When the unintended so damages!

There is something I don't understand about our Government and our leaders. This Wednesday we had the Prime Minister's spokesperson telling Minister Chinamasa off for pointing out that the Prime

Minister would not live up to his promises regarding the funding of the financially anaemic Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, ZEC.

In a highly publicised event a few weeks back, the private media boastfully told us that the Prime Minister was in full charge of the electoral process, pursuant to which he had summoned the whole ZEC for an update and direction on the way forward regarding elections, principally the updating of voter registration.

Eyebrows must have been raised in some quarters over how a presidential candidate and a leader of a contesting party suddenly reinvents himself as a disinterested facilitator when it comes to the activities of ZEC.

What charges have been laid?
Still no one laid charges. Significantly the Prime Minister, his staff and his newspapers are already answering to charges which no one has laid. Says Bango: "It is mischief of the highest order for anybody to suggest that he (Prime Minister) is interfering with a process that we all know he is working hard to push through.

"In as much as ZEC would want to be independent of political intrusion, it still needs resources from the State; that is where the PM comes in."

Just what charge is the spokesperson responding to? Who has made it? And the obliging papers: "ZEC defends PM", Daily News; "ZEC defends Tsvangirai Role", Newsday. Who needs to be defended in this power equation?

A cent-less Constitutional body which is being placed on the beck and call of a contesting politician is now being presented as defending an ambitious politician backed by a whole empire, and enjoying the status of a Prime Minister of this country. It boggles the mind.

ZEC the outsider?
I thought the idea behind lifting ZEC from being a mere creature of a statute to being a Constitutional body was to assure it financially, insulate it politically? If the PM spokesman thinks the payment of accessing resources from the State is to be hectored by politicians, surely it suggests ZEC is an outsider, a creature outside of the State and thus an intrusion on it?

Or the disheartening obverse: that the State belongs to politicians who then dole out resources to pestering outsiders like ZEC depending of course on proof of obedience and good behaviour.

Could it be that ZEC is being starved deliberately to make it daily a dutiful customer of the PM, all to redound to Tsvangirai the MDC-T candidate? I have not laid the charges. They have invited the charge themselves!

The shaker, the mover?
Those familiar with the science of political communication will quickly tell you that the oversized publicity around the summoning of ZEC was meant to depict and cast the Prime Minister as a man in charge, indeed a decisive man of affairs and direction. We all absorbed that, exclaiming wow, here is a powerful man of State moving and shaking a world securely in his palm.

Of course naughty cynics like me smirked: if the man is so in charge as he wants us to believe, let him not cry a few electoral months hence when his party draws an unflattering election result.

No real God wrestles and complains against mankind, without becoming a mere man. For how can a man so firmly in charge then complain of rigged elections? Plead violence?

Plead unfreeness? Plead unfairness?
Of course all this was said soto voce, waiting for whirling events to provide a propitious moment. Which happened sooner.

Losing maternal instinct
So we waited, and as it turned out, not for too long. Retrospectively we now know that our diligent Prime Minister invited ZEC to a meeting at which he directed the literally poor Commission to speedily produce a budget proposal for submission to him. Which ZEC did, predictably with the speed of a long-starved child glimpsing a tantalising morsel, a starved child of a filially irresponsible State parent. Then moons rose. Moons set.

Moons rose again, still set again, each such lunar occurrence seeing the long-starved child, longer starved. Our very stout Prime Minister whose warm invitation had suggested a rare point of maternal warmth, maternal concern, maternal compassion in an otherwise coldly indifferent State said no word, gave no reply, whether by word of succour or of hard enlightenment.

The silence was loud, yawning, gaping amidst a placid or equanimous executive face. Absolutely no concern, no compassion. The child meanwhile continued to progressively emaciate, until even the small ribs which ordinarily are snugly and cosily hidden in the upper reaches of the body began to publicly assert their place and shape on the caged landscape of human physiognomy. Still the mother would not be moved, stolidly indifferent. Instead the mother went a-holidaying! Oh Mister Prime Minister!

Just an executive facilitator!
Until some man called Patrick Chinamasa murmured loudly about this big, rotund woman next door, this fat woman who will not look after her children at all, this woman next door who feeds her children on fawned concern, responsibility and empathy. This woman now completely bereft of any ounce of maternal instinct.

Whereupon a deluge of a response came by way of the story I have just alluded to, ran in some of our private dailies. His system went into offensive overdrive, repugnant assault: "He (the Prime Minister) is not an accounting officer and by accusing him that he failed to give ZEC money, Minister Chinamasa is belittling the PM to an accounting officer, which is nonsensical", came the torrent by way of his spokesman, one William Bango.

So if the PM won't be belittled to "an accounting officer", what then is he, or should he be elevated to, Mister Spokesman, Sir? "The PM is just an executive facilitator," spokesman Bango said, says.

