This is an abridged version of an article that was first published in The Patriot on May 29 2020
By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
DOMINANT elites in Zimbabwe’s economic history have always relied on pushing self-fulfilling prophecies.
They start with a position which favours their minority interests.
They then try to use the press to make this minority position sound like a majority view.
If it cannot be sold as the majority view, it has to be presented as the natural, inevitable and unavoidable position. Routinely, they have always depended on blaming someone else for their conduct, especially the Government.
In previous instalments, I referred to the way the minority view, that ‘Zimbabweans do not want land; they just want jobs’, was pushed in Zimbabwe and South Africa at the beginning of the Third Chimurenga. I explained how, through mass mobilisation and appeal to national values, our liberation war heroes were able to change that lie about the people and their land: From ‘Zimbabweans do not want land; they just want jobs’ to the current national position now which says ‘The African land revolution is irreversible’.
Whatever damage the dominant minority wreaked on our land reform and its objectives, it could not reverse land reform because the land revolution was understood and accepted by the overwhelming majority of the people based on their organic value systems.
This is not the case with the struggle for our own money.
The missing links in that land revolution include the need for popular liquidity and the need for capitalisation of land reform across the board. This is to say, the struggle for a popular, viable and sustainable national currency should always be linked to the struggle for an indigenous agrarian revolution.
History shows clearly that money is not just an instrument used to create value; it has to be based on clearly understood values as well, in order to achieve resonance among the people.
The people have to be invited, encouraged, to embrace their own money and to defend it.
In a book titled ‘The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism’, Michael Novak elaborated the same concept of indigenous industry, agriculture and commerce as an extension of God’s creation, which view was an integral part of the Second and Third Chimurenga here.
The main thing still missing from the land revolution in Zimbabwe now is a national currency to free MaDzimbahwe from their total dependency on the US dollar, ‘mari yechibharo’.
According to Novak:
“Gold, silver and materials of barter were largely supplanted by symbolic paper. Moreover, this paper came to depend to an unprecedented degree upon public trust. Thus, in our day, economists measure ‘consumer confidence’ ‘inflationary psychology,’ ‘business confidence,’ ‘investment climate.’ The stability of societies has become an important factor in the value of their public currencies and their economic assets.
(One’s own money) is in part a symbol of social health and confidence in the future, and it is regarded in a quite secular sense as an act of faith, trust, confidence, and even fraternity. It has come to be seen as the key to development and peace and justice.
This ethos legitimated the completing of creation as it sprang from the care of providence. The value of money springs from foresight into the future: from pro + videre. This new conception of money, therefore, also altered the conception and value of time.”
To create one’s own currency is, therefore, an act of faith, asserting one’s belief in national independence, autonomy and sovereignty.
When it comes to the popular acceptance and defence of one’s own money, there can be no substitute to effective communication and people mobilisation in order to achieve mutual understanding and common ground.
We end this contribution with some reference to another period of capitalist (financial) crisis, the period of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Marrinner Eccles, the man whom the US Congress and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to appoint and confirm as chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, had, in his hometown, come face-to-face with the power of public expectations and speculation before he was appointed.
One morning in Colorado, a big mob of depositors queued in front of one of his banks wanting to withdraw all their funds on the basis of rumours spread by speculators.
He gave his chief cashier and the bank tellers instructions to slow operations so that fresh notes would arrive from the Federal Reserve while most of the mob was still there at the bank.
He then jumped on to a high platform and addressed the mob as trucks were just entering the premises with new notes. He told the mob that there was absolutely no need for all of them to have come to the bank at the same time for the same purpose of withdrawing funds.
There would be enough money in the bank for those who needed it when they really needed it.
There would be enough left over for those who would need money later and for many days and weeks in the future. There was also enough money at the Federal Reserve for all necessary transactions in the future and people should come to the bank when and if they needed their money to meet their obligations and engage in daily business.
This underlined the importance of effective communication in any economy and about the public aspects of banking.
Those who were coming out of the bank also confirmed to those still queueing that they got all the money they had demanded.
As a result, the majority of those who had queued outside the bank decided to go back to their jobs and businesses, since they really did not need their money that day.
The bank then resumed normal operations at a normal pace and the stampede was neutralised. Communications are now more complicated than they were in the 1930s; but the basic principles remain the same.
Each depositor must be addressed, reassured.
This is tough!
