Civil Servants Pay: Goading the masses, cuddling the IMF

THE MDC have chosen a political response to a security issue. This column had given them a good tip on how to handle the matter, namely that they take up the matter through appropriate channels whose creation they themselves agitated for when they joined the Inclusive Government.

One such forum is the National Security Council. Instead of taking that sensible route, they have chosen the path of sonorous political resonance with nil returns on the ground.

Like a little naughty child who misbehaves in the presence of respectable visitors, they are set to enjoy momentary glory as their thoughtless MPs grandstand in Parliament, to equally sonorous headlines.

Then when the day is up and hitting the fontanelle, the visitor shall bid goodbye, soon to beat the homeward path.

The stern and censorious face of parental disapproval which was the worst that could visit the naughty child in the presence of the visitor, will rapidly give way of cowhide whiplashes soon to tear the peace, soon to tear raw flesh.

The MDC formations have stepped on a raw nerve and their bringing the matter of generals to Parliament can only stoke greater rage. They are sure to walk away empty-handed, bleeding. Mark my paragraph.

Economic lesson from a dog
I have said this before. I will say it again. Someone must tell our Finance Minister who is a lawyer by training that one important curve which the dismal science called economics has given mankind is called the consumption curve.

Basic textbooks on economics will tell you that what makes this one curve stand out above all other curves - animate or inanimate - is its unique and stubborn trait of refusing to dive to the zero point of any graph, let alone to venture into the minus zone. It may meander and mend, twist and turn but no, it never hits point zero or below. When it comes to a downward trend, it is very stubborn, more stubborn than Minister Biti, with all his self-vaunted ghetto intransigence.

Its resilience is not hard to discover. Even a beggar whose pocket is totally empty, still incurs consumption-related expenditure. He must live, and the will to live compels that he borrows for survival, well beyond his savings.

This is why people get over-borrowed, including those living on or beneath the threshold, who thus should be reckoned as unable to spent.

That way the consumption curve imposes its will on mankind. The Shona have a good proverb that reckons with this phenomenon of survival economics. It says "Imbwa haihukure sadza".

Roughly translated this saying means no dog barks at food.

Only a man on a full stomach affords the luxury of drawing up a budget, affords the luxury of postponing consumption. This is one simple lesson Minister Biti might have to learn, sooner than later, amidst furious barks and even bites.

Beyond the alchemy of dreams
Or maybe the dismal science is too esoteric for the minister, too hidden and opaque to reveal its hidden ways. Let me be nearer him.

The minister claims to have been a diligent student of Marx and Engels, in his own words, during his "mistaken" student days.

Today he says he has recovered from the dashing idealism of those tumultuous days where the alchemy of militant idealism turned boys' toys into fuel-free Ferraris. He has discovered new bodies of knowledge, new rules of life, including one that politely advises that this earth has its guardians, all hailing from a clan of fairer, white skin colour. He has new teachers, new textbooks from some university called Bretton Woods.

He is also quick to add the real world is hard on the soft, harder on the dreamy. He says he is now a down-to-earth man, a hard-nosed politician-minister. I hope he is all that. For the sake of this article I take comfort from the sheer longevity of matters learnt in youth.

Such lessons tend to linger on, dominate even in later life. They tend to colour lifelong sensibilities thereby shaping outlooks. So the Honourable must remember basic Marxism, surely?

The one lesson in capitalism
The radical duo, that is, Marx and Engels, makes it commonsensically clear that the bloody capitalist, no matter how depraved, greedy and evil, is sensible enough to know that he cannot fleece his exploited and downtrodden worker right down to the marrow, pare him to the bone.

He must allow that barest minimum reward to his victim to allow the same victim to afford a morsel not just to survive, but also to get strong enough to be able to copulate with his wife, so another brood is generated and raise under the same conditions of subsistence to allow capitalism, in all its exploitative social relations, to exploit viably and thus subsists eternally.

Capitalism cannot deny its victim - the worker - the ability to reproduce his life and his class-kind, without imperiling itself.

It is clever enough to know that its sustenance rests on repeat exploitation. Surely this level of explanation should be accessible to his Honourable the Minister?

Does he eat from his pot?
Zimbabwe's national statistics are compiled by a department under Minister Biti's charge. He is about to replace that department's leadership, fortuitously giving its reigns to an officer who once upon a time was his high school teacher. This is the department which tells us what threshold earnings for our society should be, all to allow the abused Zimbabwean civil servant to be able to eat, make furious love, rest a little before making it back to workplace for another working day, indeed before siring the next generation of workers for the continuance of the system which exploits him.

The worker himself does not invent figures that gauge the poverty datum line. Biti's Zimstats -renamed after the old CSO, reshaped after a blueprint and on orders of the ubiquitous International Monetary Fund (IMF) - does.

I want to believe the Honourable eats what his pot, hand and stick cooks. If not, may God the Almighty please be with us!

Grazing around the tether.
Now, why should any other Minister - in this case Mukonoweshuro- any other official, any worker, any negotiating platform, bear the burden of advising the good minister where the remuneration formulae should begin, what livelihood negotiations should in fact take as a given?

Even a marketer knows that it is repeat sales that make business. It is never the once-only sale. If our minister' derived advice is that Government is to exploit the current worker to the bone and then to the grave, all in a hurry, then what? Shut the doors of Government while opening the happy, bloody mouth of the IMF?

It sounds really foolish for the Minister to think that civil servants can earn well below subsistence while still remaining the righteous and diligent workers he expects them to be.

To expect so is to defy the laws of the consumption curve, is it not? The first instinct of any life is self-preservation, which is why very few - if any - hunger-related deaths have been reported in the public service, grossly underpaid though civil servants still are.

The consumption curve is living truest. The Minister brags of being raised in the ghetto. I hope he was.

But he would have known from his temporary sojourn in rural areas that a goat on a tether eats around the enchanted circle marked by the reach of the rope that leashes it.

From that rustic experience, the Shona have again drawn another economics-resonant lesson of dear life: mbudzi inodyira payakasungirwa.

In our particular circumstances, where safety nets are not provided by the benefits of the ZANU(PF)-initiated land reforms, it simply means the public worker, like the proverbial goat, is grazing around his tether! Pity the Nation requiring his services!

It has to bribe, kick back, motivate, do many other unseemly things for this servant who has to obey the dictates of survival consumption.

To make this point is not to defend fufuro, or the dirty proceeds of corruption. It is to warn society against attacking its stock of morality by denying itself basics. Biti is trying to do that and he thinks he is being a no-nonsense man, a tough taskmaster.

To please an outside auditor, he has created conditions where his bigoted remuneration ideas gnaw away the very moral fabric of this nation, indeed hack the very ramparts of probity behind which a brave new world must subsist. After such a sordid achievement, he retires to his party to whelp about "a party of excellence".

Time shall test such claims for his party, its men and women, himself included.

Salaries as an internal sanction.
And the spiral goes much further and spills into every facet of life, to blight each and all. You can never recover an economy amidst a demotivated public workforce furiously tending - rat race-like - in all directions to eke out a fragile living.

Apart from being unproductive, in fact destructive, such a Service, itself the largest fraction of a dwindling workforce, cannot demand goods and services on the back of which any economy should and can grow. Simply, the workforce has no disposable income.

The essence of any economy is a human need called consumption. This is the need that translates into a demand for goods and services, which in turn trigger production and exchange. Not quite material for a law book! Sanctioned for over a decade by the West, this emaciated, ribbed workforce today survives spectre-thin, reeling from a new round of income-related sanctions package whose face resembles one Tendai Biti.

The minister behaves as if he has not heard of John Meynard Keynes and his post-WW1 theory on how governments should and do behave after major disasters like or akin to a major war.

The reader does not need me to know that the more-than decade-old sanctions are a mere five years younger than our war of Independence. He behaves as if the first commandment was written by one Friedman!

Since Biti's heroes are in the West, I will approach him on his terms.

After Versailles, defeated Germany was supposed to pay reparations to "the uttermost farthing". The victorious allies sought to exact from Germany reparations which were the value of another world war, something which gave proud Germany an easy choice between a humiliating peace and a second world war. Britain's Churchill whom I am sure Minister Biti knows and possibly reveres, castigated this foolish stance by the allies, one designed more to appease public sentiment than to build peace. He wrote: "The multitudes remained plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts, and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them.

The newspapers, after their fashion, reflected and emphasised the prevailing opinions. Few voices were raised to explain that payment of reparations can only be made by services or by the physical transportation of goods in wagons across land frontiers or in ships across salt water; or that when these goods arrive in demanding countries they dislocate the local industry except in very primitive or rigorously-controlled societies."He predicted that history "will characterise all these transctions as insane" as they laid the foundation for a resurging martial Germany and the economic blizzard we now know as the great depression.

Apart from the consequences of a second world war, Europe - Britain included - faced an era of unstable governments as the already squeezed electorate voted out one government after another, voted in one coalition after another. In Britain itself, the Labour-Socialist Prime Minister called Ramsay MacDonald proposed a programme of austerity and sacrifice for an already starving, war-weary nation. Wrote Churchill: "The mass of the people were asked to vote for a regime of self-denial." I don't think the minister would have got my point if I had quoted Mahatma Ghandi or any other non-European leader. Why is the Minister asking for a similar vote?

Ghost workers or ghost stipends?
Is the minister being senseless? No, never! He is too learned to be that, or to want to be seen to be behaving that way. There is lots of political rhyme and reason in "his" stance. His "stance" is the stance of his party and the IMF. The Prime Minister, his president in the MDC-T, has mumbled support, albeit in a manner that defies even village reasoning. The salary and wage award did not come through Cabinet, he says, adding the award is too small. A week before this spacious defence, he had defended Biti saying Biti cannot shit money.

No one has asked Biti to perform such a feat. But everyone had appealed to him not to ingest shit while ejecting common survival sense. As for our incoherent Prime Minister, so where does the money for a meaningful rise come from, Sir? Similarly, the IMF has already written, telling Biti to cut the wage bill, regardless. So Biti has an institutional home and the real challenge is to unpack and expose motives and the rationale behind this baffling stance.

Baffling because the minister is taking a hostile stance against all civil servants, including those in his ministry whose loyalty he has taxed to breaking point. As I write, the Minister is virtually alone, relying on ever diminishing hands, largely drawn from a small, politically motivated clique he has imported into his Ministry, or converted on the strength of relatively small, but in our circumstances, still significant monthly stipends coming from donor institutions and shady travel. These undeclared stipends, operating outside of the Public Service system in the form of a parallel structure, have sustained a small staff that remains loyal to him, churning spacious arguments in defence of the minister's hopelessly threadbare thesis. I am saying, the Minister's ministry has more than one remuneration structure, which is why the notion of ghost workers is child play relative to ghost stipends. Thank God someone has noticed and there is movement that shall reveal a lot.

Borrowing from the IMF
So what motivates the minister? How cohesive is his posture vis-a-vis his institutional political home? Finance ministers do respond to different pressures and interests. This is true of any society, true of Minister Biti or any Minister who might occupy that post in future. That means a medley of forces, all at work, all creating traits which in bundle, make up the official personality of a finance minister. There are factors that endear the Minister and his intransigent stance to MDC-T politics, just as they also are factors in his stance that create rattles between him and his political elders in the MDC-T. I made reference to the Minister's abjuration of his schooldays Marxist convictions for a Washington-Consensus sensibility. If truth be told, the minister's fight against civil servants salaries is a fight he has borrowed from the IMF and its team which happens to be in situ as I write.

The trouble with our media is that they lack perspective and cross references. IMF reports have consistently hammered on the issue of civil service salaries as a fraction of the GDP, or more accurately, as a fraction of revenue. The IMF myth has always been that public sector spending crowds out the private sector. I am making two points here: the minister does not own the argument against civil service salary review. It is an IMF argument which has found an enthusiastic gladiator in the Minister, against a slippery floor by way of his disgruntled Ministry and all-round revilement by colleagues in Government.

It is a derived argument by which the Minister hopes to win accolades and the imprimatur of the West. His audience is an outside one.

There are good political reasons for him to strive for that recognition. And when he is operating at that level, he is ready to defy God and man, but never the IMF which he sees occupying a pedestal a lot higher than that of God. His defiance is made worse by the fact that the IMF team is in the country, helping the Minister to cobble together a mid-term review which must show neatly balancing figures.

Already, he has failed the test on two matters: he could not successfully pilfer the President's powers in order to be able to block certain policies which cause discomfort in the hungry West; he could not get in those amendments which the IMF wanted inserted into the now-aborted Diamonds Bill. His credentials in the eyes of the IMF and the West are thus now in doubt. He has to peddle very hard, even against advice from his superiors in his party. This is why both in Cabinet and at Monday meetings of principals, Tsvangirai is at one with his two colleagues, against his own Minister in the Inclusive Government, and his own Secretary General in the MDC-T.

His flip-flopping nonsense is a false dilemma by a poor politician who thinks he is being complicated. After all, anything that wears down Biti by way of credibility is sweet music to Tsvangirai. There is a price to be paid for the ugly things that happened at the Bulwayo Congress and before. Biti must know that.

What Maslow never permits
The minister has just told Zimbabweans that although his ministry has set aside US$500million for infrastructure, that the money remains unused. For him, he sees no connection between an unhappy workforce and the languid movement of that allocation.

How do you get an unhappy workforce to want to provide a road, a dip-tank or some other amenity for any community, only to retire to a hungry, tumultuous home at the close of a working day? The nice road or dip-tank is the opportunity cost by way of foregone consumption to stave off starvation. Maslow and his life-learnt laws refuse.

There is an unmet low-order need, which is why the civil servant is too worried to philosophize about the needs of the Minister's fellow-villager in Dotito. Of course the civil servant is not a fool.

He knows that monies unspent on the capital budget will redound to his benefit, maybe not so soon but some day. The one item so easy to postpone in a distressed budget is the capital budget. We are back to the consumption curve and its dictates, are we not?

A place of expediency
Why does the MDC-T and its officials only remember Marange when the issue of civil servant salaries is broached? Well, simply because for them Marange is an argument of expediency, never a right or a natural resource that has to be defended and rescued unconditionally from the marauding West. It is an argument which the MDC-T needs to deflect criticisms from hungry, angry civil servants. They should be able to say civil servants have no money because diamond proceeds are being looted. Of course it forgets that civil servants are a different audience, an audience within and thus very difficult to hoodwink through arguments that wash only in the village.

They know how Government revenues move, indeed how mineral resources have been used and, in the case of the country's fabulous minerals under multinational corporations, how these resources have been lost to the white world, with the benediction of the MDC-T component of the Inclusive Government. Above all, they know that there are SDRs stashed abroad while their children go hungry. It shall be interesting to see whether these SDRs have not been ravished in this meantime of civil servants hunger. It is going to be a hard-sell.

Hoping for Tunisia and Egypt
Politically, what are the gains in a destabilized or an unhappy public sector workforce? This is one area where the media have been unable to help society understand the sheer treachery behind it all. Why would a man who is a part of Government bring fire to a tinter box? Why would he behave contrary to the instinct of an average politician in a season of elections? There are two reasons. First, the MDC views itself as a contract-employer in Government. Or more accurately a contract worker with no organic responsibility to the workplace. Any unrest stands to exact punishment on Zanu (PF), the real shareholder of Government.

What the inclusive Government has failed to do is to teach the MDC formations that they are no longer an opposition. Sadly Biti, one of MDC's few flickering brains, is the proverbial old wine in new bottleskin. The form of Government remains contradicted by the mentality of opposition. Secondly, the MDC-T is still nursing hopes of Tunisia/Egypt-style unrest to catapult them to power, somehow. In that demented vision and its elevating fumes, they forget this is Zimbabwe and they are in Government and thus will be part of the target of the raging demos. Their hope is that the civil servants will be the trigger, with the rest of the workforce igniting as a result. The "deft" MDC-T will then be able to fish in troubled waters, either by way of an ouster, or by way of a Libya-like external intervention. This is a scenario which connects Biti's stubbornness to mainstream MDC-T politics. And as they draw up this never-never happy scenario, the forbidding political ecology of this country is not allowed to stand in the way. It is a happy dream and let no one wake them up! Of course they forget that even private sector workers look up to collective bargaining results in the public sector which redound to them as well through a new, higher wage floor level.