Ha ha ha ha! Ini mwii zvangu! What belittles, to be mistaken as a resource-controlling accounting officer, or to be panegyrically described as "just an executive facilitator"?

I am quoting his man, please note. And this in respect of a man who routinely prefers to regard himself as executively consequential as the President, an equal sharer in state executive powers allegedly evenly split between Zanu-PF and MDC-T?

And the contradiction in "executive facilitator", a contradiction peddled as a clever oxymoron, yet so glaringly lacking in any stylistic or semantic value? I think our Prime Minister and those around him must just decide what to become: movers and shakers or simply wimpy politicians dangling pseudo-usefully by power's ever spinning or rotating margins. When God favours you with a contestant who races backwards, you happily walk to the finishing line. Oh lucky Zanu-PF! But that is a small point to make.

Summoning all and sundry
Why does the Prime Minister summon needy institutions of Government to no avail? He has done that with practically all Constitutional commissions, all in a bid to suggest power and influence. Yet we all soon discover his merely is a strange satisfaction in exercising the power to summon, the strange pleasure of one who gloats amidst an obliging crowd of wordily-famed officials who have been so emasculated as to count for nothing in their areas of GPA mandate.

And as with ZEC, his request to them is always standard: go ye and compose a budget quickly for my speedy attention. Which is duly done and delivered, together with stimulated, soaring hopes after a long ebb. Ask commissioners at the Zimbabwe Media Commission. Ask commissioners at the Human Rights Commission, commissioners at the Anti-Corruption Commission.

They have all been summoned, all to demurely appear before his Eminence. The interface template is the same, which in itself need not be a problem or surprise. Who does not know that bureaucracies are creatures of habit, of humdrum repetition? Did not the South Afrikaner radical author, Breyten Breytenbach say bureaucracies and their incumbents - politicians - suffer from an acute limited vocabulary?

Limited execution template if you ask me!
Yes, we can't!
What is a real problem for me is for the PM to demand audience and budget from this commission, that commission, those commissions, all to the same, unvarying, disappointing outcome. Why? Why disappoint? Why hurt? Why frustrate?

And if it can't (our stock answer in primary mathematics!), more accurately if you can't, why bother those ever slimming commissioners who accepted appointments in the hope of seriousness and plenty? No wonder why a number of them are quitting! And if accounting officers determine the flow of resources, which you, Mister Prime Minister, can't, why not leave these meetings to those accounting officers who can?

Why give us a new chorus: YES, WE CAN'T!? And look at the communication around the latest round of meetings with ZEC. You have the Prime Minister, you have the acting Finance Minister in tow; you don't have the Finance Minister who is in Canada, in Britain, lost in useless perforations he dignifies as lectures! Meanwhile, Rome is burning.

The upshot of the meetings: the Prime Minister has assured me that he has been assured by the substantive minister that money is there for ZEC, and I will go and find out why the money is not yet disbursed. Good gracious me!

Surely if this duty hyperconscious party can cut short its prime Minister's holiday (Cut?My foot! Let them publish the dates on Cabinet Authority), surely it must be a lot easier to summon back its Finance Minister so inanely concerned with sound bites that bring no value to Zimbabwe, while vital national processes stall. Party of excellence indeed!

Politics of headlines
Anyway, what in fact is lacking is exactly that "executive facilitation" which the PM claims some competence in. So who is being dishonest, the responsible minister who won't get money, or an effete Prime Minister who pretends to be a decisive fixer? A minister who knocks in vain for money from an MDC-controlled Finance Ministry, and a PM who bustles indefatigably around Commissions long rendered innate by loose and even denied funding, while doing absolutely nothing about that or about corrupt municipalities controlled by his party, his men and women? The City has no water Mr Prime Minister, water which is life! The focus on one amounts to an absurd ambition - an overreaching; the lack of focus on other, a blatant dodging of responsibility, a fault - nay a sin - crying out for expiation.

There is too much of politics of imagery, of pseudo-events, of headlines by some nearly men who seek to look enormous, consequential. And the executive decisions on our un-funded Commissions lie with Cabinet, specifically with Finance Minister Biti, the secretary general of the PM's party.

Why not engage Cabinet; why not engage the minister executively, if you don't want to be belittled? Why wrestle a pig on your way to your fastidious girlfriend? You get grime, surely? Another thing: the spokesperson must avoid defences which slur other statuses, other positions in the bureaucracy.

If a monkey goes up a beauty ramp, it should not cry foul when its caved forehead is mentioned. What is easier, to qualify as an "executive facilitator" or as an accounting officer? Which one is merited?

Missed or spared, Barclays merger
I turn to a more serious matter. This week my publishers, The Herald, gave us two instances of unthinking journalism which would have been kindly endured except for their politically pregnant value. My suspicion is that the Business Herald may be guilty of the sin of inadvertence.

