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Strive Masiyiwa

WHEN the Zimbabwean-born and South African domiciled businessman, Strive Masiyiwa, voiced his concern about huge youth unemployment and the wakeful nights which that caused him, little did he know he would get a confirmation of his anxieties from somewhere within the South African body-politic. That South Africa is his business home, makes this confirmation and response not just relevant and immediate, but also doubly menacing. He has to reckon with emerging politics of that country, not so much because Malema’s EFF may triumph against the ANC in the next elections. That is highly unlikely, undesirable even for Malema, for South Africa and for our Southern African region. Malema’s fate is not to lead; it is to give South Africa a better leadership. Or to destroy it.

Ruinous politics
For what is likely, though unintended by both the EFF and the ANC may be a mutually ruinous split vote which redounds to the Democratic Alliance, itself the sum of apartheid’s reborn politics. That way, the elders’ anger against a dashing youth in the ANC, and the youth’s embitterment at the elders’ accommodation of apartheid forces, will have conspired to yield an enormous lift to post-apartheid Apartheid. Both the ANC and EFF would be ruined by such an outcome, more so the ANC. Both South Africa and Zimbabwe will be ruined and challenged respectively. For already, the apartheid forces are using the law and the courts to restructure relations between Southern Africa’s two most energetic, most resilient liberation movements, in the process undermining social programs of liberation movements in the region all of them so dependent on mutual inspiration and fronts.

Julius Malema

Malema’s contribution
But there is something that stands to “gain” in such a scenario. It is the masses, the demos of South Africa. Gain not materially, gain not physically, but in the rather abstract, Marxian sense of a risen consciousness on the part of the broad majority of black South Africans who will be able to name and describe their social predicament, point to the organisational form a release from it might or should take, and thus begin yet another long struggle against apartheid. Malema’s EFF’s contribution to South African politics is a new, forceful grassroots-speak which refocuses politicians well away from a patrician quarrel we have witnessed to date. Charges of high corruption upon which South African politics have been founded to date amount to policing the exercise of power by the same elites in circumstances of an unchanged, unchallenged apartheid political economy.  Those politics do not give a blueprint on remaking a new, black South Africa.

One Limpopo, two decoys
And there will be key differences with the situation in Zimbabwe. Here the broad, disinherited masses have had to struggle for social gains like land in circumstances in which their nationalists still control the State, principally its government, indeed in circumstances in which, in spite of considerable internal contradictions, the nationalist leadership has been an ally, has in unity pledged itself to such a struggle. The post-Rhodesian settlerism has been fought with and by nationalists, with and by the post-liberation government. So where Zimbabwean masses’ gains have been tangible, immediate, those of their South African counterparts may be spiritual, inspirational if you want. Malema and his EFF is not what voting South Africans will get; They may be what voting South Africa needs to protest against the ANC.

Both Malema and EFF are what the South African masses yearn for and might get after a very long revolution post-apartheid. The issue is whether or not that which they yearn for shall be delivered by the ANC, or by that which succeeds it after a mutually ruinous contest which may be possible next year but which looks unlikely presently. For without doubt the ANC will romp home in the next election, but with a result degraded by both EFF and Agang of Ramphele. And the ANC’s focus on both in the forthcoming polls will distract it from focusing on the real enemy of the South African masses, the DA, the same way Zanu-PF was distracted from focusing on MDC-T by the bogey of Makoni’s Mavambo.

