Biti obsessed with political monism

The Herald

October 14 2010

By Reason Wafawarova
THIS writer has had to defer an essay on Majorities versus Minorities: Quantity versus Quality to next week because of the need to engage Tendai Biti on his Saturday October 9 piece, "Messianic complex, bane of Zanu-PF" — an engagement made imperative by the compelling need to liberate would-be captives to Biti’s gospel of "transitional leadership", a proposed transition of post-colonial Africa from political to capital colonisation.

Monism is a doctrine that there is only a single principle from which everything is derived and developed, idealistically or materialistically, and in Biti’s case all of Africa’s problems are a result of the flaws of nationalism — the monster Biti says was never going to be a suitable instrument for the challenges of post-independent nation building.

Biti rhapsodised passionately and almost endlessly about the hopelessness of liberation nationalists in evolving into effective managers of Africa’s post-independent nation states. He accused the generality of Africa’s founding fathers of being smitten by the deadly zeal to pursue the "power retention agenda".

This of course is coming from Tendai Biti, himself a high ranking addict of the power grabbing agenda that is notoriously associated with the dreadful call for the strangulation of Zimbabwe’s economy through the ruinous economic sanctions that wrecked havoc in the lives of poor Zimbabwean masses in the last 10 years.

Tendai Biti is the abrasive secretary-general of MDC-T, whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai gallivanted across the globe begging Western countries to smite Zimbabwe with deadly sanctions he hoped would force people into a revolt against the sitting government.

Today, Tsvangirai rascally postures in deep provocation to the masses, politicking unashamedly over the issue of the illegal economic sanctions as if the sanctions were a matter of child play.

He signs with his own hand a GPA that acknowledges the ruinous nature of sanctions and that calls for the lifting of such sanctions, and with his rather loud mouth he shouts that the same sanctions do not exist, and that if they do, he can only call them "restrictive measures".

One may want to weigh the options here. Africa is according to Biti’s monistic hypothesis, stuck with nationalists that are firmly possessed by the vicious demon of "power retention", and these are at war with Western-backed anti-nationalist politicians whose sole political occupation is the power grabbing agenda. That is Africa’s power politics, so to speak.

"What we want to tell Mugabe today is: Please go peacefully. If you do not want to go peacefully, we will remove you violently". These are the infamous words uttered by Tsvangirai at the first MDC anniversary in 2000.

Biti vehemently defended these utterances in 2000, and he had his own style of attempting to grab power from Zanu-PF in 2008, when he baselessly and unilaterally announced election results in favour of his party — all from his head, totally unfounded and unverifiable in any way. What honour are we meant to read from these power grabbing games?

Nationalism is in short a devotion to the interests and culture of one’s nation, or the belief that nations will benefit more from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasising national rather than international goals. This Biti sees as the single biggest problem of Africa today and he suggests that Africa must "construct a National Democratic State in the Leninist sense".

Leninism is a political theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary vanguard party, something that Zanu-PF claims to be doing, especially through the radical land reclamation program that was executed mainly by landless peasants and equally landless veterans of the liberation struggle.

Leninism reversed Marx’s order of economics over politics, allowing for a political revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries rather than a spontaneous uprising of the working class as predicted by Karl Marx.

Zanu-PF says its politics of empowering the black masses will shape the economic super structure of Zimbabwe and this is why the party adopted the motto "Land is the Economy and The Economy is Land".

This also is why Zanu-PF’s empowerment policy for black capital is supposed to be the base that will create the economic superstructure, reversing Karl Marx’s theory of the economic base shaping the political super structure.

Is this not the National Democratic State that Biti wants the whole African continent to become? How then is it that Biti wants Africa to be exactly what he has devoted his whole life fighting, so that his own Zimbabwe should never become?

Biti thinks this "Leninist sense" nationalism will "unleash the true potential of the African state" when at home he has fought bitterly against the same Leninism, as he has so resolutely and openly done on behalf of white capitalists for the last 10 years.

This is the very Biti that has had to be dragged screaming and frothing against the idea of funding new farmers since he became Finance Minister.

Why does Biti not see the need to unleash the true potential of Zimbabwe’s black farmers when he can so easily pontificate over the dream of an African nation to be prospered by the very ideology he fights so vigorously at home? It is hard to fake nationalism and patriotism when you are employed by imperialists for your daily duties.