The first instance referred to a claimed Barclays/Absa deal, which deal The Business Herald reported in lamenting tones as excluding Zimbabwe.

Two days later, The Business Herald  ran another story suggesting Zimbabwe's investment approvals fell to US$930 million last year, from US$6,6bn a year before. In project terms, the Zimbabwe Investment Authority approved 172 projects in 2012, down from 227 projects in 2011.
Not too far down in the piece, the paper punctures its own balloon by intimating the above statistics "are just approvals" which may never become real investment propositions on the ground, all for a variety of reasons which the paper dutifully gives.

Providing platform for anti-Indigenisation lobby
While the paper offers a number of reasons for both developments, in its view, inauspicious developments, one voice runs consistently through. It is an anti-Indigenisation voice from an anti-Indigenisation white gentleman called "Dr" Eric Bloch.

He blames both the exclusion of Zimbabwe from the Absa deal and its  diminishing investment approvals to the "wait-and-see approach adopted by investors in the wake of the policy of Indigenisation. "All this showcases the level of anxiety among investors . . . They don't have the assurances that their investments are safe in Zimbabwe and as a result the country is losing out on billion-dollar transactions", the paper quotes "Dr" Bloch of H&E Bloch.

So many questions for ZIA
Let us make the hard points. The Business Herald admits the second story is empty. That it is. I fail to grasp the value of statistics on approved project proposals, especially when these have come to naught in the past.

Are we looking at this bureaucratic fascination with figures, an illusory movement concretized through nebulous figures? Why does ZIA continue to give us useless statistics? What does this say about it and the whole template it uses to interact with so-called investors? Are these real investors or mere chancers dignified by a faulty assessment template? And when ZIA approvals don't see the light of day, who answers for that? Kasukuwere? Does this imply ZIA approves outside of the country's laws? To achieve what? A high failure rate? These are key questions which the Business Herald must raise, must probe.

The runaway meaning
Much worse - and this is what miffs - if the story and its false figures are empty, why headline the non-story "Zim investment falls"? Which investment? What has fallen? Can anything which is not there fall, given what the story itself admits to? Where you have an empty story and you knowingly run it, what gets foregrounded is something else.

Intended or unintended, this non-story entrenches a certain perception on Zimbabwe in the reader, namely a country which is inhospitable to investments. Much worse it attributes that inhospitality to one factor: Indigenisation.

And the Business Herald produces a whole "Dr" to validate this charge. In the absence of any value in the story, the article draws attention to opinions that purport to drive it. And all the opinions are anti-Indigenisation!

The key question no one asked
The first story imply the ABSA/Barclays merger is a good thing. And since the Business Herald laments the elimination of Zimbabwe in the mergers, one assumes the paper thinks it is a good thing for host countries of those mergers.

Has this assumption been examined, interrogated? What is the link between international banking institutions operating in Third World countries, and the expansion or contraction of credit in those countries, for those countries? Who gets the money by way of local borrowings? Are they local at all? You could do a whole Phd on that, could you not? A very key question which has been answered variously, but all inconclusively. A very key question which the Business Herald seems un- alive to.
In Africa or about Africa?

One very strong reading is that these international banks are: one, following their home clients as these venture into the last resource frontier that Africa is thought to be.

Their expansion into Africa is thus not about Africa and her interests. It is about who has come to Africa in pursuit of own interests. And it's nothing new. The onset of colonialism saw the extension of these international banks into new colonies, the new world as it was fashionably called, all to suggest late birth, never purity of birth for us! Two, responding to the financial crisis in the Eurozone and beyond,a crisis whose epicenter has been banks, both causally and by way of consequences.

The outward growth is thus meant to assuage this crisis by mopping deposits world-wide. Again, the focus is on resolving the latest crisis that has hit finance capitalism, not any benevolence to our continent.

It is interesting that even the retail sector of banking is attracting such investments, with the new focus on mopping the little savings of Africa's historically un-banked.

Exploitative reach has deepened to blight even those for whom poverty and exclusion has been a protective dome. Who is that who wrote about the un-captured peasantry? Time to revise the scholarship!

How does this marriage make a happy night for Zimbabwe?
Three, Africa today stands as the hope of the world, the new miracle given not just its vast natural resources but also the fact that its apartness from the world financial system has spared it the ravages of the meltdown. It naturally becomes the only direction to head for by way of the search for recovery.

These banks are not doing us a favour; they are recognising our worth, inherent worth, which is why Business Herald's lamentations are completely obnoxious and uncalled for.

Four, the trend of majors has been developing over the period, and Business Herald must surely research to see the trend. Where these have happened, the idea has been for national financial systems to drive hard bargains with international bankers in order to get a strategic lift, in order to make those national financial systems graduate through such mergers to global players and competitors.

