I WRITE this piece from inside the belly of the beast. The beast no longer carries itself about with a swagger. Clearly all is not well. Its lair is topsy-turvy. Only a deep rumble echoing right through to its entrails.

A wail of distress, on and off its streets. In place of the garrulous loquacity of yore now reigns mournful whispers of anxieties, continual monologues and soliloquies, as somnambulist America audibly broods her fate, vainly seeking to come to terms with a crisis which threatens to topple it, to rob it of its previous lustre, its pride of place as a cosmic giant. You smell a deep smoulder, the cracking of a deep burning.

Gone is its dash, its conviviality of yore. Gone too is that Yankee sense of great power and dominance, that reckless laughter of the unchallenged, the muffled laughter of a society choking with fat and lucre. A society that eats too much, sleeps too well and too soundly, wasting and giving away so much, but without any sense of diminishing stock. The sanguineness of post-1989 uni-polarity is gone, and yonder prattles the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, the new eating chiefs in the village.

Rickshaws in Madison

On America’s boulevards, cars have shrunk severely. Not so much in numbers as in size. Big America today drives small. Not out of greater environmental awareness; not out of Kyoto. General Motors, with its vast, sauntering limousines now struggles for a customer. Its penile limos have now shrunk, shrunk to Hitler’s humpy VW beetle — or worse — British mini-coopers. The big ego is gone as crowded America now huddles into a beetle. I even saw the Indian rickshaw wobbling its way right through Manhattan, creaking past Waldorf Astoria, itself temporary home to US presidents on General Assembly days. Given the sweat on the dark peddler’s brow, the furious waving from prospective passengers, the rickshaw was needful, never a case of a rich man or society indulging poverty, never a case of affluent America affording itself the pleasure of comic and rudimentary exoticism.

Penny for poor folks

Much worse, America’s poor have escaped from their pens. They now break into polite society, break into the beau monde, well away from the slums, their designated habitats. The poor have since trekked right into Manhattan, and do accost passers-by for "a coin for a poor folk!", voice cracking, face hungry and subdued, all needier and most desperate. This is the land of the Mayflower, of puritans who have lost better times and with it, the defining milk of human kindness. There poverty has a colour, a nationality. It is black; it is African-American; it is Hispanic, it is Latino.

It is the immigrant who until now has hung so precariously just above the datum line, now toppled and on an irrevocable downward spiral to perdition. But this another America, completely invisible from White House, completely un-captured in Barack Obama’s waxy rhapsodies, Obama’s great ode to New York recited in the splendid halls of the UN compound, to a spellbound world citizenry. For him, as indeed for all his predecessors — great and small — New York is a great rendezvous for peoples’ freedoms, that one huge human concourse where the American dream touches the world. Like all his predecessors, he is trained not so see the other side, this sordid slice of America squatting so obscenely on its vast streets, begging for aid from small Third World bureaucrats whose trip to the UN could very well have been funded by the American Government.

Obama’s wars

I peep through America’s mind, coming through as its argumentative television. You cannot miss a sense of befuddlement, a sense of utter perplexity as this society so used to plenty, now has to grapple with need and greed, predatory greed. As always, political parties begin to swap righteousness and blame. Poor Barack Obama, he is receiving! The Republicans are after him, baying for his Presidency.

They blame him for George Bush’s wars which they have now re-christened "Obama’s wars". Even Collin Powell speaks, publicly and loudly withdrawing his confidence in Obama and his administration which Bob Woodward of Watergate fame characterises as fractious and helplessly enervated amidst a war that has to be fought and won. The same colour ticket, by which Obama boarded the train to White House, now seems the stigma set to see him out of that same great House of white America. History seems set to record him as a coloured mistake, a fluke which America suffered briefly to prove "No they can’t" to any suggestions of Negro Presidency.

Negro President?

By the way, gentle reader, did you know that way, way back in 1961 — on June 2 to be exact, James Baldwin — that well-known Diaspora black writer — received with understandable incredulity a promise by one Bobby Kennedy that if lucky, he could be President too, 30 years from that year? Those 30 years passed in 1991, with Obama needing almost another two decades to ripen for American Presidency. Obama became the Negro Presidency Kennedy had predicted, the first "Negro President" Baldwin could not visualise then, above the devouring Negro problem in the 1960s.

But in that incredulity, James Baldwin made a remark which was so percipient and thus such a perfect endnote to this portion of my piece. He wrote: "And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro "first" will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of." Hear; hear the man speaking from the grave!

Generational complex

Tendai Biti has joined Arthur Mutambara in the fallacious generational jargon which seems to be creeping into our politics and which thus must be examined for what it is worth.

On September 8, he addressed a breakfast meeting of business people and took advantage of this event to adumbrate his generational theory. Referring to his interlocutors, he said: "Most of you are young and we are in the same generation . . . I think that this country has a challenge.

