AVARICE and ambition. These two passions reign supreme in the minds of our leaders. They have informed most of the policy initiatives over the past decade.
There are many who have confessed by their own words and deeds their desire to be remembered as having championed a great cause not only in Zimbabwe, but in Africa. Yet in all these unfortunate desires to flirt with heroism, the constant has been the extended pauperisation of the masses by the various programmes designed to extricate them from their struggles.
What is unfathomable is how the masses readily submit themselves to the fancies of their politicians when they have been circumcised by their deeds several times. Cato, so displeased by this instinct of mankind, coined the phrase: “Pound a fool many times with a mortar, and yet he will not come out any wiser.”
As a country, we are emerging from our greatest economic crisis invited by the folly of our leadership to our doorstep. The culprits have not been brought to book and the moment whispers emerged for justice to take its course, they were doused down. The irresponsible handling of the country’s monetary affairs has not only been pardoned; it has been rewarded by an extension of the tenure of office for the culprits. Yet in our midst the victims are everyday burdened by the vagaries of life. They have no-one to turn to. Those whose hard-earned pensions were whittled away to sustain the abortive economic turn-around initiatives and the much hailed land reform suffer in solitude. It is as if their case does not matter.
Surprisingly, the irresponsible bureaucrats who are not only benefactors of the crisis, but the very people who conjured it, are heard yet again devising schemes to extend our wretchedness through their deceptive stratagems. Talk is doing the rounds of a gold-backed currency and suddenly illustrious voices are being heard lending their weight to the preposterous idea. This, we are told, is been necessitated by the perceived liquidity challenges bedevilling the nation.
It has been the tragedy of our country that those we have entrusted to govern us perceive problems so that their innate heroism can be put to use. This is one such example; outlandish as it may seem.
Money is nothing but a medium of exchange. Every extension of this definition, by adding several other appellations is nothing but politics. It is, therefore, necessary for our intellectuals, those indispensible guardians of our progress, to dissuade our politicians from their manifest trick to confiscate real economic resources from the general public for the benefit of their sycophants through the instrumentality of money.
In the recent past, the greatest victims of this treachery have been the pensioners, whom alone every resettled farmer should thank for their alleged success. We do not know who could be the next, although we are very clear who the villains will be.
Those who want to give relief to their heroism must find other avenues. To conjure liquidity crises is unfortunate. If someone is aware of any gold reserves out there they should just sell them and bring in the United States dollars. This is not a difficult thing given the almost unlimited fungibility of gold. We cannot speculate on establishing bureaucracies for things that do not even exist. Besides, to think we can conjure sustainable economic growth buy quantitative easing is unfortunate. The Americans know better on the futility of this proposition.
The multi-currency regime, emblematic as it is of the unlimited potential of democratic resistance, cannot and should not be easily surrendered. Whilst there has been political clamouring for the credit of instituting the multi-currency regime by various politicians, it is clear that this was never an intentional government policy. Government hopelessly surrendered to the whims of the market process, despite spirited overtures to resist the unfolding dynamics.
The Zimbabwe dollar faced its demise when people power rejected it. False parities between the Zimdollar and the U.S dollar were announced by the monetary authorities in a bid to salvage the currency, yet the market unanimously rejected these fanciful whims. The leopard cannot now suddenly tell us it has changed its spots.
It is unfortunate when illustrious sons of my former university like Gilbert Mponda give credence to these emotional effusions by personalities striving for relevance. We cannot afford to let them abuse our former university motto, by ascribing outrageous propositions like this proposed gold-backed currency as befitting the title: Thinking in Other Terms.
The government has always resorted to monetary solutions for our economic problems. The debt crisis engulfing our beloved nation is another symptom of this obsession. We cannot dignify these disgraceful acts because they have simply been given a different name.