Great expectations’ great lesson
But all this is to ignore my fellow countryman’s wakeful nights. He worries about instability from youth unemployment which he surmises will engulf Africa and its rich men, and women (who, where, are they?). This is a real worry and no one accuses Strive of being unduly fretful. After all when Rome burns it is always its palaces and temples which tumble. His own remedy is jobs, expedited job-creation to quieten the demos. I respect that, believe that to some great extent. And his antidote is founded on the premises that “the world is changing”. I begrudge that, doubt that totally. My countryman may be guilty of the Dickensian syndrome! Those of you who read Great Expectations, a novel by Charles Dickens, will recall that incident and encounter between little Pip and the enormous fugitive-robber, Magwitch, in the church cemetery. Magwitch is on the run, having escaped from Australia, Britain’s colony for felons. He “spares” Pip’s life on condition Pip daily brings stolen food to his hideout in the cemetery for his survival in hiding. And of course Pip is to steal the food from his waspish aunt’s compound.  To motivate Pip to do Magwitch’s bidding, Magwitch has to prove a greater terror to Pip than Pip’s aunt. And Magwitch does that remarkably. He tilts Pip once, twice, thrice, repeatedly until the small boy hits some swoon. What is interesting is not so much his repeated topsy-turvy predicament; rather, it is his own interpretation of it. “The Cathedral tilted”, he says each time Magwitch gives him a tilt. “The Cathedral tilted again”. “And once more the Church tilted”! Something like that.

Nigel Chanakira

Colour in a callous world
The real danger, dear Strive, is to see the Church tilting when in fact you do. As once did Nigel Chanakira when all seemed good going for him. He, too, was in good company and, I happen to know, when destruction finally came, finally visited him, Strive knew and was not too far away from the action to draw life-long lessons. Let me not elaborate. Nigel thought all it took to succeed was to be a brilliant EMPRETEC graduate. And after the British-sponsored EMPRETEC internship, he emerged with fumes of greatness, fumes which puffed him up and up, well above his people, all of them Africans, Zimbabweans, colourfully black!  Until one day the empire decided to strike back, and all came tumbling, wound up as dust. The Church never somersaulted, the world never changed. Nigel did. The Western world had only given its precocious underlings only some playful, time-honoured concessions and glory. We should always remember that as men and women of colour.

And separating us, creating an illusion in some of us of being better, of being colourless, of having escaped group fate, is part of the control strategy of this white world. That way it divides us, rules us. After all unity is never founded on exceptions, on a sense of exceptionality; division is. And hey, Strive, the very Indian, Malaysian, Nigerian competitors you meet nowadays may very well be the agents of your undoing, the same way that you may be of theirs. For both of you are people of colour, the subalterns of this globalised, racialised economic and power structure. For all of you are white capitalism’s proxies, pale capitalism’s veneer of even-handedness. For all of you come from one womb – a womb full of colour – much as you are oblivious to your essential unity that gets you by in this callous world.

Goodluck Jonathan

Politics that don’t balance in Eden
Wakeful nights. True and everywhere. It is ironic that Strive mentions in approbation both Kagame and Goodluck Jonathan, mentions Rwanda and Nigeria as two enlightened African countries. A person of such vast intellect, vaster means, may not, surely, be unaware that the one has relied on foreign wars across the border in the Congo, the other on a snowballing civil war, to police the interests of Strive’s nameless, colourless and nationality-free investors? Kagame needs a turbulent Congo across his borders to keep pillaged resources flowing into Rwanda, to offload Rwanda’s surplus population. Much like Cecil John Rhodes did in the Nineteenth Century when his little great Island faced the dire prospect of a social revolution around unemployment and population density! I notice Kagame’s advisor is Tony Blair, that diminutive warrior for a greater England.

Rwanda may have balanced books in respect of its economy but its politics are far from balancing, are frothing, something which will become more and more apparent as the Congo – all along its escape hole – begins to solidify as a real State with the means and allies to stabilise itself, guard its borders and harness its stupendous wealth to develop itself and its people. There is a not-so-obvious shift in power balance in the Great Lakes, a shift which started in 1998 when Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia deployed there in support of the Congo. The recent routing of Rwanda’s rebels by a Sadc-led intervention force may have been the turning point the Congo needed to put behind it its baneful, underdog legacy since the tragic days of Lumumba.