This is why Reserve Banks of affected countries have been so key. It is about national financial strategies. Now, for the Business Herald to suggest that there is or might be a strategic gain for Zimbabwe in a marriage designed in South Africa, involving a white South African banker and a British banker, is to stretch matters. It is also to show a terrible inability to weigh developments and news before one.

Mergers of it, not on it!
Five and arguably most important, international bankers who traditionally have always been western, today face new realities defined not by their monopoly status deriving from colonialism.

The new realities are now being defined by new entrants, principally the Chinese and limitedly, Islamic banks. A few statistics on this factor. We have just had a new kid on the block, Ecobank.

It is a joint venture between a Chinese Bank and a Togolese bank. That way Togo now boasts an institution with global pretensions, thanks to this merger. It now operates in over 32 African countries.

Clearly, this is a purposeful merger, with very clear national objectives. Clearly China did not dodge the issue of Indigenisation, of partnership with players on the continent. It met it head on. We have a similar merger involving ICBC, the world's largest bank by value, which paid US$5,5bn for a 20% stake in SA's Standard Bank in 2007.

Barring who Standard Bank is, you cannot miss the fact of national purpose and partnership with "local" institutions. HSBC may or may not have consummated with Nedbank, I am not so sure. But they talked. The moral cannot be missed. Indigenisation or local partnering has not stood in the way of mergers; it is now the new strategy for them.

What we see in the exclusion of Zimbabwe from the Absa/Barclays merger is not weakness of local environment.

It is an attest action of strong national policy framework, indeed a banking presence which remove us from the category of unbanked territories. As a banking proposition, Zimbabwe is very deep and sophisticated. Much more, what fails in our circumstances are attempts to overrun us, to subdue us.

Our politics revolve around the founding and asset equipping of a local middle class. We are not like South Africa. There is war against such a policy, which is why what is at issue is not banking, but using banking to pursue hostile politics against us.

That, surely, must be known to the Business Herald which need not be an unwitting tool. Zimbabwe looks for mergers involving national institutions, mergers of it, not on it. For such a thrust, one does not expect accolades from Bloch, surely?

Africa as a factor
Apart from the 1bn-strong market that Africa is, the continent is also witnessing a rapid growth in its middle class, reckoned now to stand at 355 million, or more than 34% of the continent's population.

You might say the greater part of the billion-strong is unbanked. Well, it has been, but not anymore, thanks to mobile banking which is brining the un-banked into the circuit. We have seen it here. Kenya's model M-Pesa service launched in 2007 has netted in over 14 million customers from the previously un-banked.

Where is CBZ, or other national banks?
All of which is to say? Well, that mergers arising from the mating of foreigners on our soil  need not be celebrated, need not mean much for you and me as Zimbabwean depositors.

In our case these international banks have been mopping our deposits without giving us loans, or more accurately, to take our deposits to overseas investors. The figures are there for anyone with eyes. The ratio of deposits to loans is disgusting.

How different the situation would have been if we were shareholders in those banks! What we would have lost on the swings of financial sanctions, we would have recouped on the shareholding roundabouts, surely! Secondly, any merger which dodges ownership issues with locals merely create new behemoths which make issues of sovereignty loom more and more distant, further and further away from our grasp.

Why, dear Business Herald, am I to celebrate an ABSA/ Barclays merger instead of pushing for a merger which lifts CBZ or any other genuinely national banking proposition? Why should I wish for a merger which will create conditions for the defeat of national banks through unequal market power? We are not there on the globe, we get wiped here at home? These are very key  issues which cannot be wished away, and one hoped our newspapers would enlighten us.

Now, the politics of it all!
Politically, the two articles create a certain attitude against Indigenisation, all  on falsehoods and mistaken analysis or lack of it.

I have already shown that Chinese finance courts local players; it does not dodge them, or vilify them as does Eric Bloch and those of his ilk. Subconsciously and cumulatively, Business Herald is psyching you and me - we blacks - to begin to believe that demanding our heritage and place in the scheme of things hurts business. That our rights are a cost.

That the forfeiture of our rights and entitlements is the high cost of investment and so-called development. And Business Herald reproduces "statistics" from a national agency called ZIA, to back this up! Produces "Dr" Eric Bloch to corroborate, to interpret. But we also know whose policy Indigenisation is.

Or is not! When you have a public paper making these points, carrying in its columns seemingly politically neutral, technical voices, you enhance the believability of a mistaken analysis.
You build a case for the rejection and stigmatisation of a key policy which is bitterly contested, which is an electoral question. I want to meet the MDC formations on this key issue, not the Business Herald.

Indeed when I meet the Herald, the paper will have used technical voices and tools to create a salubrious conceptual environment  for the receptivity of MDC anti-indigenistion politics and messages. Politics of thraldom, in other words. Does Zimpapers want such values? I doubt. Icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw