FIRST, let us update each other on the state of the Union. My sources tell me full Cabinet met this week and transacted Government business. And when I say full Cabinet, I mean just that, Prime Minister included. Not quite a constitutional crisis! Or is it? One celebrated by normal government business?

Surely the response to a constitutional crisis is not normal Government convocations, one and foremost of them being the Cabinet meeting of Tuesday? Let me also add one more thing my sources tell me: the Council of Ministers met . . . as usual and again flagged matters for consideration by Cabinet in future.

The Prime Minister chaired it. And in its referral status is the clue to the power relations between these two forums (Cabinet and the Council of Ministers) and those chairing them (the President and Prime Minister). Gentle reader, never read the dirty lips of politicians; read Government workings so you know real conflict as opposed to marambadoro. Back in the village, when you cannot govern your mouth after one or two, the polite advice from the drinking party is: “If beer refuses you, just go home.”

Kana ndaguta ...

You do not respond to constitutional crisis in the Republic by having business as usual, by more routine meetings of the same Government whose constitution has been shat on by a “dictator”. “Kana ndaguta ndinorova mai,” goes one of our many ditties composed for drunks in our midst.

Roughly translated it means when beer fills me up, right up to the temple, I beat my own mother! Where I come from, you beat your mother, you see unsavoury things! It is an abomination. I have a brother who likes this song to same great length he likes his beer. I say so because when he is sober, he cannot remember a single line of the song.

If he did, how come he never sings it when sober? When drunk, the song darts from his coarse throat so effortlessly. But he is careful to sing it in the safety only assured by being a stone-throw away from his mother’s heath. Where there is a beer party, no village is too far for him, which is how he readily devours vast distances for his drink, traversing two, three, four “lines” (maraini) for his mug. And he drinks well into the night, later relying on his fear-filled silence to walk home, stealthily.

Know thy customers

The song is his signature tune by which he announces his arrival to his “swallowing” mother, his mother who seems amazingly ready to accept all. So known is this signature tune that our usually fierce dogs no longer bother to bark at his rough bite on this melody. But my mother (may her soul rest well!) never scurried for safety because this threatening song was approaching her home.

Quite the contrary, she would fold her wizened body into a crouching “L” lump, then struggle to fan the dying embers. She would build great pressure inside her, soon to translate into a stretched burst of gale on the dying embers. As if reacting to a mouth-to-mouth, the embers would glow into a flicker which with careful tending would turn into leaping flames, hot enough to warm my errant brother’s belated dinner.

By the time my brother staggered into the kitchen, stupor drunk, and recklessly planting himself on my mother’s mud “benji”, amai would have delivered a full glow on the heath, soon to be followed by a hot dish for her wayward son. Depending on her mood, the plateful would be pushed my brother’s way, spiced by hard expletives. Such as: “Basa kungodutira mupeta nekurembedza mabhurukwe. Ndosaka risingadi kuroora!” It would be my mother — not my brother — on the offensive. Dear reader, please know your customers!

Diplomatic Sound and fury ...

As I write, there is an indication that European one or two MEPs have written to the European Commission official, one Barrosso, urging him not to recognize Her Excellency Madame Margaret Muchada, our new woman in Brussels. She has been redeployed to Brussels from Italy, proving this is not a new appointment, only a new station for this career woman diplomat who used to be the Permanent Secretary for the then Information, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry.

She finds herself in the same situation of redeployment as Ambassadors Mphoko, now in South Africa, and formerly in Russia; Chidyausiku destined for Russia, formerly at the United Nations; Chipaziwa, now at the United Nations formerly in Geneva, Manzou now in Geneva, previously in Angola, and many others. And all these men and women are civil servants.

Now when you hear that European MEPs have written letters echoing the Prime Minister’s destructive wish, your heart misses a beat for your country, imagining dire things are set to follow. They won’t; they can’t. The equivalent of such actions by way of innocuousness is when any one of our Member of Parliament writes to the Mozambican Government telling it not to recognize an envoy from Kenya! It is all hot air, a European equivalent of “kana ndaguta ndicharova mai”. Peace, be still!

Where is the affidavit?

Real governments will know nothing has been communicated, beyond a whirling lump of hot air. You do not take a buffalo hide shield to ward off such a vacuous blow, do you? But the whole action mirrors our Prime Minister in terrible light. First, the Europeans.

