Neoliberalism & Austerity a twin attack on democracy development & Zanu PF Ideology
NEOLIBERALISM & AUSTERITY A TWIN ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY; DEVELOPMENT & ZANU PF IDEOLOGY.
The adoption of neoliberalism as the guiding ideology of state development by the President Mnangagwa has led to a lot of structural changes within the state The new dispensation shift of ideology from left to right/ Marxist Leninism{Gwara Remusangano} to Neoliberalism is of paramount importance as ideology guides state action and behavior through a veil of engrained beliefs, assumptions and opinions entrenched within the ideology. The shift can only be likened to a conversion of a Christian to a Muslim. But the ease and speed in which the transition to neoliberalism has been made is striking.
But, what is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism refers to the idea of establishing a minimal state {small government} with free market principles. It basis its argument on the Laissez Faire principles that the economy works best when left alone by government. Business people should do whatever they please with the prices as unrestrained pursuit of profit lead to a general benefit. This profit motive by private business is seen to be the reason behind the efficiency of the private sector over the public sector enterprises. Ultimately market fundamentalism is the heartbeat of neoliberalism which is the principle that the market is morally and politically superior to government and political control.
How it Attacks Democracy
Who voted for neoliberalism and austerity? No one. Who wants neoliberalism, privatization and austerity?IMF and MNCs. Therefore minimization of the state itself by neoliberalism is an attack on democracy. As when you minimize the state you transfer decision making to private power. Private power is therefore maximized. Yet it is only through the state and its organs that the citizen can influence social and economic policies at least in principle. This cannot be said for private power. As a matter of law a citizen cannot influence the decisions of IMF, Lobels, Lafarge ,Econet or any other corporate. As a consequence both the citizens and the state have less capacity to control the economy as the powers to control would have been surrendered to a few tyrannical elites. For corporates have a “one centre of power” totalitarian structures as decisions are handed down from the top. Few corporate CEOs decide what the price of medicine ,bread or cement should be and few IMF foreigners dictate what economic policies should the government adopt.
The idea of separating politics and economics as espoused by President Mnangagwa following the tenets of neoliberalism also shrinks the democratic space as citizen participation will be restricted to the political sphere leaving the economic sphere being a democratic free zone dominated by corporates, investors and multinational companies. Power will continue migrate from political structures to dominant economic players . For instance if we are now changing our political, ideological and legal environment to attract MNCs and investors how much more will we change our politics to maintain their interest once they invest. If sanctions taught us anything it is that private concentration of wealth , network and finance in non native hands is dangerous for the economy.
The president instant ideological crossover from left to right has also reduced Zimbabwe to become a one party state. Whether the President arrived at neoliberalism like Paul in Damascus wherein upon being elected to the presidency he realized all past deeds and visions were evil or whether he was convinced by Morgan’s criticism of the leftist government or whether he was baptized by the hegemony of the bourgeois and succumbed to the domination of western ideas is yet to be explained by ZANU PF elites. But the consequences of the ideological shift cannot be mistaken. ZANU PF and MDC A now share ideology and vision. Consequently critical questions on the role of the state , the path to development and economic management are no longer central. They now all agree that the state has to be minimal with free market principles, privatization and foreign domestic investment as the driver to economic development. For the citizens the question is no longer who has a better vision or plan but who can implement the plan better. The leftist principles of domestic driven economy with community ownership schemes , central planning, big government and indigenization have been abandoned. In any case there is a vacuum in the left.
How it attacks development
Neoliberalism seeks to destroy the welfare state as it minimize the part of the state which is directed to public needs. For instance education programmes such as BEAM and Cadet tertiary scholarships will never be resuscitated thereby restoring the colonial bottleneck system through finance. Telone and Netone which are subsidized by the state to offer affordable data services to the public are set to be privatized. Consequently reducing the number of access through price increases. Privatization reduces accessibility. Privatization also opens up opportunities for corruption either through the tender process or the valuation procedures. The processes of valuations and tender procedures will be easy to manipulate given the corrupt culture which rampant and the fact that we intend to privatize multiple state entities at the same time. Zambia and Brazil present multiple classic cases on the failures of privatization schemes.
The call of austerity as declared by the President is also a major obstacle to development. This is mainly because our 7 year experience of austerity during the ESAP period from 1990 to 1997 left us in a worse situation. All the ESAP targets and the stated benefits of austerity were never achieved.The masses were left in poverty and the state in debt.For austerity is based on the belief that during bad times you cut government budget deficits and you create surpluses in order to contain the growth of debt to GDP ratio. But this has never worked because only at household level is to be found independence between income and expenditure .For instance if you don’t buy $24 bag of cement your income would not be reduced by 24$.But a nation expenditure is a nation’s income. When a government cuts spending by 20 percent of GDP ,GDP is cut by 20 percent. Debt to GDP increases immediately. To reflect this Yanis{2017} states that in 2008 the city of London reduced spending by 6 percent and debt to GDP increased by 19 percent
However the ideas to privatise and liberalise the economy are not new. We tried them during the ESAP years and they successfully failed. Manufacturing to GDP declined from 20 to 16 percent , Agriculture to GDP also declined from 16 to 14 percent and the inflation rose from 12 to 26 percent. A total of 100 000 people also lost their jobs under the ESAP liberalized economy. As a result a comparison between the first decade of independence and the ESAP period reflect a decline of GDP growth from 4,2 to 2,8 percent. Even in Chile during USA and IMF backed Pinochet coupist government neoliberalism was experimented but it also failed. Learned professors and doctors of neoliberalist economy famously known as the “Chicago boys” tried and failed to resuscitate the Chilean economy.Eventually both the Chicago boys and the neoliberalist policies were abandoned and the state had to take over the economy after five years of neoliberalist ruin.
It is also important to point out that countries which are developed such as Japan ,USA and UK never followed neoliberalist free market principles. In actual fact they violated them. They developed through economic nationalism with serious state intervention in the market and high protectionism and subsidies.Noam {2011} mentions that the USA in the early 19th century was similar to Egypt with agrarian cotton based economies. Japan’s economic and social development was equal to that of Ashanti Kingdom while India was the major industrial centre producing more iron and textile than all of Europe. Yet India ,Egypt and Ghana did not eventually develop because they experience a neocolonial liberalist policies.To show disgust at neoliberal policies USA blocked British goods which were cheap and of better quality in the 19th century to protect their home industry. They also increased state spending and practiced a command economics in 1939 to end the “great depression”. In the 1840s both the British empire and the Japanese empire closed off their territories because they couldn’t compete with foreigners. Therefore high spending ,protectionism, market intervention were the path taken by developed states to development.
The call to prioritize debt repayment by the new dispensation is even more disastrous. How can a poor struggling state prioritize debt repayment to rich financial institutions .The few resources we have should be directed toward our own development not further enrichment of foreign banks. Even Thomas Sankara in 1987 stated that “if we do not repay lenders they don’t die but if we repay we are going to die” Furthermore the IMF and World bank debt constitute the USA 1898 basic definition of an odious debt. The arguments which were utilized by USA to default the Spanish debt incurred by Cuba are applicable with regards to the IMF and WB debt. The debt was not incurred by the people but by the state elite as the nation never benefited from it. Even more the IMF admits that ESAP programs failed because they were wrongly structured .How then can we pay back a loan with interest yet we all agree that the loan was wrong? Therefore any cent which is related to ESAP shouldn’t be paid. However the fact that our state elite paid even the Rhodesian debt and are bent on begging for new loans and sacrificing economic sovereignty to IMF conditionalities and control leaves one to wonder whether the new dispensation will put the development of the state over the demands of multilateral institutions. It would not be a surprise if the state elite would repeat the 90s ESAP repayment mechanism were 30 percent of our total export earnings were diverted to foreign banks effectively transferring public wealth to private foreign hands. Shockingly we are now even compensating men who robbed us of our land and cattle, who even got to benefit from such criminal action for more than a century.Now in independent Zimbabwe descendants of victims who inherited nothing but poverty have to compensate descendants of perpetrators who inherited stolen wealth.Such injustice is impossible under nationalism
Neoliberalism incompatibility with ZANU PF ideology
ZANU PF has traditionally been a Marxist Leninist party with pure Leninist vanguard structures as the central committee and the politburo. It is through Marxist Leninism that the party was formed and through Marxist Leninism it launched the national revolution that eventually to the independence. If it had adopted neoliberalism as its founding ideology it would never have been revolutionary simply because neoliberalists are not revolutionaries they are integrationists not nationalist .As such they do not prioritize the needs of the poor and the peasant but of the elite and the wealthy through market fundamentalism.
Marxist Leninist ideology was the basis of our independence struggle, education prowess indigenization and land reform. Without ZANU PF traditional ideology such structural gains would have been impossible. Immense human development programs of building schools, hospitals ,free primary education ,universal health care were achieved through the economic policies such as the Growth with Equity, Transitional National Development Plan and the First Five Year Plan were founded on Marxist Leninist ideology. Even the indigenization and community ownership schemes are basic leftist principles.The aim of these policies at least in principle was to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of the masses on the basis that the first beneficiaries of state should be its citizens not investors or MNCs. Therefore even if the old dispensation made its mistakes Marxist Leninist ideology was not one of them.
Besides the best economic statistics we ever recorded in post independence were under leftist ideologies. Even the GNU statics do not surpass the 1980 to 1985 numbers. Economic policies of the 80s achieve both economic growth and equity. The interventionist development strategy with strict price controls recorded growth of industrial sector to 23.3 percent of the GDP.Even our GDP per capita then at 1.295 became higher than that of China and India at 1.061 and 938 respectively.
However with the ideological crossover to neoliberalism , sooner or later the ZANU PF political structure will change, if not changing already as senior political officials are being silenced on commenting on market and economy clearly illustrating the supremacy of the economy and private power of IMF, Investors and MNCs over political structures. Regardless left wing political structures of the politburo and central committee are incompatible with right wing politics of neoliberalism. A left wing political party cannot practice right wing politics. Therefore ZANU PF elites have to be reeducated and converted in order to avoid ideological confusion and conflict or ED has to be rebaptized back Marxist Leninist ideology. Either way the current paradox were some elites argue for anti imperialism, anti west and sovereignty while ED is changing the ideology, admitting IMF conditionality’s, seeking collaboration with the west and attempting to create a FDI driven economy cannot be maintained.
malikmpereki@gmail.com
The adoption of neoliberalism as the guiding ideology of state development by the President Mnangagwa has led to a lot of structural changes within the state The new dispensation shift of ideology from left to right/ Marxist Leninism{Gwara Remusangano} to Neoliberalism is of paramount importance as ideology guides state action and behavior through a veil of engrained beliefs, assumptions and opinions entrenched within the ideology. The shift can only be likened to a conversion of a Christian to a Muslim. But the ease and speed in which the transition to neoliberalism has been made is striking.
But, what is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism refers to the idea of establishing a minimal state {small government} with free market principles. It basis its argument on the Laissez Faire principles that the economy works best when left alone by government. Business people should do whatever they please with the prices as unrestrained pursuit of profit lead to a general benefit. This profit motive by private business is seen to be the reason behind the efficiency of the private sector over the public sector enterprises. Ultimately market fundamentalism is the heartbeat of neoliberalism which is the principle that the market is morally and politically superior to government and political control.
How it Attacks Democracy
Who voted for neoliberalism and austerity? No one. Who wants neoliberalism, privatization and austerity?IMF and MNCs. Therefore minimization of the state itself by neoliberalism is an attack on democracy. As when you minimize the state you transfer decision making to private power. Private power is therefore maximized. Yet it is only through the state and its organs that the citizen can influence social and economic policies at least in principle. This cannot be said for private power. As a matter of law a citizen cannot influence the decisions of IMF, Lobels, Lafarge ,Econet or any other corporate. As a consequence both the citizens and the state have less capacity to control the economy as the powers to control would have been surrendered to a few tyrannical elites. For corporates have a “one centre of power” totalitarian structures as decisions are handed down from the top. Few corporate CEOs decide what the price of medicine ,bread or cement should be and few IMF foreigners dictate what economic policies should the government adopt.
The idea of separating politics and economics as espoused by President Mnangagwa following the tenets of neoliberalism also shrinks the democratic space as citizen participation will be restricted to the political sphere leaving the economic sphere being a democratic free zone dominated by corporates, investors and multinational companies. Power will continue migrate from political structures to dominant economic players . For instance if we are now changing our political, ideological and legal environment to attract MNCs and investors how much more will we change our politics to maintain their interest once they invest. If sanctions taught us anything it is that private concentration of wealth , network and finance in non native hands is dangerous for the economy.
The president instant ideological crossover from left to right has also reduced Zimbabwe to become a one party state. Whether the President arrived at neoliberalism like Paul in Damascus wherein upon being elected to the presidency he realized all past deeds and visions were evil or whether he was convinced by Morgan’s criticism of the leftist government or whether he was baptized by the hegemony of the bourgeois and succumbed to the domination of western ideas is yet to be explained by ZANU PF elites. But the consequences of the ideological shift cannot be mistaken. ZANU PF and MDC A now share ideology and vision. Consequently critical questions on the role of the state , the path to development and economic management are no longer central. They now all agree that the state has to be minimal with free market principles, privatization and foreign domestic investment as the driver to economic development. For the citizens the question is no longer who has a better vision or plan but who can implement the plan better. The leftist principles of domestic driven economy with community ownership schemes , central planning, big government and indigenization have been abandoned. In any case there is a vacuum in the left.
How it attacks development
Neoliberalism seeks to destroy the welfare state as it minimize the part of the state which is directed to public needs. For instance education programmes such as BEAM and Cadet tertiary scholarships will never be resuscitated thereby restoring the colonial bottleneck system through finance. Telone and Netone which are subsidized by the state to offer affordable data services to the public are set to be privatized. Consequently reducing the number of access through price increases. Privatization reduces accessibility. Privatization also opens up opportunities for corruption either through the tender process or the valuation procedures. The processes of valuations and tender procedures will be easy to manipulate given the corrupt culture which rampant and the fact that we intend to privatize multiple state entities at the same time. Zambia and Brazil present multiple classic cases on the failures of privatization schemes.
The call of austerity as declared by the President is also a major obstacle to development. This is mainly because our 7 year experience of austerity during the ESAP period from 1990 to 1997 left us in a worse situation. All the ESAP targets and the stated benefits of austerity were never achieved.The masses were left in poverty and the state in debt.For austerity is based on the belief that during bad times you cut government budget deficits and you create surpluses in order to contain the growth of debt to GDP ratio. But this has never worked because only at household level is to be found independence between income and expenditure .For instance if you don’t buy $24 bag of cement your income would not be reduced by 24$.But a nation expenditure is a nation’s income. When a government cuts spending by 20 percent of GDP ,GDP is cut by 20 percent. Debt to GDP increases immediately. To reflect this Yanis{2017} states that in 2008 the city of London reduced spending by 6 percent and debt to GDP increased by 19 percent
However the ideas to privatise and liberalise the economy are not new. We tried them during the ESAP years and they successfully failed. Manufacturing to GDP declined from 20 to 16 percent , Agriculture to GDP also declined from 16 to 14 percent and the inflation rose from 12 to 26 percent. A total of 100 000 people also lost their jobs under the ESAP liberalized economy. As a result a comparison between the first decade of independence and the ESAP period reflect a decline of GDP growth from 4,2 to 2,8 percent. Even in Chile during USA and IMF backed Pinochet coupist government neoliberalism was experimented but it also failed. Learned professors and doctors of neoliberalist economy famously known as the “Chicago boys” tried and failed to resuscitate the Chilean economy.Eventually both the Chicago boys and the neoliberalist policies were abandoned and the state had to take over the economy after five years of neoliberalist ruin.
It is also important to point out that countries which are developed such as Japan ,USA and UK never followed neoliberalist free market principles. In actual fact they violated them. They developed through economic nationalism with serious state intervention in the market and high protectionism and subsidies.Noam {2011} mentions that the USA in the early 19th century was similar to Egypt with agrarian cotton based economies. Japan’s economic and social development was equal to that of Ashanti Kingdom while India was the major industrial centre producing more iron and textile than all of Europe. Yet India ,Egypt and Ghana did not eventually develop because they experience a neocolonial liberalist policies.To show disgust at neoliberal policies USA blocked British goods which were cheap and of better quality in the 19th century to protect their home industry. They also increased state spending and practiced a command economics in 1939 to end the “great depression”. In the 1840s both the British empire and the Japanese empire closed off their territories because they couldn’t compete with foreigners. Therefore high spending ,protectionism, market intervention were the path taken by developed states to development.