Our Marlovian hero
As an individual political player, the current dispute allows Biti to cut a riveting profile as the only politician from the MDC-T who is able to stand up to the President. After all, you are as big as the man you pick a quarrel with. He needs that investment for a political future. The only trouble is that the naive media do not realize that this is a self-profiling effort. Secondly, Biti hopes to cut a stronger profile against his party political boss, one Morgan Tsvangirai. It is a struggle within a struggle, with the target attention being that of the sponsoring West. The West is assessing who is best placed to protect its interests in the inclusive immediate, assure its interests in the long run.

That candidate must have the courage to tackle Zanu-PF as a current negative, and the highly politicised and radicalized masses in the long term. When capitalism is eating, the demos must be penned, must be kept in firm check, to lower the costs of exploitation. Capitalism needs a local strongman. And since the West is working for a dispensation in which ZANU(PF) is subdued, what we are witnessing in the MDC is a vicious struggle for a post-ZANU(PF) scenario, which is why it pits Biti against Tsvangirai. And in the fury of the fight, neither realise Zanu (PF) is still around. Like poor hunters, they are already fighting for the tender silver-side of a quarry still in the forest. That quarry happens to be the ferocious black rhino! So in one fight, Biti is engaging Robert Mugabe as both leader of ZANU(PF) and as President of Zimbabwe. On the other side he is engaging Tsvangirai as leader of MDC-T whose credentials he wants doubted by the sponsoring West. The easy media has read the issue of civil servants salaries as pitting Biti against President Mugabe.

Except that is not the case, and even it was - which it is not - that cannot be news. Merely a dog biting man. The truth is that Biti has been defying Tsvangirai who is not just at one with Mugabe and Mutambara, but is also anxious to carry the civil service with him. When told by his fellow principals to whip his man in line, his refrain has always been: "Anonetsa mukomana uyu," in utter resignation. Which is why Mutambara volunteered to help Tsvangirai pursuade Biti on the issue of salaries, and also went along when eventually, a decision was taken above and beyond the defiant minister. That cosmic fight which Biti has been waging makes him a Marlovian hero, one destined to initial victory, all to be followed by a dramatic fall.

And in that fight, relations are both dynamic and complex. As principals and leaders of Government, Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Mutambara will close ranks and share a common front against Biti, as indeed they did two Wednesdays ago when they told the Minister to pack his papers and leave them, to go back to implement the decision on civil servants pay, which decision did not require his consent or goodwill. It was curt, and the Minister left, dumbfounded. Even that meeting eventually came after fervent pleas. The principals had decided against granting the nuisance minister any further audience, forcing Tsvangirai to make an obligatory plea for the minister. Inside, Tsvangirai could only have been pleased that his rival was meeting a dramatic comeuppence. Realising he stood no chance, the minister has since acquiesced and has fallen neatly in line. For the third time, he stands to disappoint the expectant IMF, and the western world.

Macheso's madman
All of which means what? Well, that the Inclusive Government will grow even more dysfunctional as both inter-party and intra-party dynamics stymie its functionality. This is what will recommend early elections, never the GPA and its ridiculous time-tables. But there is an immediate meaning for Minister Biti in this whole saga, and I am happy to be Macheso's madman who warns a sceptical village of an impending war.

The issue of civil servants salaries mark a turning point in the minister's career in Government. A decision has been taken without him, above him. Everybody in leadership is convinced he is obstructionist. Some even smell a constituency which lies well outside and beyond a national one. On this and other matters likely to emerge in future, he shall be nudged aside. He shall be told to fall in, or fall out of the way. And if push comes to shove, he shall be got rid off, with the only little likely tears coming from President Mugabe, his supposed enemy. His own shall spot cheeks that are drier than a surface licked by a cold Harmattan. He serves and continues to serve largely by the President's goodwill. Surely by now he must know he has enemies in his own party, friends in his opposition party and leadership. If he does not, then he is a fool that must never be saved. Icho!