Food for thought
Developments in Nigeria are there for all to see. While that giant of Africa has given us lots of millionaires, a huge GDP, it is beginning to spew up huge instability at a time when we all look up to it for continental leadership. In the oil-rich Delta, the rivers are dead, killed by “colourless” giant oil-investors who have left everything dark and dank, who have blighted Nigeria’s precious, once pristine rivers and lands. Fishes no longer play, trees no longer grow. The land is smothered, suffocating and groaning under the dark weight spewed by white interests. What only seems to grow are angry young men so well armed both in heads and hands. The investor has created strange jobs for the youth requiring extremism as a skill, needing deadly triggers. True, Nigeria is changing: changing books of fortunes abroad, charging bombs of African destruction at home. Even in the North where its leaders have traditionally been brewed. It recalls a comment made by the late Chinua Achebe in respect of a “green revolution” unleashed by one of Nigeria’s numberless leaders, all in the hope of curing stalking hunger. Achebe wryly remarked: “The Green Revolution has given us lots of food for thought, but hardly any for the stomach”! In addition to sleepless nights, my countryman shall one day enjoy a turbulent conscience after discovering his wireless technology is being used to coordinate attacks against Goodluck Jonathan’s government and people. Then will he realise he may have relied on examples that rebuke him.

No cosmic rules from a grain
I don’t think Strive is wrong to see matters the way he does. He is obviously looking at the world from the standpoint of a millionaire made in telecoms, in the service sector. Apart from the natural, national resource of frequencies, everything about his business rests on technology which needs little or no inputs from a country’s natural capital. Besides, unlike Nigel, he has traditionally relied on Nordic capital and technology. I hope it is kinder, less predatory. We grant him all that and the thinking that flows from such a transformation formulae. But that is no basis for him to develop a continental model, even a cosmic one, from that. Both his model and his examples do taunt him, before we all do, which is why we urge him to speak in modesty.

Dali Mpofu

Sleep and nightmare
Juxtaposing Strive’s comments and Dali Mpofu’s, you get a personification of millionaire and what steals his sleep. And both live in the same national neighbourhood. And both are grappling with the quest for stability on an increasingly buffeted continent. For Strive, it is a fully employed youth on the continent which underpin that stability. For Mpofu, it is addressing the needs of the poor “at the expense of those who have”. Such as Strive? Therein lies the irony. It is the poor in Strive’s business world who shall remind him of the colour of his passport, of his business and of his jobs. He is right to worry about them, wrong to believe the price for buying them off is cheaply called jobs. As his own experience as an employer will testify, the new investor does not  aim at job-creation; he aims for super-profits only guaranteed by labour-free, capital intensive operations. The issue of a stake does not arise.

With Chinese characteristics
And China whose Deng Strive quotes is interesting. Deng opened the world to China on Chinese terms. These included enforcing a 50-50 percent parity between investors and Chinese state corporations. And to enforce that, he had China’s vast multitudes, China’s coveted market. Demography was his trump card, something which recommends a completely different model for the continent of Africa. Secondly, he relied on a strong State, not a weak, quiescent state which allows the so-called colourless investors to blight African rivers with impunity, while paying and cleaning for small pollutions in vast oceans in strong America. And that China turned its own cadres in the People’s Liberation Army, PLA, into a prowling global entrepreneurial force. Picked on soldiers for they exuded national values, national goals. They were Chinese: yellow, round, short and national, never colourless, taller than Chinese and China. Thirdly, Deng provided a strong policy framework for technological uptake founded on the notion of adopt, copy and improve and, on the basis of all of these, to surpass and excel. I thought an honest Masiyiwa would berate Africa for not having a better strategy than that of merely lifting her skirt high enough for dalliance with the West. It does not take a quiescent State to end up with a China that mortgages America, that rides on traditionally unbridled forces of western capital to wind up with a new capitalism “with Chinese characteristics”.

Vanity and the cockerel
It would be fatal for Strive to ever imagine he is Africa’s Deng. I love Strive and as a Zimbabwean I vicariously share in his triumphs. He is one of mine, in spite of his claim to colourlessness. The more reason I write so candidly. The more reason I don’t want him to share the fate of the proud, mellow-singing cockerel in the African tale of Chimedzanemburungwe. Having gone for days without a hot meal, the wily jackal saw a big cockerel pecking at worms in wet surrounds of a quiet village. The villagers had gone to the fields, all to break the clod. Realizing the ground was clean and open, he told himself the art of hunting and surprise would yield no lunch for him. Intellect and subterfuges would. “My friend cockerel, you sing so ever beautifully. All of us in the animal kingdom stand still to listen whenever you stretch out in full melody. I wish I was like you, nay you!” Thus extolled, the cockerel stretched out his long neck, closed his round eyes to sing with full-throated ease. Whereupon the wily jackal pounced, thus silencing the cockerel hardly past the first line of the first stanza. Vanity had delivered a meal; a happy song had thrown away the cockerel’s guard.