The call to prioritize debt repayment by the new dispensation is even more disastrous. How can a poor struggling state prioritize debt repayment to rich financial institutions .The few resources we have should be directed toward our own development not further enrichment of foreign banks. Even Thomas Sankara in 1987 stated that “if we do not repay lenders they don’t die but if we repay we are going to die” Furthermore the IMF and World bank debt constitute the USA 1898 basic definition of an odious debt. The arguments which were utilized by USA to default the Spanish debt incurred by Cuba are applicable with regards to the IMF and WB debt. The debt was not incurred by the people but by the state elite as the nation never benefited from it. Even more the IMF admits that ESAP programs failed because they were wrongly structured .How then can we pay back a loan with interest yet we all agree that the loan was wrong? Therefore any cent which is related to ESAP shouldn’t be paid. However the fact that our state elite paid even the Rhodesian debt and are bent on begging for new loans and sacrificing economic sovereignty to IMF conditionalities and control leaves one to wonder whether the new dispensation will put the development of the state over the demands of multilateral institutions. It would not be a surprise if the state elite would repeat the 90s ESAP repayment mechanism were 30 percent of our total export earnings were diverted to foreign banks effectively transferring public wealth to private foreign hands. Shockingly we are now even compensating men who robbed us of our land and cattle, who even got to benefit from such criminal action for more than a century.Now in independent Zimbabwe descendants of victims who inherited nothing but poverty have to compensate descendants of perpetrators who inherited stolen wealth.Such injustice is impossible under nationalism
Neoliberalism incompatibility with ZANU PF ideology
ZANU PF has traditionally been a Marxist Leninist party with pure Leninist vanguard structures as the central committee and the politburo. It is through Marxist Leninism that the party was formed and through Marxist Leninism it launched the national revolution that eventually to the independence. If it had adopted neoliberalism as its founding ideology it would never have been revolutionary simply because neoliberalists are not revolutionaries they are integrationists not nationalist .As such they do not prioritize the needs of the poor and the peasant but of the elite and the wealthy through market fundamentalism.
Marxist Leninist ideology was the basis of our independence struggle, education prowess indigenization and land reform. Without ZANU PF traditional ideology such structural gains would have been impossible. Immense human development programs of building schools, hospitals ,free primary education ,universal health care were achieved through the economic policies such as the Growth with Equity, Transitional National Development Plan and the First Five Year Plan were founded on Marxist Leninist ideology. Even the indigenization and community ownership schemes are basic leftist principles.The aim of these policies at least in principle was to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of the masses on the basis that the first beneficiaries of state should be its citizens not investors or MNCs. Therefore even if the old dispensation made its mistakes Marxist Leninist ideology was not one of them.
Besides the best economic statistics we ever recorded in post independence were under leftist ideologies. Even the GNU statics do not surpass the 1980 to 1985 numbers. Economic policies of the 80s achieve both economic growth and equity. The interventionist development strategy with strict price controls recorded growth of industrial sector to 23.3 percent of the GDP.Even our GDP per capita then at 1.295 became higher than that of China and India at 1.061 and 938 respectively.
However with the ideological crossover to neoliberalism , sooner or later the ZANU PF political structure will change, if not changing already as senior political officials are being silenced on commenting on market and economy clearly illustrating the supremacy of the economy and private power of IMF, Investors and MNCs over political structures. Regardless left wing political structures of the politburo and central committee are incompatible with right wing politics of neoliberalism. A left wing political party cannot practice right wing politics. Therefore ZANU PF elites have to be reeducated and converted in order to avoid ideological confusion and conflict or ED has to be rebaptized back Marxist Leninist ideology. Either way the current paradox were some elites argue for anti imperialism, anti west and sovereignty while ED is changing the ideology, admitting IMF conditionality’s, seeking collaboration with the west and attempting to create a FDI driven economy cannot be maintained.
malikmpereki@gmail.com
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