By reacting the way they have done to the Prime Minister’s useless letters, reacting before even bothering to find out the views of the other parties to the GPA, they have shown us quite clearly who their customer in the Inclusive government is. They have proved their men here are not accredited to the State of Zimbabwe, but to an erstwhile opposition faction, only now included in Government.

With that outlook, they do not deserve any courtesies. As it turns out, their customer is going about all the functions of Government, including those which remind him he is verily junior to the President (who appointed him by the way). He has not mobilised for street action through which to challenge the illegality of un-constitutionalism. And as DPM Mutambara correctly puts it, he has not approached the constitutional court for a determination.

It has been about him and the pint-sized advice he got from those that followed the sedate and thoughtful Godden Moyo. The reshuffle was a great mistake the Prime Minister will live to rue. I hear Dr Lovemore Madhuku has declined tendering an opinion on the matter after an approach by the Prime Minister’s people. I know why. You want your name associated wit a decent fight. Not this. You want to tender an honest professional opinion to a client who seeks to understand the law, not to self-vindicate after stupid actions.

A similar letter for an end to sanctions?

A small thought: does the Prime Minister require more profound writing skills to write the same people on the same paper, in the same language, using the same loaned white officer, to simply ask them to remove sanctions? He seems to know the address? Do it, Mr. Prime Minister! After all you say you want the GPA implemented in its entirety. Sanctions are in the GPA, as are external pirate radios.

Indeed, the two are the real outstanding issues under the GPA, not matters arising from your governing partnership with Zanu PF and MDC-M. Surely GPA which is a cut and dried document with a closing page, could never have had a premonition on matters later to arise many moons later? A sober thought: does the Prime Minister remember he swore to be loyal and faithfully serve Zimbabwe? Did he in this instance?

The guardians are there

My piece on European and American involvement in agriculture generated huge interest. Much of it quite wistful. I want to allay your fears, good readers. They are people employed to ensure the Republic is safe, that subversion is thwarted. Their competencies are not to be doubted. Besides, there are ways of taking full advantage of sinister means and intentions to further our own ideals.

We have just done that with their money on constitution-making, haven’t we? It is not money that germinates crops. Crops grow on the land and yes, our people must know that money makes you rich, the land, the land, the land, makes you wealthy. So sleep well and soundly.

But volunteer information so we keep watchful. No evil against Zimbabwe takes place in the stratosphere. It is hatched and implemented on this our holy earth where you and me are born, live, walk and grow. The bird that flies, and however high it flies, must one day land to slack its thirst. The westerners may have hatched their plans outside Zimbabwe, or away from prying eyes, but to execute those plans, they need our phones, our roads, our hands, our rules… which is where we meet. Nyika ndeyedu iyi.

Nyerere and Arusha

1967, President Nyerere proclaims the Arusha Declaration, itself a policy jolt to imperialism, more or less the same way our Land Reforms did, more or less our indigenisation programme, if well handled, is set to. Unlike in Zimbabwe, the western imperial world responded to Ujamaa not through confrontational sanctions and direct subversion such as we have had here. Indeed, President Nyerere was still able to govern Tanzania with CCM as the sole Party, one virtually coterminous with the Nation.

He never had to contend with the Westminster Foundation, never with a Tanzanian MDC, much as his policy thrust was just as radical, spiced by truculent politics and support for Southern African liberation movements. The West chose containment wrapped beautifully as a donor-funded green revolution, as a fund for “social projects”. The western world led by America, used the World Bank’s sister institution, IDA, to ensare Tanzania through her parastatal called Tanzania National Development Credit Agency (NDCA) and two other parastatals involved in the production, processing and marketing of tobacco.

Of course IDA is touted as a funder of social projects, which is what gives it the aura of compassion. A loan agreement was signed with the Tanzanian Government (Credit No. 217 TA), signed in October 1970. All told, US$9m was involved and the target was small-scale tobacco growers, with NDCA — a Tanzanian national institution — reduced to an implementing agency of IDA.

Angling for Nyerere’s radical cooperative movement

The focus was not so much on the loan, as on angling Nyerere’s cooperative movement, and bringing it within the ambit of a market-driven model, in the process emptying it of its socialist pretensions. Remember the cold war was at its hottest. The package was unusually familiar to what we are used to here: inputs like seed, fertilizers, chemicals, labour costs, fuel, equipment. IDA went further.

It compelled creation of posts in affected parastatals, posts to be filled by persons acceptable to it and whose conduct adhered to terms in a schedule drawn up by it. But the project also included the production of staple crop, maize, for food security. It is beginning to sound familiar to something you have read in the Herald one Saturday, is it not?

The loan carried about 15 000 Tanzanians, all huddled into “tobacco villages”. At the end of it all, indeed tobacco production doubled, trebled, with villagers working treble as hard, surprisingly for ever declining rewards. What is more, western finance capital no longer needed to employ merchant capital since national institutions became “farm managers” for IDA.

When the crop ripened, American tobacco companies came in to siphon surplus, with the Tanzanian Government smiling for increased foreign exchange earnings. The deal had a built-in mechanism for siphoning surplus in the name of exports and trade, indeed a way of turning cooperators into employees rather than land-owners with ambitions to socialize production. Jobs went to America, together with the raw, unprocessed tobacco. So did real value.

Temperamental State

Later, the project collapsed. America had got the world to smoke, had made its citizens tobacco barons richer. But Tanzania remained an agricultural and industrial shell. Even worse off were the cooperating peasants who had nothing to show except their distrust of Ujamaa and severely tested faith in their leader. In this age of scarce land, scarcer suitable land for the production of key agricultural products, finance capital relocates to the periphery were land is fertile and abundant, labour worth only a song. Zimbabwe is a unique case.

It has the land, the requisite climate, the infrastructure, the know-how and the reputation. But the land is no longer with the settler white man who used to play imperialism’s beachhead. It is now with the indigenous person, predominantly small-holder who has the labour and ethic of industry, but hardly the sophistication to negotiate with these vultures. What is worse, the State in Zimbabwe is nationalistic to a point of being “roguish”, and thus cannot be turned into a “manager” of finance capital. International finance cannot extract surplus through such a temperamental state.

White NGOs and the new revolution

Besides, sponsored agriculture needs close supervision which the under-funded, sanctioned State cannot guarantee. New structures, preferably involving former white tobacco tycoons but now dressed as NGOs, are needed. Two birds are killed with this one stone: white kith and kin so ruined by Mugabe, are given a new lifeline. The Zanu PF rural constituency is penetrated unsuspectingly, all in the name of extension services. At the end of it all, the market ethic is cultivated, laying a lasting foundation for “market-led democratization process” America sorely needs.

But American market needs will have been met through a programme of regime change. Who cannot be happy when politics begin to flower? One gear up, the social funding is then turned into mortagage and the notion of default is then used to repossess land from peasants. We are back to where we begun: a landless people, an occupied people once more. It helps to know that global capitalism has come full circle and is back to plantation capitalism typified in Latin America by United Fruit Company, that sprawling behemoth which became the power behind all right-wing governments in Latin America, and toppled most left-wing ones in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Diamonds which cannot fund agriculture

It is not for nothing that Richard Bronson introduces himself through a peasant women wishing for capital with which to work the land. The entry point is to re-orientate our agriculture towards reliance on external capital and faming inputs. We the diamond people! One gets worried when the Nyabondas and Hungwes wake up every morning to beat early morning dew to USAID offices. Or to USAID contact points in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Apart from political relations to emerge from such production relations with foreigners, you begin to see the phenomenon of a bureaucracy oriented towards the execution of America’s PRIZE, all for a handsome prize. Add to this a whole stratum of blacks keen to be rented out by returning white capital anxious to avoid indigenisation laws, then you share my own anxiety about the trajectory of emerging class tendencies in post-land reform Zimbabwe. This my great debate with Tendai Biti which Zhangazha, with his pretensions to eruditeness completely misses. He thinks we are debating Fanon and Cabral!

Nyerere’s parting testimony

A few years after this encounter with IDA, on November 17, 1976, Nyerere had the following to say, and I shall quote him extensively:

“The reality of neocolonialism quickly becomes obvious to a new African government which tries to act on economic matters in the interests of national development, and for the betterment of its own masses. For such a government immediately discovers that it inherited power to make laws, to treat with foreign governments, and so on, but it did not inherit effective power over economic developments in its own country. Indeed, it often discovers that there is no such thing as a national economy at all!

Instead, there exists in its land various economic activities which are owned by people outside its jurisdiction, which are directed at external needs, and which are run in the interests of external economic powers. Further, the Government’s ability to secure positive action in these fields does not stem from its legal supremacy; it depends entirely upon its ability to convince the effective decision-makers that their own interests will be served by what the Government wishes to have done. This is a very serious matter. For it means that if deliberate countervailing action is not taken, external economic forces determine the nature of the economy a country shall have, what investment shall be undertaken and where, and what kind of development — if any — will take place within our national borders.”

