By Prof Artwell Nhemachena
THE media is awash with the news that industrial robots are already taking jobs away from human workers – and this is true.
In other words, unemployment technological advancements are set to rise to unprecedented levels, globally.
Western capitalism operates by using (African) human beings and then disposing them as if they are diapers.
Indeed, Westerners themselves operate by using human beings (Africans) and then disposing of them.
Very soon, African youths will be regretting opposition to African liberation movements’ struggles to repossess African land from colonialists and from the descendants of colonialists who are still keeping the African resources.
Western capitalists have never been well-meaning to African youths who are now being replaced, in employment, with robots.
The point here is that, political parties that over-rely on Western capitalists are misdirected because capitalism is about maximising profits and not caring for Africans, especially the youths.
When African liberation movements, including the ZANU PF Government, urged Zimbabweans to recover their land in the land reform, this was, in fact, prescience as it is now evident the future of African youths does not lie in being employed in Western industries.
The future of youths now lies in owning and controlling their African resources – and in investing in their own economies where they become their own employers.
Election manifestos are empty shells if they do not address youths in relation to ownership of land and other resources.
The future of African youths is not necessarily in employment but in ownership, control and productive use of their resources.
One very big problem in global discourses is that African youths are often made to believe that they are the future and that the future is theirs yet, ironically, Western capitalists continue, in the 21st Century, to grab African land and other resources.
In other words, the future is already lost to those African youths who are not resourced with land and whose political parties only focus entirely on employment and jobs in a world that is ironically already replacing human workers with industrial robots.
The point I am making here is that, there is a need for Africans to shift from obsession with employment rates. They must begin to focus not on employment rates but on ownership rates.
In fact, the problem with Western statistics, which they have used to demonise Zimbabwe, is that the West’s metrics focus on employment rates instead of on ownership rates.
Zimbabweans who assumed ownership over their land increased, yet the West ignores such metrics as it chooses to focus only on metrics about employment rates.
In any case, a preoccupation with measuring employment rates has for long been a sleight of hand used by Westerners to divert African attention from ownership of their resources. Thus, while they own and control African resources, Westerners wrongly advise Africans to only focus on employment rates.
One reason African youths lose the future, even as they have not yet started to experience it, is because some youths do not care to know the African past, including African liberation war history.
Scholars on foresight studies have made it clear that the future can be anticipated on the basis of the past, on the basis of what has happened in the past.
Yet African youths are often wrongly advised by Eurocentric thinkers to ignore the past.
And in spite of being wrongly advised to ignore the past, the African youths are paradoxically assured that the future is theirs and that they are the future.
It is cause for wonder whether one can dispose of one’s past and retain the future.
Put differently, the question is whether one can dispose of one’s past without simultaneously disposing of oneself or rendering oneself vulnerable to disposability?
Colonialists have, for centuries, advised Africans to dispose of their cultures, memories, marriages, families, religions, history, ancestors, natural resources, economies and politics.
Africans have been wrongly advised not to reclaim ownership and control over their natural resources – instead, they have been advised to rely on employment or on jobs offered by the colonialists and their descendants.
In other words, Africans are sadly advised by Westerners that they must remain servants working for colonialists and their descendants who still own and control African resources.
By ideologically inculcating servant-mentality in Africans, colonialists have created, for themselves, Africans who would refuse to take ownership and control of their natural resources, preferring, as they would do, to look for employment in industries and corporations owned and controlled by colonialists.
By owning and controlling the Zimbabwean economy and natural resources, colonialists and their descendants have made themselves non-disposable, even as they have ironically made the indigenous Zimbabweans as disposable as diapers which can be used and then thrown away; employed and then retrenched.
Put differently, a servant-mentality is a diaper-mentality in the sense that those that prefer to be servants of Westerners are, in fact, preferring to live as disposable diapers.
The biggest problem that Africans need to solve is one of their disposability, including vulnerability to disposability.
Put differently, the problem in Zimbabwe is not necessarily that the Zimbabwean currency is devalued.
Rather, the problem is that the Westerners have devalued the lives of Africans such that everything African has lost value, and has become disposable.
When African-Americans complain, and protest in the #BlackLivesMatter, they are in essence reminding Africans, Zimbabweans included, that it is not only African currencies that have been devalued but also, more generally, African lives have been devalued in the world.
Inflation, including hyperinflation, is everywhere in the world, including in the US and the West, where even African lives have been greatly devalued.
The point is that even in Ukraine where Africans were shoved to the back of queues when they tried to flee from the ongoing war, African lives are devalued and Africans are deemed to be disposable.
Even in the US, where the US dollar retains high value, African lives are thoroughly devalued and rendered disposable as diapers.
If African leaders have devalued their currencies, the million-dollar question is: Who has devalued African lives in the whole world?
The reason Westerners prefer to own and control resources is that they know that that is where value lies. Yet some Africans prefer to only work for someone else so that they earn salaries and wages which are not as valuable as owning and controlling one’s resources.
To prefer employment is to stick to something that is already devalued. It is to prefer something that renders one vulnerable to disposability.
Real value is not in the wages and salaries that one earns; rather real value is in ownership and control of one’s resources, including land.
The problem in Zimbabwe, and in Africa more broadly, is that we have tended to look for value where it really isn’t residing. This is because colonial ideologies have taught Africans to value what isn’t really valuable.
Instead of seeing value in the land and other natural resources, we have tended to look for value in jobs, employment and in wages and salaries – which is to say, we have sadly seen value in servant-hood rather than in ownership of our resources.
Zimbabweans should have learnt a lot when Westerners demanded that the late President Robert Mugabe’s Government should respect property rights. The Westerners did not primarily demand that the Zimbabwean Government respect employment rights.
This is indicative of the fact that those who own and control resources are not as disposable as those who simply work for wages and salaries on someone else’s property.
In any case, if work, a job or employment were really valuable, then the Eurocentric constitutions bequeathed to Africans at independence would have entrenched work, jobs or employment in the Bill of Rights. They would have appeared in the form of the right to work or right to employment which would parallel the right to property.
