling in Zimbabwe.
More important, you will also begin to get the full meaning of David Brown, the chief executive of Implats, when he tells 702 Talk Radio of South Africa that Implats will not exit Zimbabwe, for all the rhetoric on indigenisation.
What boggles the mind is listening to mouths which speak for minds owned by inverse nationalists, inverse and obtuse nationalists so given to bellowing out the "scaring away investors" mantra in respect of a country of great, ineluctable destiny. As if Zimbabwe is ever able to scare away people like Mr Brown! With such a geo-mineral strategic position who gets scared? Only the owner through ignorance and low self-esteem and self-belief, surely! Slowly we are getting to a stage where the talk about "scaring away investors" just becomes primitive and ignorant, a real scarecrow phrase in the anti-nation politics of comprador natives. As is also that of a coy investor who has to be won over through cat-walking by a whole Prime Minister in bikini!
Be-fogging Zimbabwe's worth
In the week we got more testimonies, including even from players from hostile states. We had a British securities firm, Charles Stanley Securities, telling the world that Zimbabwe's vast diamond deposits are set to shape the industry the world over in the next few years. "Zimbabwe really does have the potential to upset the applecart . . . The actual resource base of the Marange fields is still pretty much unknown, but official documentation implies that there is between 60 000 to 70 000 hectares of resources there, the largest alluvial discovery in history." In the firm's reckoning, this translates to between two to three million carats per month at peak for around 20 years.
The firm made a geopolitical point: "China is a massive investor in Zimbabwe so I think that China and Zimbabwe are likely to be very close trading partners with diamonds." The report noted that US sanctions against two Zimbabweans diamond producers would mean US would lose out to China and India in the exploration on this finite resource. Already the Indians of Surat are up in arms against the US over imposition of sanctions against Zimbabwe. They are already lobbying their government to ask the US to drop those sanctions altogether. The link between resources and foreign policy cannot be any clearer.
Equally, as a Zimbabwean you are left asking, why this Zim pessimism? Don't we see that our hour cometh? Or are we in the grip of those who seek to batter our soul with helplessness so we never get to recognise our worth and therefore our place and power in global affairs? Is this a real conspiracy to keep smiting us with the fog of false pessimism and debility so we never get to the summit to see the wondrous world beyond? We are already upsetting the world applecart yet we image ourselves as still clawing to mount it? Wake up Zimbabwe mhani!
Those the gods want to redeem . . .
Give it to him, Tendai Biti has seen the light, albeit riding bumpy atop MDC-T's dark political cloud. It is partly a matter of parting languid eyelids, partly a matter of necessity. Those whom the gods wish to redeem, place close to searing but bright fires. Biti has his ministry to thank. It has got him to grasp the horrid reality of neo-colonialism in a way that debunks his politics, that repudiates his benefactors. It has got him to have the information base from which to re-examine his whole politics. Once he told me he used to be a Marxist while in university. I suppose like most of us were. Student days are days of muscular thinking, days of virile ideologies. Then he added: until joining Government jolted me into the world of real politics, well away from the idealism of Marxist ideology.
I wonder what he is likely to tell me now, a good three years into the Finance Ministry where coffers sing the dim song of hollowness, ring loud from eddies of near-bankruptcy. A good three years of seeing upfumi hwenyika huchierera, with him atop and sanctifying it all. It must be painful to have and to see so much, while having nothing or so precious little to give and use amidst such massive need. He lives the paradox of a rich, needy country that is Zimbabwe.
Fighting against convictions
But give it to him. What I find most fascinating and even admirable about Biti is his readiness to speak against own convictions, to speak against his own politics.
This gets even more disarming when said and done in the season of elections. It is like distracting the male of a beast in full heat, is it not? He is one politician with the sincerity to bow to facts, including those questioning his very convictions, his very political predilections.
While the Prime Minister and his Deputy, Mutambara, are busy repining about revenue from Marange diamonds, repining about the pains of being in an inclusive Government of divergent dreams and values, Biti is busy discovering existential values, is busy taking an otherwise mangled and bungled argument forward, and doing so in a way that profits the nation through a better grasp of what really is at stake in our country. Two or so days ago, he told Johannesburg investors he was supposed to entice into Zimbabwe that there is a big gap in revenue between what the Ministry of Finance is getting from diamonds â€" and other minerals â€" and what he believes is actually being produced and exported.