Neo-colonialism is real ...

Continues Nyerere: “Neo-colonialism is very real, and very severe limitation on national sovereignty. The total amount of credit and its distribution to different sectors of the economy, for example, is determined by the banking system. The persons or groups who control the Banks therefore have a very fundamental — almost a deciding — effect at two points. The first is on the level of current economic activity in a money economy; the second is on the comparative expansion of, say, peasant agriculture as against estate agriculture, or agriculture in general as against the development of local industry or trade. The local agents of foreign banks may well be willing to cooperate with the national government's priorities; but in the last resort their loyalty is, and must be, to their overseas employers.

In case of dispute at the top policy level, the government will not be able to enforce its decisions. It may be able to stop things; it will not be able to start things. Matters of vital interest to our development are thus determined externally, without any consideration being given to our interests. In economic maters, therefore, our countries are effectively being governed by people who have only the most marginal interest in our affairs — if any — and even that only in so far as it affects their own well-being.

That, in fact, is the meaning and the practice of neocolonialism. It operates under the cover of political colonialism while that continues. Its existence and meaning become more obvious after independence.’

Calling Biti’s bluff

If Tendai Biti is genuine in his reading, he should be able to pick that I have called his bluff. The above example and quote comes from Dan Wadada Nabudere whose name Biti sprinkled in his response to my piece a few weeks back. I hope that came from his reading Nabudere, not from meeting him through Mandaza’s citations. That would be shallow and unbecoming. But I have also incorporated this candid testimony from Mwalimu to prove that there is nothing unusual which is happening to our country when one is familiar with the behaviour of imperialism elsewhere in the world. Imperialism is not that inventive as to evolve penetration ways sui generis.

The Tanzanian example shows imperialism is using in Zimbabwe in 2010 stratagems it employed in Tanzania in 1970 to de-radicalise and eventually contain Ujamaa. When history judges our land reform, it will not about the fact that we acquired 9 million hectares of land from the white settler community once upon a time. It will be over the fact that after we had acquired it, imperialism regrouped and came back with old tactics and in the name of supporting the same policy, to reverse and defeat it. Today’s beneficiaries of land reforms can very easily become mere plantation workers with titular access to land, but zero access to the surplus derived there-from. They can easily become indentured, mere serfs.

A lawyer trying to be a social scientist

Let me rattle the Finance Minister a bit. In the first place he must learn to debate matters coolly, without degrading his contribution to thoughtless party slogans. This is no forum for slogans. Secondly, in the area of social sciences where matters are more complex than right or wrong, guilty or not guilty, the law of precedence does not exist. There is no case law in social sciences, only examples and opinions arising from interpreting them.

These opinions stand or collapse by their degree of plausibility. They do not set precedence. In a debate like this, on a matter like the one on hand, it hardly helps the Minister make any point at all by citing two, three, ten scholars as if these cited scholars are God’s deputies, as if these set iron-clad precedents for cognizing and even moulding intervening reality.

They don’t. Fanon, Baran, Cardoso, Nabudere, Babu, Amin or Mandaza, all these project mere viewpoints and if the minister was old enough to follow the Codesra series of the 1980s, he would quickly get the point I am at pains to drive home. The views of these writers are not canonical. In any case to these few writers which the Minister itemizes as in exhibits in a criminal case, I can spew a thousands more with contrary viewpoints, a thousand more who are dismissive of these, his thought heroes.

The meander of scholarship

This is exactly how the ECLA-based scholarship which burgeoned in effervescing Latin America in the 960s soon collapsed, giving way to the “Dependencia” thesis led by Gunder Frank. That it turn gave way to the world systems of the likes of Wallerstein. That too, collapsed, giving way to UN-based development theories, not least among them community development of the 1960s, basic needs approach of the 1970s, participatory approach (NGO-led) of the 1990s, etc, etc.

You then had a cabal of western scholars led by the likes of Golan Hyden who termed themselves Africanists who pushed the line that the African State was not only unable to encompass its jurisdictional territory, but was in fact a terrible burden on those it governed, or should have governed. Millions on the continent existed outside of the precincts of State authority as the un-captured peasants, and would get by daily without this meddlesome “leviathan” which stymied local initiative.