The generation of Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo delivered this country, delivered national liberation, I think that was their obligation and they delivered . . . From 1980 to now, I think we have a hiatus because we are asking one generation which had prosecuted an important task to carry over a new task of reconstructing and rebuilding a new Zimbabwe. It is not possible. It is not possible because you get exhausted."

Home and away

The forte of nationalists lay in dealing with issues of universal suffrage and "racial democratisation". The weakness of nationalists is when they begin to aspire to govern or to run economies: "But when it comes to statecraft and the economy, it is a totally different ball game. The tragedy of Africa is that the inheritors of state power at Independence were a generation of teachers, peasants, petty-farmers and so on. They inherited a very complicated state; the generation of Nyerere, Kaunda… They were playing at home when it was a struggle for decolonisation, and they were playing away when it was the struggle of rebuilding a post-independence state."

Biti’s persecuted

Biti lamented that Zimbabwe had lost 30 years because "those who have been presiding over the economy have little knowledge of statecraft and the complexity of nation building." This "statecraft illiteracy" which cost "us" the three decades, adds Biti, showed itself by way of an anti-capital disposition of the post-colonial state, a disposition which prompted the State to fight black capital it was supposed to nurture for the sake of founding an indigenous middle class with higher aspirations, better vistas. And Biti backs up his thesis through the examples of Masiyiwa, Chanakira, Mawere, Makamba, Mutasa, Makoni, Mushore, Ncube, Mzwimbi, as the group of the persecuted.

Cult of patronage

In another piece in the Herald partly reacting to one of my instalments, he noted that the only black capitalists spared from this persecution are the likes of Chiyangwa, Kaukonde, Kasukuwere and Nguni only survived by "taking refuge in Zanu PF".

"The latter group of people illustrates the subjective treatment of black capital by Zanu PF and the inheritors of the State. The religion of this system has been patronage and cronyism and the economy has been the mere temple of this cult. Government tenders, licenses including mining licenses in Chiadzwa, the land reform programme have all been conducted on the basis of cronyism and clientelism."

Turning on to indigenisation, Biti declared: "Thus when black elites in Zimbabwe question the current indigenisation programme, they are not doing so on the basis that they are anti-empowerment. They are doing so on the basis of fear of precedent. That is the mere knowledge that Zanu PF is not capable of doing anything without resort to its natural DNA of patrimonialism." Biti’s Herald piece also blames colonial and unreformed post-colonial education which "trains the African child to be a subservient seller of labour."

Succession debate

I have deliberately quoted extensively from this piece from a man who is himself secretary general of MDC-T, Finance Minister in the Inclusive Government and a lawyer by training. He is influential, which is what makes his thinking consequential. You cannot miss a "messianic complex" which typifies this haughty thinking yet one founded on so mistaken a premise. Make no mistake about it, beyond its vaulting pretences, this self-serving theory amounts to the same old succession debate re-issued.

Unlike in the past where this debate has unfolded within the separate boundaries of respective political parties, this time it has since mutated to be transcendental, which is why it posits itself as "generational", itself a very synthetic construct. This so-called technocratic generation needs "thuggery" to "grab this baton stick [power] from the generation that thinks it has a divine right to hold on to it", a generation he blames for "failed states or altered states". You get a sense of squabbling gods, mutually accusing each other of claims to higher divinity. Biti moves away from party frameworks to reach out to a misceagenated audience which is what business provides. He could not have made such an address in Gokwe, without being read to be challenging the authority of Morgan Tsvangirai who he makes old enough to join in the fate of Mugabe and Nkomo, too old and too basic to grasp the art of statecraft.

White capital

The theory is an attempt to rally an African managerial class I alluded to in my piece, a class represented by Luke Ngwerume, the Chief Executive Officer of Old Mutual. Therein lies the full significance of Biti’s makeshift theory, itself a poor attempt by an MDC-T Secretary General to mutate beyond oppositional discourse of pre-inclusive days. He is not making a case for a national democratic state of Lenin, or for a national bourgeoisie of Fanon and Cabral. He is making a case for a servile African managerial class serving multinational interests. And he is the right man to do so.

Founded by the British through the Westminster Foundation, the MDC of which Biti is Secretary General is essentially about recapturing state power from aggressive nationalists to restore ease to wistful colonially derived white capitalism. MDC was and remains a project in founding a neo-colony, not a post-colony, as Biti pretends. And the affinity of the black managerial class to those managing the political expression of that attempt, is both natural and inevitable.

After all, the MDC’s pre-inclusive economic blueprint came from this same managerial stratum which sought to ensure a perfect fit between the ethos of the state and the marketplace. The other day a friend gave me a paper done by the Americans on supporting small peasant farmers in order to consolidate the ethos of the marketplace. In New York Carson distributed a paper on post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. And both documents show one great mutation which has happened to imperialism as it assaults our country: it does not hesitate to adopt the radical language of nationalists in order to undermine them. Demanding space for pseudo-black capital, or title deeds for new farmers, or transparency at Chiadzwa, need not suggest a break with capitalism. The discourse is more complex, the conduct more versatile.