Splitting the liberation movement
So which way? I hope the gentle reader is beginning to sense the continental import of the debate contained in three of the four thoughts summarized last week. The Nyoni regime-change thesis deals with the overarching governance politics and what they mean for the African social question. It is a thesis pursued by those sent to pre-empt a social revolution by those who benefit from its absence on the continent. And if it is remembered that Zimbabwe and South Africa are the two states where such a post-liberation social struggle is more likely, one is thus not surprised that the counter-revolutionary methods designed for both countries have been comparable, both of them founded on splits and labour-led oppositional politics. For a key strategy has been a fragmentation of the Southern African liberation movement, taking full advantage of some of its real pitfalls to make this real and deserved. It is to split it from within, split it from its links with the masses, split it from affinities with fellow liberation movements and agendas. Zanu-PF may be emerging from it, which is not to say it has survived against it. Not yet.

Neither Strive nor Dali
The Masiyiwa neo-liberal thesis triggers an antithesis which is summarised by Mpofu’s left-of-left redistributional politics. While I abhor Masiyiwa’s mistaken, Africa-rich-man-and-the-chapel-has-tilted thesis, I, too, am not enamoured of Mpofu’s radical, anti-liberation politics. Or more accurately, anti-ANC politics. Whether we like the ANC or not, history records that the ANC, alongside the moribund PAC, led South Africa’s struggle for the broad masses. That same history tells us that with better internal advocacy work, a liberation movement in power can be a veritable player in the settlement of the national social question, itself always rising after settlement of the national political question of independence. Zimbabwe proves that.

Boers might return
And Zimbabwe also proves that break-away parties from a liberation movement can distract a people’s struggle in ways that profits forces and agents of reaction. After the Shilowa debacle, one would have thought that South Africa’s ANC would have learnt an thing or two. It is not good for a liberation movement to lose its aura. Or to be on the receiving end of socially penetrating comments like “hanging on to the sentiment and the name”, which is how Dali says of all those who have not yet defected from it. Such powerful comments make disintegration of a liberation movement seem legitimate, in fact make it appear like a revolutionary duty. We had a similar one here in the MDC mantra of “the party that liberates must not govern”. Many were swayed and very few realized the import was to delegitimise the completion a struggle by its lead agent, indeed that the import was to get a liberation movement to surrender to Britain’s proxy political forces. And where such an unfortunate eventuality happens, the ruling liberation movement must put together its wits to mount a convincing counter-argument. Ramaphosa’s “boers-might-return” reposte cannot be that clever argument. Rather, it is the conclusion begging for a robust argument to lead to it. The real tragedy would be to allow such a frightful but real prospect to be roundly disregarded as an incredulous invocation of the fear factor by a party which has exhausted its electability.

Which Econet is in danger?
It is telling that when Strive gave the argument, the local media did no more than faithfully carry it, editorial-free. That amounted to an endorsement of it, which in itself could be a dig at the strong redistributive and affirmative thrust of Zanu-PF. Or was it ignorance? I am not so sure. Whatever it was, Strive broached a key debate we will have to deal with, more so in the context of Zanu-PF’s manifesto. From the easy juxtaposition of indigenise, empower, develop and employ, one senses that from a Zanu-PF perspective, jobs will have to be yielded by those who indigenise and empower. Is that possible? Strive might think not. Quite the contrary, he maintains that asking too many questions forces serious investors to take flight and land in other more hospitable climes. Unless of course a country has a unique, much sought after mineral. And Strive thinks we don’t? Don’t we? Do we? Key questions. Let me add another one, again related to Strive’s thesis: what is in greater danger from a rebelling unemployed youth, “Econet” South Africa, Rwanda, Nigeria, or Econet Zimbabwe? Food for thought.

Icho!

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