The World Bank and its crisis thesis

1989 was key to the development of this scholarship. The World Bank, in its annual report characterized Africa’s crisis as that of “governance”. That opened floodgates to sustained attacks on the African State, and with it the belief that the State was only there to enable the private sector to get on with the business of making money, itself often confused with developing a country. Here in Southern Africa this attack on the African State, often justified by an exaggerated focus on its real foibles, claimed its first victim, President Kaunda, and installed its first party and President, MMD of Zambia and President Chiluba whom Tendai Biti kills off in his selective leadership typology.

Ill-wind of no change

When that attack reached the land of Mutapa, a good decade later, the result was MDC, Biti’s MDC. In between, this ill-wind of negative change or throwback, had detoured in Malawi, killing off Kamuzu Banda, creating Bakili Muluzi. It found its legitimacy in attacking the “dictatorial” liberation movement-turned-governing party, with a “technocratically illiterate” leadership of “head boys” at the helm.

This is old scholarship led by Hayden, Bates, Chazan, Mortimer, Ravenhill, Rothchild, etc, etc, later to be joined by American sponsored African scholars like George Ayittey.

It became an industry, American and World Bank sponsored research industry which western governments harnessed to challenge the nationalist State and its reluctance to liberalise. Voices like that of Ayittey who is by the way MDC-T’s hired gun abroad, served to legitimize this assault on Africa. So Biti must not play philosopher-king, play new generation with messianic pretensions. He is only exhibiting an Anglophile sensibility, itself a hallmark of western sponsored political entities tasked to challenge aggressive African nationalism.

When Accra and Harare are mental neighbours

I happen to have got detailed notes of the Paris Conference Biti attended, together with Kufour, former President of Ghana. So inspired was Biti with Kufour’s thesis, that he departed from his prepared speech to repeat what he had published here the week before, which in fact echoed what Kufour would say a week later in France. Is it not interesting that a character in Zimbabwe, itself situated in Southern Africa, interprets African reality in exactly the same words as another character in Ghana, a country far up north in West Africa? Is that fortuitous?

The answer is simple: it is not about the spatial distance between Southern and West Africa; it is about the nearness of America as the source market for the political philosophy which is reigning in Africa, imported by this new generation educated, inspired or sponsored by the West for carbon copy political projects on the continent. That is what Biti mistakes for “skills in statecraft”.

When oranges are made apples

But this generation of foreign sponsored student-politicians have a legitimacy problem which manifests itself as a classification problem. Biti puts himself and his party president in the same league with the likes of the late Mwanawasa, President Rupiya Banda, Kufour, President Wade, Mkapa, President Kikwete, Prime Minister Odinga, Mogae, President Khama, President Pohamba, President waMutharika, Muluzi and Chissano, calling all these transformational leaders. Clearly he does not use the term “transformation” to refer to a major break with a reigning status quo, such as that unleashed by our land reforms which expropriated white settlers here to lay a foundation for a national economy whose absence in Tanzania Nyerere bemoaned.

He means charismatic leaders whose charm spellbinds their people for imperialism, some opium of the masses, as Marx would say. Imperialism needs leaders which keep the rabble in line, to use Noam Chomsky’s phrase. That is exactly what Biti does when he tells civil servants cannot get an increment. I don’t mean to incriminate the above men, most of them truly fine men who have earned the respect of Africa. Merely to show how false leadership measurements are themselves a method of prepossessing and controlling our continental leadership from representing us and African interests, indeed a way of legitimizing puppetry by decorating it with mere words.

Verandah Boys versus capitalist stooges?

Looking at Biti’s own list, you see how it meanders and writhes for both rhyme and reason, in the end achieving neither. Kufour serves under Nkrumah, as a deputy minister of Foreign Affairs. He emerges as part of the internal forces which western countries, led by America and Britain, use to undermine and eventually depose Nkrumah whom this group led by elements in the Police and Military calls “a verandah boy” because of his modest western scholarship, not education (compare this with Biti's own calling early nationalists “herd-boys”!). Those who depose Nkrumah do not grace Ghana with “transformational leadership” at all.

