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AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
One of the oldest
and longest struggles in human society is the struggle to make sense of
self, society and the world.
The academy has tried to cope with
this fundamental human struggle by splitting fields of "knowledge" into
thousands of specialities, with the futile result that the "specialists"
so produced can no longer speak to one another in the same "language", let
alone understand each other across the splintered specialties.
At
the same time, as Ivan Illich showed in Towards a History of Human Needs
(1977) and Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli illustrated in Faith and
Credit: The World Bank’s Secular Empire (1994), those who sponsor and pay
"experts" have managed to convince the povo that they are totally helpless
without the hired "specialists" or "professionals".
Ivan Illich
raised the problem of experts in general. Susan George and Fabrizio
Sabelli raised the global problem of experts in finance, economics and
development in particular.
This is not a remote issue in Zimbabwe,
as the following selected examples will show:
l First, as The
Herald of October 24 2003 reported, medical doctors and other medical
specialists are demanding the most shocking monthly salaries in the
history of this country, up to $30 million per month, at a time when the
credibility and historical reputation of medical practice and medical
science have hit rock-bottom worldwide. They have hit rock-bottom because
of the failure both to explain HIV/Aids as a phenomenon and to find a
cure, so that too many experts and the NGOs profiting from HIV/Aids, in
fact, spend most of their time either just repeating the worsening
HIV/Aids statistics or trying to blame values and cultures of the dying
population: polygamy, promiscuity, ignorance, superstition.
The
fact remains, however, that the most promiscuous societies in the world
are not the most hard-hit by HIV/Aids. And, as for ignorance, the
invention of the myth of the expert-professional was to banish ignorance
once and for all. So, from a layman’s point of view, the capitalist
medical profession has become most expensive to society at a time when it
has become almost useless to that same society. It needs re-invention.
l Second, as part and parcel of the neoliberal structural
adjustment programme in the 1990s, Zimbabwe was persuaded to host the
Capacity Building Foundation, which promised to make our key institutions
— including the civil service, the universities, the hospitals and
parastatals — more efficient, more transparent, less expensive and
people-friendly. One of those institutions, the Central Mechanical
Equipment Department (CMED) was turned into a private company on the basis
of expert advice.
Just this last week CMED announced shocking
rises in fuel prices, with leaded petrol rising from $450 per litre to $1
750 per litre and diesel rising from $200 per litre to $1 650 per litre
overnight. There has been no clear explanation to the non-expert
population from the Ministry of Energy, the CMED itself or the Capacity
Building Foundation, just whose capacity and what kind of capacity is
being built by these institutions. The same questions go to the National
Oil Company of Zimbabwe (Noczim) , which is supposed to supply the CMED.
l Third, between 1991 and 2001, there were dozens of expensive
media projects headed by foreign media experts and sponsored by Sida,
Norad, Danida, the British Council and USAid. The main thrust of these
projects and the main message of the experts was that the best national
media policy for Zimbabwe was to "open up" everything, to de-regulate all
media. It was not until the time of the debates sponsored by the National
Develop-ment Association, in 2000-2001, that the true implications of the
foreign-sponsored media policy projects became clear.
The clarity
emerged when the sponsors, the experts and the various media groups they
had sponsored came out openly opposing the new Zimbabwean policy of "local
content" or "national content" or "Pan African content". That debate
became an indicator of divergence on many other issues concerning the
media in Zimbabwe. The divergence remains to this day.
These three
examples present a particular challenge to journalism and journalists
because of the claim that the mass media exist to educate, inform and
entertain the public. In the last 15 years of the neoliberal thrust in
media, the education and information provided through journalism is
supposed to result in even more glorious benefits for society, such as
democracy, empowerment, civil liberties, human rights, transparency,
freedom of _expression_, accountability and the free flow of information.
The problem with this claim is not just the vehement opposition to
the policy of local content by the sponsors of neoliberal journalism and
their clients in Zimbabwe, but also the open murder of journalists in
Yugoslavia and Iraq by the same sponsors of the doctrine of "free flow of
information". The invention of the "embedded journalist" as an adjunct of
the weapons of mass deception in Iraq was quite a revelation.
The
significance of all this for journalists and for anyone else seeking to
explain the current situation is that they try to force the reality of the
actual world to conform to their predictive theories.
They
describe the world in terms of what is supposed to happen and not what is
actually happening. Poor people’s access to mass media has actually
decreased during the same time of the growth of the doctrine of free flow
of information. There is neither transparency nor accountability in the
entire manufacturing and retail sectors in Zimbabwe today. There is
neither transparency nor accountability in the so-called foreign currency
parallel market in Zimbabwe today.
What people experience in real
life is that the forces which have been demanding the continual
devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar through State policy have succeeded in
doing so through the back door, through foreign manipulation of the
currency, through local currency speculation, through illegal sanctions
imposed on the country and through the corporate monopoly grip on the
production of basic commodities and agricultural inputs.
Industry
and commerce appear to be at war against the agrarian revolution. What
people experience is a real economic war. On one side are those who have
benefited from structural adjustment, corrupt indigenous robber barons
forming an alliance with old Rhodesian and apartheid interests and their
foreign white backers who wish to stage an unconstitutional coup d’etat
through the economy. On the other side are the majority who have been
weakened and impoverished through structural adjustment — the vast
majority whose only hope of recovering from the crisis is based on their
labour and access to the newly reclaimed land.
The function of
journalism has been mostly to gloss over this war and, when it is not
possible to gloss it over, at least to explain the so-called Zimbabwe
crisis only through white British, Rhodesian and South African eyes.
There is a global dimension to this economic war which the media
also seek to hide most of the time. In a paper called "A Better World is
Possible: Alternatives to Economic Globalisation", the International Forum
on Globalisation (IFG) spoke of "two different worlds", one inhabited by
"corporate globalists" and those organisations they pay to advance their
views; and the other inhabited by the vast majority of the peoples of the
world.
"Corporate globalists inhabit a world of power and
privilege. They see progress everywhere because from their vantage point
the drive to privatise public assets and free the market from governmental
interference appears to be spreading freedom and prosperity throughout the
world. They see themselves as champions of an inexorable and beneficial .
. . process toward erasing the economic and political borders that hinder
corporate expansion, eliminating the tyranny of inefficient and meddlesome
public bureaucracies, and unleashing the enormous innovation and
wealth-creating power of competition and private enterprise."
But
the experience of people recently in the countries such as Brazil, Mexico,
Argentina, Turkey, Russia, Zambia and now Zimbabwe is that of tightening
monopolies, shortages of basic goods and grinding poverty.
Said
the IFG: "Citizen movements see a starkly different reality. Focused on
people and the environment, they see a world in deepening crisis of such
magnitude as to threaten the fabric of civilisation and the survival of
the (human) species — a world of rapidly growing inequality, erosion of
relationships of trust, and failing planetary life support systems . . .
Where globalists see the spread of democracy and vibrant market economies,
citizen movements see the power to govern (autonomy and sovereignty)
shifting away from people and communities to financial speculators (the
parallel market) and global corporations dedicated to the pursuit of
short-term profit."
This "get rich quick" mentality is here in
Zimbabwe in a big way. It is more dangerous here than in the imperialist
countries because our local robber barons are derivative middle-men for
white colonial and white foreign interests.
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