Much further, to the man Biti’s so-called persecuted black capitalists are neither "black" nor owning or controlling capital. I take it that black ain’t a mere colour; it is an outlook. I challenge Biti to take us through each of the business persons he enumerates indicating to us as Finance Minister of this country what capital they own, beyond an ornamental shareholding. Why does he pretend not to know what lies beneath and behind?

And between Ngwerume and Masiyiwa or Mushore is no Chinese wall, both being privileged proletariats only in similar set-ups with different forms. This is a stratum which in outlook is as anti-nation as the MDC itself, indeed a stratum that benefited the most from the imposition of sanctions. Is it not a fact that "burning" was done in their banks? Is it not a fact that to the man, externalisation was done by them? Is it not a fact that when the State responded, they all ran to Europe and South Africa? Is it possible to found indigenous middle class on the malpractice of externalisation? How do you ensure national accumulation with a managerial class whose bearings are external and western? And is it not a fact that this sub-class was most opposed to the land reform programme, itself the basis of founding a genuine middle class in a plantation economy with limited scope for industrialisation for a start?

A fractious sub-class

Which takes me to a point I make with absolute despair. There does not appear to be an awareness in this managerial class that it needs unity within itself, or the resource of a nationalist government pushing for a major break with colonialism, for it to graduate from a caretaker class to an owning one. Quite the contrary, that sub-class is fighting itself and nationalists.

A Nigel Chanakira fighting Moxon, meets a Farai Rwodzi in the ring, not white Moxon. In other words, he meets his own!

A Chiyangwa trying to save Chanakira faces opposition from fellow black investors, not from white investors.

There is despairing internecine warfare in this sub-class. Beyond itself, this subclass is fighting the national liberation project in order to replace it with a neo-colonial arrangement, represented by the politics of Biti and his MDC.

It seeks to overthrow the aggressive nationalist State in order to install servile rule, servile State to match its own servility in the marketplace. This is the fight and the great split in boardrooms as we have them presently.

Know thyself, thy enemy

And this class has bought into all the technical arguments developed by white interests through white thought leaders like Hawkins, Robertson and Bloch, arguments which disguise the issue of continued neo-colonial relations with Britain and Europe with lots of technical economic jargon. Unless this latest attempt is repulsed, we are on the verge of witnessing complementarity of locally managed foreign capital and a locally run colonial government - a neo-colony for short. Once this is achieved, the current hidden harmony between a Biti who denies fiscal support to agriculture - itself an enclave of indigenous capital accumulation – and a locally run multinational bank which will not extend loans to the same black farmer, will become obvious.

Presently this harmony is troubled and hidden because the MDC only controls and portion of Government, with its neo-colonial proposals getting reversed in Cabinet, thanks to Zanu PF vigilance. They would have wanted to deny funding and input support to peasants, A1 and A2 farmers, but this has been overturned. They would have wanted to deny the farmer competitive producer prices but this got challenged similarly. Cotton price debate was such an illustrative case.

More significantly, they would have wanted Nigel Chanakira swallowed quietly by Moxon but were forced to use State power to intervene, as has happened. There is thus no contradiction between a Biti intervening directly and through Gono to save Chanakira on the one hand, and a Biti who decries what he perceives as Chanakira’s "drift towards Zanu PF refuge". The intervention was willed by Government while his reservations of the perceived drift towards Zanu (PF) represents the subconscious of his MDC-T party. Within the inclusive Government, he has to reconcile both.

Sins too many

The real issue is that through the Nigel Chanakira saga, the aspiring indigenous black capitalist has realised the dangers of partnering with white capital in the hope for a glorious home. Secondly, he has realised the need for having in place a State which will come to his defence when threatened by predatory capital, Rhodesian or foreign. With this new precedent already set, foreign capital could very well brace up for a rebellious managerial class which begins to gain confidence that indeed, the nationalist State can become a real partner in redrawing the ownership structure of the Zimbabwean economy.

But that class must have a clear mind by way of its role in constructing and defending that State, and in rejecting its erstwhile servile relationship with foreign capital. It has too many sins to expiate, too many confessions to make. Chinua Achebe puts it so well: "To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or nom de plume!"

To pretend to own what you are merely entrusted to run, is not great self-knowledge of the present depths to which you have fallen, is it? To give the predatory oppressor a sweeter or more palatable name of "partner" or "investor" is not terribly clever on the part of the oppressed, is it? What is worse, to pretend to have better grasp of "statecraft" and a better pedigree than the nationalists - you the son or daughter of a plantation worker, peasant or multinational employee - is not a great act in self-awareness, surely? Biti’s politics is not about taking forward the project started by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. It is about challenging it, negating it for the British and lately, Americans. This is why he is a pen name in America’s Senatorial bills, he a mere son of a plantation worker. Indeed this is what the "messianic complex" seeks to hide. Caveat Emptor.

Icho!

Nathaniel Manheru is a columnist for the Saturday Herald newspaper