Disclosing that diamond gave the country US$80 million in 2010 and is set to give the county more than US$600 million in 2012, Biti went against the grain by disclosing that the Finance Ministry only collected US$150 million from the rest of the mining sector in 2011, against mining exports valued at US$2,5billion.
"The question is how do we make sure that in Zimbabwe the resources do in fact sweat for the Zimbabwean people which is not the case at the present moment. Shareholders in London, Jo'burg and Cape Town are primarily benefitting." Biti went even further: "In the 2011 financial year we received US$150 million from the rest of the mining sector but mining exports alone were US$2,5 billion. Now there is a huge gap between US$150 million and US$2,5 billion."
Not quite the language of cajolery, the language of lewd self-bastardising in order to win investor notice.
Chikwambo chisingadzorerwi
Compare these succinct points, well backed by facts and figures, with the Prime Minister's speech so fixated in the so-called inclusive partnership as if this is the biggest tragedy for this country. You burn so many calories on an ephemeral political question which is going to be settled in due course anyway through elections, while playing blind to real issues requiring stupendous national effort to correct? The contrast could not have been starker.
And the implications become even more far-reaching when you consider that this all-MDC-T ministerial team was supposed to sing from the same hymn at this investment conference, that is, to present a corrosive opinion on Zanu-PF and its Indigenisation policy. What you got from Biti was a well-illustrated argument on why the real challenge in Zimbabwe is not so much FDI as it is about accounting for the country's resources. He spoke from the Zanu(PF) corner, not so much by membership or conviction, simply by an acceptance of brittle facts leaping frontally onto the blinking eyes of all thinking Zimbabweans. Not this sugarcoating business, this cheap business of ducking key questions by fielding non-questions on Mugabe, his health, his politics and his successors. Whether or not the Prime Minister and his deputy like it or not, the issue of national resources and who eats them on what terms, is now firmly on the table, staring each and all politicians like chikwambo chisingadzorerwi, like a bad tokoloshi!
This evil guy called Nostro!
And Biti is not being aberrational. Whatever his past mistakes on SDRs and nostro accounts, however hard the nudge he needed from Cabinet, he has put right his past errors. It is never easy for a politician with such a high profile, such an aggressively put viewpoint to recant amidst searing attacks from political rivals. Yet recant he did once the facts were before him. And the facts were quite damning. Before the new measures, the three foreign banks' nostro balances stood at USD266 million. That means this is money from Zimbabwean depositors stashed abroad in the name of meeting the obligations of those banks abroad. Yet in reality close to half of that - USD127 million - was in excess of nostro needs, all of which must now come back into the country. The figures on loans to deposit ratio are even more scandalous. Against an internationally acceptable benchmark of between 70 to 90%, some of these banks were running as low a ratio as 20%, while stashing the rest abroad in the name of nostro! We are still to hear about the value of offshore accounts run by multinationals, including those in mining. Biti has had to act, indeed has acted.
Candor of self-hurt
And as we move into the future, Biti shall grow more and more challenged. There is a whiff of candour which has seized the Europeans. They have been hurt by their own sanctions, hurt so badly that they are desperate to salvage their lamentable position. The recent revisions of the raft of sanctions on Zimbabwe show a bloc that is well past wearing fig leaves. By removing Ministers Mumbengegwi and Chinamasa from the sanctions list, the bloc clearly sought to sent a clear message for unconditional dialogue. After all these are the two ministers critical to the reengagement committee of Government. Also by removing all the companies of a white businessman, one Billy Rautenbach, while keeping the rest on, the bloc has stumbled from one untenable position to another. In due course the point shall be made about the hard-to-duck charge of racism on the bloc's dealings with Zimbabwe.
Don't you know he is Italian?
