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among these has been an inability to act in the national interest. All too often, African State machinery has been populated by a useless parasitic and pointless direction caste.

While determination of what constitutes national interest is debatable certain acts undertaken by these governments have been clearly deleterious to the interests of the broad citizenry.
The state has been beholden to special interests, be they foreign or local manipulators.
Recent experience has brought to the fore the centrality of the quality of the state as a critical instrument in initiating and directing development.

The second critical ingredient has been the orientation of the elites that control the state. How do they define their role and how much space do they perceive they have to advance the national interest?
What elements lead them to the delineation of that space, those policy options? In other words is this a modernising patriotic elite or a pointless (ditto) occupation of the state intended to facilitate transfer of resources to unproductive national elites or assure super profits for international capital.

The African struggle for freedom and dignity has been long and difficult. It is a continuing struggle.
This article seeks to situate the Indigenisation Bill in this fight to deliver dignity and rights for our people.
The journey towards this endeavour must have as its departure point a new foundation knowledge. There are certain, stark and evident realities.

That foreign control of not just our states but our natural resources has failed to deliver jobs, rising living standards for our people.
To expect another outcome would be unreasonable. Even states with limited capacities to deliver services to our people have always had a robust national security component that has always been able to guarantee the operations of foreign multinationals and their super profits.

That even where states have a range of capabilities and strong leadership, that leadership has not acted in the national interest.
That while there has been a deluge of foreign direct investment (FDI) to East Asia, over a long period of time, to South Korea, Taiwan and China more recently, there has been limited and sporadic inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa.

It is clear that Africa will not develop on the back of foreign direct investment no matter how much we have tried to make ourselves attractive over the last 20 years with Structural Adjustment Programmes and advances in democratic rule.
Foreign Direct Investment, touted as a panacea for advancement, has not come into our economies and it has generally not come to similar, Third World economies, contrary to the claims that it is simply the politics(?).

It has in fact gone to countries with massive democratic deficits, countries not particularly politically friendly to the West.
It has also gone to repressive governments that are allies of the West.
The question is what is to be done?
Where are the resources going to come from?

An enduring lesson and self-evident truth is that it is African people who rose up to free themselves. While there was international solidarity it was by no means the seminal determinant in our truncated attempts to birth our emancipation.
If we have been struggling to assert a national political sovereignty against spirited attempts to deny us this right, how can we plausibly conceive an economic policy regime attuned to the reclamation of our natural resources without contestation?

Why should foreign firms that have made fortunes here give up the loot?
Did white farmers, who had super citizenship rights, not call for international sanctions to force the return of ‘their farms’?
Thus the Indigenisation Bill is a significant step in dealing with our realities. Ideologically it sets the fore grounding.
The Indigenisation bill is an important foundation stone in evolving a national consensus on the role of the state.

How do we construct a state with authority?
While the bill does not present a radical shift in the structuring of the economy, it is in itself an acknowledgement of the limitations of waiting; ie waiting for FDI, for donors, for non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

It responds to a series of changes that have been taking place in the economy since the inception of the Structural Adjustment Programme.
The de-industrialisation of Rhodesian factories in mid to late 1990s at the behest of the mandarins of the Bretton Woods institutions was the gospel, inevitable. But the other carrot, that there would be inflows of FDI did not happen.

Whatever the myriad of objectives of the neo-masters at these institutions, there was an inescapable denudation of state capacity to respond to crisis.
From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it is clear that development does not just happen.
Recent experience points to the centrality of the state as a deliberate and key driver.
This is contrary to the prophecies of fundamentalist free marketers who wanted us to believe that the state must retreat from the economy and merely referee.

It is elemental to restore and to build state capacity to intervene and to act in the interest of the wider masses. The state can be an instrument for change.
Failing to act represents not just a lost opportunity but this inaction advantages entrenched groups out to exploit the broader masses.
We must construct a state that is capable of completing the emancipation project, reclamation of our dignity and provision for our children and their children.
Our policy options would have been simpler if we had escaped colonialism.

We did not escape colonialism and particularly in Southern Africa we had a settler community which benefited from racist state driven dispossession.
To illustrate an old point differently, the whole country was privatised and a small group of whites received the deeds.
Any person who has had sight of the title deeds of the low density areas will testify that the deeds clearly state that no non-white person could own or live in these areas unless they were a servant.
The same state then embarked on a century of state driven marshalling of resources, material and human, to advantage whites.

This is not a fictional scenario concocted by a creative American script writer.
This is Southern Africa. Again from the vantage point of what we know, from the experience of others who have succeeded, even in ordinary circumstances, say we were Sweden or Norway, the state has an overwhelming role.
What would delegitimatise the case for a strong state role in our special circumstances?

What other strategic resort do we have?
The indigenisation bill signals an attempt to attend to those inadequacies.
Fundamentally it underlines the simple fact that the state has authority.

That it can be deployed, to paraphrase Claude Ake, to get Africa in motion . . . behind revolutionary principle.
It signals that the state has a role to play in not only redressing historical injustices but it can respond to current realities.
It further signals state willingness to confront remnants of the colonial property rights regime. The state itself is a living organism, and must be attentive to vicissitudes in the outside world.

The trajectory we are on will not deliver the industrial or agricultural jobs that the African has been oriented to expect. In any event the arrangement of the colonial state was not designed to provide millions of middle class jobs to Africans.
It is too much to ask of a state which, was not crafted to perform such a task. In addition advances in education and information have led to heightened expectations particularly for a middle class lifestyle.

How do you meet these expectations? It cannot possibly be by doing more of the same.
The Bill does not go far enough in creating sufficient space to truly make the indigenous Zimbabwe the principal player in the economy, possibly 70-75 percent would have triggered a re-evaluation.
Until the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s, foreigners could not own more than 10 percent of South Korean companies.

What the Bill fails to do is to disaggregate sectors and to make sector specific recommendations.
For instance in the mining sector certain minerals/metals could be designated strategic to the national interest say platinum, diamonds.

This designation would entail government participation in the form of a public-private partnership in which a state entity would be the dominant partner in terms of control and profit share.
These funds would accrue directly to treasury.

The Bill’s intention is to strengthen the hand of government, to build enhance state capacity, and therefore to enable the state to act as a transformative institution.
In Southern Africa, the state remains the only institution in the economy in African hands; it is not to ask too much to have it act vigorously in the interests of those people.
If you take the land reform programme for instance, it was politically intolerable for white farmers to continue to benefit from the returns of colonialism while our people lived on unproductive land.

But more fundamentally land reform is good poverty reduction policy.
Studies in livelihoods point to the importance of land in positively impacting poverty.

Why should white farmers have super profits on our land while our people lived in poverty?
Where in the world, in a democracy would this happen?

Why should we be an exception?
Is it because we are black?
To another illustration, while there were no medicines in our hospitals, the price of platinum has risen by more than 90 percent.

Gold has similarly risen on global markets with little or no contribution to the national fiscus according to official pronouncements.
Zimbabwe has the second largest chrome reserves in the world, coal, and diamonds.

That’s what we have.
How do we look at it, reconceptualise and deliver on the promise of independence?
Irimudare!!

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