On becoming a Chinese colony
June 21st, 2005
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‘We are a sovereign nation! We will never be a colony again!’ This slogan drove ZANU PF’s 2005 election campaign; and it was followed by a frenzied attack on Tony Blair and his treasonous accomplices of imperialism within Zimbabwe. The thousands of school children forced to listen to such rantings have never experienced being a colony and surely do not understand the concept of sovereignty. But, as they boast disingenuously of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty, they are busy selling what little remains of it to a different coloniser – the Chinese.
In the 1960′s, when our push for independence with majority rule began in earnest, we knew what a colony meant, and thought we knew what sovereignty meant. A colony was a country ruled not by its own people, but by others. Sovereignty meant being in charge of our own fate, our own government, our own natural resources, and our own decisions about our present and future development. If we threw off our foreign rulers then we would be sovereign in our own land. There were two problems with this, we discovered. One was that in order to gain that “independence” we had to make compromises, particularly in regard to what we could do with private ownership of land. Secondly, although we might be politically independent, economically we could not progress without assistance from foreigners in the form of loans and investment.
Throughout the first twenty years of “Independence”, ZANU PF pursued an essentially western-oriented, capitalist approach to the economy. In spite of socialist rhetoric and tight economic controls, socialism was in no way a serious prospect. When the economy ran into trouble at the end of the 1980′s, because we could not pay our debts, we had to depend on balance of payments support from the IMF; being indebted meant we had to take instructions from the lenders on how to organise our economy, and this entangled us deeper in the tentacles of world capitalism. Indeed, we were no longer a colony, but we were hardly sovereign in our land because we could not choose our own policies. Too late ZANU PF realised the danger. By the end of the 1990′s with the economy contracting under structural adjustment, ZANU’s political support crumbled. They decided to renew efforts to use land redistribution to pacify supporters and reinvigorate the economy. But land reform still required foreign assistance and they were frustrated by conditions placed by donors who distrusted their corrupt, opaque and nepotistic methods. It is a fact of economic life that the financier dictates the terms; but while in 1980 and 1990 ZANU PF had been prepared to work within the conditions, in 2000 they could see that the impositions would affect their ability to rule by patronage. Instead they staged a governmental temper tantrum, denounced the west, and returned to the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the liberation struggle… read the full article here