But nowhere was this newfound candour apparent than in the recent utterances of the EU envoy, one Dell' Ariccia, at a SAPES seminar series. Asked why the bloc was so obsessed with the internal politics of the country, Dell'Aricca simply told the meeting Zimbabwe possessed a vast array of raw materials that were of strategic importance to the EU. He explained that previously, Europe used to freely access these raw materials from Zimbabwe to develop itself. He bemoaned the fact that nowadays Europe has to compete with other international players. It was thus vital to have "better relations" with the country for easier access to the raw materials! Just like that. This was on 23rd February, in the year of our Lord 2012. I don't need to tell you that better relations means putting in place a Government which will play weak or no goalkeeper on national resources. Such a government is made from MDC-T of Tendai Biti. Will he stand for that, with all these facts, this knowledge, such consciousness? Will he? After all, judging by the drift of his arguments, his public positions, Tendai passes for a politician who would be part of a stratum that rules, not part of a shallow stratum of those that merely govern. Yes, Tendai Biti, the man who would rule but the politician who governs.
Icho!
---------------------
Nathaniel Manheru can be contacted at nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
The piece in The Herald was figurative, poignant and mordant. Mordant against those Zimbabweans in possession of knowledge, in positions of leadership, but who are unable to use either or both to defend the national and people's interests. The imagery used by the writer was particularly poignant: Mr Prime Minister why abuse and collapse the adder of just this one cow (Marange Diamonds) while leaving the rest of the herd (mines under various multinationals) to roam un-milked, or milked by outsiders? It was an apt imagery, one that drew the notice of people who matter, get it from me. Thank you for that one mate!
A pittance from billions
More information continues to come through, and it is important to keep the searchlight on this one matter which is bound to shape politics of the country, indeed bound to shape political careers of many. A new statistic now with us is that Implats is collecting more than 100 000 ounces of platinum from its Zimbabwean interests each year. I have just googled the price of platinum per ounce and it's given as US$1 699 or Eur1 285,29. Work it out and tell me how much Implats gets from Zimbabwe yearly, and then tell me how that compares with the paltry US$10 million given to communities of Ngezi, Mhondoro and Zvimba as belated compensation.
Matted weight, never value
But we should not abort a larger point. The above price relates to recovered platinum. From Zimbabwe, Implats does not ship out platinum. It ships out platinum ore and/or mat. Platinum ore carries at least five other metals which are ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium. In our case I hear we need to add gold, with chromium coming as an impurity. Silver, too, could come together with rhodium.
Out there in South Africa and beyond, the matted ore gets processed to recover all those minerals which get sold separately as a frill for the trouble of digging so shallow in Zimbabwe. I hope you begin to get an idea of what we have gone without since platinum mining started in Zimbabwe, what we will continue to go without for as long as platinum mining proceeds on the basis of the current neo-colonial framework.
Here in Zimbabwe we charge weight of ore shipped out, never value in the ore shipped out. We simply ask Zimplats how many tonnes of ore or mat they ship out and then compute what this translates to by way of royalties! Or we simpy wait for them to volunteer returns of value they are comfortable to declare to the natives, these most sincere whites! As if we do not know that even Jesuits â€" the holiest ones â€" have in history suffered monumental capitulations of conscience! That is how primitive we are, how naive we the sons of Munhumutapa and Lobengula are!
The game we in fact started
Are you aware that most of the mines we have in Zimbabwe were simply prospected from pointers by way of works left behind by our forebears, well before the British ever knew how to get here? We provided the lead to imperialism because we mined gold, iron, silver and other minerals well before the onset of colonialism. We traded with the Phoenicians, with the Chinese, with the Arabs well before we traded with the Portuguese, themselves the first Europeans to do business with us well before Rhodes and his gang.
That puts mining in our DNA, does it not? Now, where has that gene one? Why this level of ignorance, this faith in the righteousness of greedy upstarts we taught to mine, we taught to locate minerals in the country? Why?
The bogey of scared investor
Now, spread this simple argument over all the minerals we have ceded to foreign mining magnates in Zimbabwe and you get an idea of the degree of prejudice to Zimbabwe, indeed an idea of how far back we hit the US$100 billion economy we will always have without ever controlling in Zimbabwe.
More important, you will also begin to get the full meaning of David Brown, the chief executive of Implats, when he tells 702 Talk Radio of South Africa that Implats will not exit Zimbabwe, for all the rhetoric on indigenisation.
What boggles the mind is listening to mouths which speak for minds owned by inverse nationalists, inverse and obtuse nationalists so given to bellowing out the "scaring away investors" mantra in respect of a country of great, ineluctable destiny. As if Zimbabwe is ever able to scare away people like Mr Brown! With such a geo-mineral strategic position who gets scared? Only the owner through ignorance and low self-esteem and self-belief, surely! Slowly we are getting to a stage where the talk about "scaring away investors" just becomes primitive and ignorant, a real scarecrow phrase in the anti-nation politics of comprador natives. As is also that of a coy investor who has to be won over through cat-walking by a whole Prime Minister in bikini!