Biti wrote that the post-independent African State was primarily anti-capital and more importantly was "viciously against the emergence of a nascent black bourgeoisie".

The first assertion is Biti’s way of bemoaning what happened to white commercial farmers in his home country in 2000 and that position is indeed understandable given that Roy Bennett and his fellow ousted colleagues demand the voice of the MDC-T’s Secretary General for their cause, and that of Tsvangirai as well.

However, any serious thinking person will easily dismiss the assertion that post-independent Africa has "viciously (stood) against the emergence of a nascent black bourgeoisie". This is a ludicrous claim because indeed there is a nascent black bourgeoisie in every post-independent African country, from Ghana 54 years ago to South Africa 16 years ago.

Biti himself wrote about the emergence of this black bourgeoisie in Zimbabwe, wrongly crediting patronage and cronyism for the development.

So where is the vicious aggression against these black bourgeoisies if the African State can afford patronage and cronyism to promote the same?

It is the Leninist state Biti wishes for that will stand viciously against the emergence of black capitalists and bourgeoisies.

In this Leninist African State, presumably run by the proletariat, Biti advocates for a "National Democratic State" where he engages in this hoopla about the "creation of democratic space" so that "(Western) capital is allowed to grow", and that the workforce will "control the process and product of its labour", and also something about the "evolution of the state".

So we are now advocating an African State that imports capital and settles for a workforce that contends with control of the process and product of labour? But Biti just lectured us the other week that we must seek a state that teaches its youth business proposals and not how to be hardworking employees — only excelling in applying for jobs and staying loyal to employers as colonialism trained us to be.

Biti conceded that the founding fathers of African independence had structures that "could not have produced any other outcome" and he described Zimbabwe’s massive education and health expansion programmes of the eighties as a "mitigating factor" and another such "mitigating factor" was the land reform program.

If the founding fathers could not have produced any other outcome why then do Biti and his colleagues engage aliens in his fight against them? And against what are the mass education, the health expansion, and the agrarian reform programs mitigating?

Is it against Biti’s mixed up attack on nationalism or against the vilification that Zanu--PF receives from Biti’s Western funders?

Biti had the nicest words for John Kufour, the man who presided over a gross output of gold exports of US$8 billion in 2008, with only US$550 million being retained by the Ghanaian economy.

Of course, Kufour was a darling of Western investors and that is very understandable. It is more understandable that Kufour is also Biti’s admired hero — he is a forerunner leader of the desired capital colonies that Western countries seek to establish in Africa through sponsored puppet parties like Biti’s MDC-T.

Of course, Kufour did not tell Biti and others who listened to him that Kwame Nkrumah largely inherited and pursued industrial policies that had been initiated by Britain — social democratic policies that almost destroyed Britain’s economy about the same time.

When Nkrumah later committed himself to socialist policies, what the West did with the cocoa market must be noted, totally strangulating Ghana’s economy through manipulating cocoa prices, and resulting in the coup that Biti says was celebrated by all Ghanaians, the very way he says all Zimbabweans support Tsvangirai and MDC-T.

Biti legitimises his revisionist blame on nationalist African leaders by quoting George Ayittey and Dele Oluwu, and his major problem with nationalist leaders is that they have what Biti calls a sense of "entitlement".

Those who think the gains of the liberation struggle are personal entitlements for which they fought must be understood in the right context.

Why would liberation fighters stand akimbo in the name of democracy and human rights when former colonisers come back sponsoring puppet politicians in broad daylight?

There is a huge difference between entitlement to specific achievements and entitlement to a country.

We are all entitled equally to Zimbabwe as our country, but there are those who stand as vanguards to those achievements that we consider the cornerstones of our national independence and what these people defend are values so fundamental to our national being that without them we are rendered as good as a colony again.

What caused the 2008 near collapse economic meltdown were neither bad policies nor what Biti calls a sense of entitlement.

It was what Biti and Tsvangirai braggingly called the "Tongai Tione" campaign — a killer economic onslaught by Western countries that was so comprehensive that it nearly stalled everything in Zimbabwe.

The strategy was to make Zimbabwe ungovernable by causing unprecedented economic chaos — sabotaging supplies, hiking prices, economic isolation, relocating firms to neighbouring countries and employing every dirty trick in the economic hitman’s book.