They turn it into a morass until Rawlings takes over militarily and begins to address the national question. Nationalist Rawlings by the way. Kufour succeeds him, riding on the same forces that gave us the MDC here. After two terms during which Ghana liberalises to great accolades from the West, but hardly much gain at home, Kufour's party is deeply unpopular and cannot reproduce itself as a governing party. Its last ditch act at recovery comes by way of reinstating Nkrumah - the erstwhile “verandah boy” but conscious Africa's eternal hero - back on his pedestal (compare this with Mutambara's aphoristic "No Deng without Mao). What does all this illustrate?

What Kufour tries to do with Nkrumah, President Mutharika has already done with Dr Kamuzu Banda, namely to restore the Ngwazi posthumously to his glory as a founder President. Late Mwanawasa too, has already done that with Kenneth Kaunda, fortunately in his lifetime after being savaged by Frederick Chiluba, Zambia’s own equivalent of Tsvangirai here.

But Mwanawasa is succeeded by Rupiya Banda, yes an MMD President, but with deep roots in UNIP, the party of “herd boys”. Today he runs Zambia on the crest of Kaunda’s philosophy of an owning Zambia, not Chiluba’s of “in Zambia, everything is up for sale,” as his first Finance minister once said. In all these instances the vision of nationalists who won us freedom is where we get back to, after our dalliance with western interests prove a disastrous journey to nowhere.

Mugabe’s transformation

How on this good earth do you put Benjamin Mkapa and President Pohamba in the same league with Tsvangirai? Just how do you do that? Mkapa was Foreign Minister of Tanzania in the 1970s when the Zimbabwean war of liberation was at its hottest. He was part of the Arusha Declaration, a real acolyte of Nyerere and CCM policies. Does Tendai know that? His Presidency saw a real emphatic support for Zimbabwe’s land reforms.

He was a nationalist to the bone, something CCM is now seeking to reassert in the Tanzanian Government. Interestingly, President Kikwete, himself a mere friend of our Prime Minister — not his look-alike — has just given Southern Africa a radical mining law emphasizing local ownership and empowerment. We are all learning from it. This is not transformational leadership is the Biti sense. In the Mugabe sense maybe. Pohamba is a hardcore SWAPO cadre, one in whom founding President Nujoma reposed with the challenge of handling the sore land question in Namibia. How does he become a Tsvangirai peer? Or is the idea to ridicule Tsvangirai through such damning comparisons?

Confounding Kenya

Then you have the confounding case of Kenya. Biti picks on Odinga as a model, leaves out Kibaki who was in fact the leader of the Orange Movement to which Odinga belonged, before the split. In that strictly limited sense, Kibaki could be viewed as Tsvangirai’s equivalent, or better still the late Sibanda’s equivalent. That makes Raila your Welshman Ncube and his MDC-M, does it not? Is Biti about to tell us something as Zimbabwe politics slide faster and deeper into a quicksand zone? I think the Minister must make a contribution always with his eyes firmly set on the exit door. He makes too many unguarded postulates.

Monetising the Fiscus

Lastly Minister Biti should not proclaim radicalism. He should demonstrate it through his actions in the powerful ministry he heads which is now playing Central Bank to the development process which Nyerere talked about. If his gripe with Gono was fiscalisation of the monetary authorities, today his own guilt is monetizing the Fiscus. It is no superior sin. Let us sample a few of his actions and what they portent for this country. Biti has not relented in his quest to have this country turned into a HIPIC case. He has merely found new language with which to describe the same, after Government threw out his plan. This diamond country, becoming HIPIC?

Give us transactional cash, Obama

Biti recently went to America to persuade that country's Treasury to print us new U.S. dollar notes for use here. He will not go to South Africa; he will not go to the world's largest economy (by reserves) called China. He will not hear about Zimbabwe currency, maybe for good reasons but which cannot remain good forever. No, he must plead with the Americans who are doing bad things to you and me, good thinks I suppose for the MDC-T, Biti’s party.

It is to get us integrated into US monetary system, with all the financial disasters which that country triggered for the world economy not too far back in time. Transformational leadership indeed! Why not anchor a Zimbabwe currency on our fabulous mineral wealth which is beginning to be noticed. After all America will not unleash a run on the dollar with their own man, their own party at the helm of national finances. Surely? Much worse, he has taken his sweet time to release resources for the agricultural season. Was it to create room for American and European donor initiatives?

Surely payments to the IMF for arrears is not as seasonal as agriculture here or anywhere? And like these donors, he is taking his sweet time to announce a package for A2 farmers who inhabit “contested land”. Is that being sympathetic to the “black middle class”, or the beginnings of it? How is he being different from the herd?