Be-fogging Zimbabwe's worth
In the week we got more testimonies, including even from players from hostile states. We had a British securities firm, Charles Stanley Securities, telling the world that Zimbabwe's vast diamond deposits are set to shape the industry the world over in the next few years. "Zimbabwe really does have the potential to upset the applecart . . . The actual resource base of the Marange fields is still pretty much unknown, but official documentation implies that there is between 60 000 to 70 000 hectares of resources there, the largest alluvial discovery in history." In the firm's reckoning, this translates to between two to three million carats per month at peak for around 20 years.
The firm made a geopolitical point: "China is a massive investor in Zimbabwe so I think that China and Zimbabwe are likely to be very close trading partners with diamonds." The report noted that US sanctions against two Zimbabweans diamond producers would mean US would lose out to China and India in the exploration on this finite resource. Already the Indians of Surat are up in arms against the US over imposition of sanctions against Zimbabwe. They are already lobbying their government to ask the US to drop those sanctions altogether. The link between resources and foreign policy cannot be any clearer.
Equally, as a Zimbabwean you are left asking, why this Zim pessimism? Don't we see that our hour cometh? Or are we in the grip of those who seek to batter our soul with helplessness so we never get to recognise our worth and therefore our place and power in global affairs? Is this a real conspiracy to keep smiting us with the fog of false pessimism and debility so we never get to the summit to see the wondrous world beyond? We are already upsetting the world applecart yet we image ourselves as still clawing to mount it? Wake up Zimbabwe mhani!
Those the gods want to redeem . . .
Give it to him, Tendai Biti has seen the light, albeit riding bumpy atop MDC-T's dark political cloud. It is partly a matter of parting languid eyelids, partly a matter of necessity. Those whom the gods wish to redeem, place close to searing but bright fires. Biti has his ministry to thank. It has got him to grasp the horrid reality of neo-colonialism in a way that debunks his politics, that repudiates his benefactors. It has got him to have the information base from which to re-examine his whole politics. Once he told me he used to be a Marxist while in university. I suppose like most of us were. Student days are days of muscular thinking, days of virile ideologies. Then he added: until joining Government jolted me into the world of real politics, well away from the idealism of Marxist ideology.
I wonder what he is likely to tell me now, a good three years into the Finance Ministry where coffers sing the dim song of hollowness, ring loud from eddies of near-bankruptcy. A good three years of seeing upfumi hwenyika huchierera, with him atop and sanctifying it all. It must be painful to have and to see so much, while having nothing or so precious little to give and use amidst such massive need. He lives the paradox of a rich, needy country that is Zimbabwe.
Fighting against convictions
But give it to him. What I find most fascinating and even admirable about Biti is his readiness to speak against own convictions, to speak against his own politics.
This gets even more disarming when said and done in the season of elections. It is like distracting the male of a beast in full heat, is it not? He is one politician with the sincerity to bow to facts, including those questioning his very convictions, his very political predilections.
While the Prime Minister and his Deputy, Mutambara, are busy repining about revenue from Marange diamonds, repining about the pains of being in an inclusive Government of divergent dreams and values, Biti is busy discovering existential values, is busy taking an otherwise mangled and bungled argument forward, and doing so in a way that profits the nation through a better grasp of what really is at stake in our country. Two or so days ago, he told Johannesburg investors he was supposed to entice into Zimbabwe that there is a big gap in revenue between what the Ministry of Finance is getting from diamonds â€" and other minerals â€" and what he believes is actually being produced and exported.
Disclosing that diamond gave the country US$80 million in 2010 and is set to give the county more than US$600 million in 2012, Biti went against the grain by disclosing that the Finance Ministry only collected US$150 million from the rest of the mining sector in 2011, against mining exports valued at US$2,5billion.
"The question is how do we make sure that in Zimbabwe the resources do in fact sweat for the Zimbabwean people which is not the case at the present moment. Shareholders in London, Jo'burg and Cape Town are primarily benefitting." Biti went even further: "In the 2011 financial year we received US$150 million from the rest of the mining sector but mining exports alone were US$2,5 billion. Now there is a huge gap between US$150 million and US$2,5 billion."