Biti blamed it all on bad policies on the part of Zanu-PF and on the "inevitable and unwise Economic Structural Adjustment Programme", and he did not bother to explain how an unwise policy became inevitable.

The word "inevitable" is to sanitise the image of those who initiated this draconian killer ESAP programme, the IMF, and the word "unwise" is meant to demonise the recipients of the programme, the Zanu-PF government of the time.

Biti wrote and blamed the one party-state proposals of the late eighties as the cause of the economic decline that resulted in ESAP being implemented. Zanu-PF debated the idea of a party state and that debate resulted in the idea being abandoned and Zimbabwe never became a one party state.

It is a wonder how something that never became policy can be blamed for the economic misfortunes of the time. Did Biti ever read about the Washington Consensus and the Ten Point Plan?

Biti wrote and said that his MDC entered the political arena "in line with the real ideals of the liberation struggle", and he bragged that the same party was "a mere extension of the national liberation struggle".

Jesus comes back! Is this why the MDC was founded and funded by the very people the liberation war was waged against?

Is this why Tsvangirai called for killer sanctions against Zimbabweans? Is this why Zimbabwe stands sanctioned outside the UN mandate today?

All because MDC-T is in line ‘‘with the real ideals of the liberation struggle, and that it is an extension of the national liberation struggle?’’.

A national struggle that seeks to oust "unskilled black farmers" for "skilled white farmers" is what Biti was lecturing us about. He was lecturing us about ideals of a liberation struggle that derives logic in having a bitter ousted white colonial farmer as a deputy minister over the very new farmers that ousted him and "stole his farm".

And Tsvangirai is so scared of the Security Forces and the war veterans that he publicly bemoans his position relative to these men of war.

Yet he is the leader of a party that is "a mere extension of national liberation struggle". Extending from something that deeply loathes you does not sound like a good idea.

Of course, Biti will tell us that his party is an extension of all the dead liberation fighters, those who died in the past, those who die today and those who will die in the future — all because they become separate from the living nationalists — the bane of Zanu-PF, those that do not exactly think that MDC-T is such a good party.

When Nathaniel Manheru says MDC was founded and funded by the Westminster Foundation, that the party is tasked by Westerners to recapture state power from nationalists, to restore white capitalism, and that the party seeks to "found a neo-colony and not a post-colony", the assertion does not imply that black people cannot think for themselves, as Biti suggested.

Firstly, MDC is not representative of all black people and that is just a fact.

Secondly, policymakers in MDC are a minority group of donor mongers who cannot honestly claim that the majority of MDC supporters are clear of where funds that run affairs in that party are coming from.

Biti talks of millions of workers "who voted and are "dying for the MDC" and he accuses anyone who dares criticise his party of crossing the path of these "millions" of dying workers.

Why would people die for MDC anyway?

Is there no ideology to die for in that party — even Biti’s misplaced Leninism, or Chamisa’s real change, whatever that means?

Ever heard President Mugabe saying people died for Zanu-PF at Chimoio or Nyadzonia?

Training people to die for a political party is extreme jingoism and it does not build nations.

Biti is in government and he tells the world that Zimbabwe is being ruled by "hippos that are lazy, slow and ornery"; and he prides himself as the Finance Minister of such a Government?

And we were lectured about this new era of "transformational leadership" determined by "values and trainings" — such as the training "Dr Morgan Tsvangirai" is reported to have had at Harvard University and the take-away doctorate he collected from the South Koreans.

These transformational leaders stand on "superior ground norm of nation building" and Biti tells us that Ian Khama and Raila Odinga are some of the luminaries that belong to this prestigious club alongside our own "Dr Morgan Richard Tsvangirai", a man grudgingly but wrongly described by Biti as "the undisputed and unquestionable leader of the MDC and the face of the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe".

Welshman Ncube will have to comment on this. When Tsvangirai was bragging about the ‘‘tongai tione’’ mantra, the suffering masses rechristened his part Movement for the Destruction of our Country, and yet we hear the man is the face of the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe.

Could this be Leninist democracy as well, that democracy based on the proletariat?

I hope Minister Biti does not find this essay "verbose and violent" and of course he must delight in the fact that Reason Wafawarova is not a nom de plume.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafa warova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com