Not quite the language of cajolery, the language of lewd self-bastardising in order to win investor notice.
Chikwambo chisingadzorerwi
Compare these succinct points, well backed by facts and figures, with the Prime Minister's speech so fixated in the so-called inclusive partnership as if this is the biggest tragedy for this country. You burn so many calories on an ephemeral political question which is going to be settled in due course anyway through elections, while playing blind to real issues requiring stupendous national effort to correct? The contrast could not have been starker.
And the implications become even more far-reaching when you consider that this all-MDC-T ministerial team was supposed to sing from the same hymn at this investment conference, that is, to present a corrosive opinion on Zanu-PF and its Indigenisation policy. What you got from Biti was a well-illustrated argument on why the real challenge in Zimbabwe is not so much FDI as it is about accounting for the country's resources. He spoke from the Zanu(PF) corner, not so much by membership or conviction, simply by an acceptance of brittle facts leaping frontally onto the blinking eyes of all thinking Zimbabweans. Not this sugarcoating business, this cheap business of ducking key questions by fielding non-questions on Mugabe, his health, his politics and his successors. Whether or not the Prime Minister and his deputy like it or not, the issue of national resources and who eats them on what terms, is now firmly on the table, staring each and all politicians like chikwambo chisingadzorerwi, like a bad tokoloshi!
This evil guy called Nostro!
And Biti is not being aberrational. Whatever his past mistakes on SDRs and nostro accounts, however hard the nudge he needed from Cabinet, he has put right his past errors. It is never easy for a politician with such a high profile, such an aggressively put viewpoint to recant amidst searing attacks from political rivals. Yet recant he did once the facts were before him. And the facts were quite damning. Before the new measures, the three foreign banks' nostro balances stood at USD266 million. That means this is money from Zimbabwean depositors stashed abroad in the name of meeting the obligations of those banks abroad. Yet in reality close to half of that - USD127 million - was in excess of nostro needs, all of which must now come back into the country. The figures on loans to deposit ratio are even more scandalous. Against an internationally acceptable benchmark of between 70 to 90%, some of these banks were running as low a ratio as 20%, while stashing the rest abroad in the name of nostro! We are still to hear about the value of offshore accounts run by multinationals, including those in mining. Biti has had to act, indeed has acted.
Candor of self-hurt
And as we move into the future, Biti shall grow more and more challenged. There is a whiff of candour which has seized the Europeans. They have been hurt by their own sanctions, hurt so badly that they are desperate to salvage their lamentable position. The recent revisions of the raft of sanctions on Zimbabwe show a bloc that is well past wearing fig leaves. By removing Ministers Mumbengegwi and Chinamasa from the sanctions list, the bloc clearly sought to sent a clear message for unconditional dialogue. After all these are the two ministers critical to the reengagement committee of Government. Also by removing all the companies of a white businessman, one Billy Rautenbach, while keeping the rest on, the bloc has stumbled from one untenable position to another. In due course the point shall be made about the hard-to-duck charge of racism on the bloc's dealings with Zimbabwe.
Don't you know he is Italian?
But nowhere was this newfound candour apparent than in the recent utterances of the EU envoy, one Dell' Ariccia, at a SAPES seminar series. Asked why the bloc was so obsessed with the internal politics of the country, Dell'Aricca simply told the meeting Zimbabwe possessed a vast array of raw materials that were of strategic importance to the EU. He explained that previously, Europe used to freely access these raw materials from Zimbabwe to develop itself. He bemoaned the fact that nowadays Europe has to compete with other international players. It was thus vital to have "better relations" with the country for easier access to the raw materials! Just like that. This was on 23rd February, in the year of our Lord 2012. I don't need to tell you that better relations means putting in place a Government which will play weak or no goalkeeper on national resources. Such a government is made from MDC-T of Tendai Biti. Will he stand for that, with all these facts, this knowledge, such consciousness? Will he? After all, judging by the drift of his arguments, his public positions, Tendai passes for a politician who would be part of a stratum that rules, not part of a shallow stratum of those that merely govern. Yes, Tendai Biti, the man who would rule but the politician who governs.
Icho!
---------------------
Nathaniel Manheru can be contacted at nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Source - zimpapers
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