Picture this: A few national dailies are carrying a story that President Obama and his Chinese counterpart are due in the country late this afternoon using one of our very own Chidweya airplane. They are here to meet our State President—to discuss how our country could financially bail out the US economy so that the Americans can then pay off their ever-growing debt with the Chinese!
Already our State President has been to Parliament Buildings—to address a joint sitting of MPs and the Council of Brainy Nationals [CBNs]. The CBNs is a new Chamber of Parliament created to ensure that people with sufficient grey matter between their ears are directly involved in ensuring—as part of our national Strategic Independence—the national economy is in tic-toc state of export-driven economic growth. In fact, one of those CBNs is the ‘godfather’ of the Chidweya technologies that the Americans' NASA is now keen to use on their manned shuttles to the outer edge of the galaxy: go and see some funny beings reportedly living there!
Naturally, an hour ago the State President emerged from parliament buildings more fiesty and envigorated to take the fight to the other two superpowers. Thanks to the CBNs and the fast growing national export economy, the political trade off would be us demanding our rightful place in global decision making! And right time too.
Cut! Dula! Cut! This is some ufiti dream, kapena?
How did we get here—from that messy ISI thing Kamuzu bequethed us? There has to be a process. The diagram below—another of the over-abused three-part ‘value-chain’—endeavors to demonstrate how. It is still about terminologies but these—for a change—are more organized and purposeful. At least the general tone is not 'anti-people' and/ or 'unpeople'.
First, a valuable lesson in history. Mercantilism has been with us since 1493. That is when Martin Luther of Gotenberg posted his letter on the wall; berating the Roman Catholic Church. He told them to get off their high horse that insisted the ‘church’ was the beginning and end of all life. Luther wanted a separation of powers between economics and metaphysics. The church had no right to interfere in earthly matters everytime poverty walked the world. In fact, for getting organized into Capitalism, Luther wanted change. He got it. The church resisted and the Protestant church was born again and again. In turn, artisans—in their homesteads—were released from their guild obligations. They become part of a more organized production system. Later factories—involving a few guild societies would emerge—went into specialization and efficient coordination of national resources from one human system to the other. The quest for Strategic Independence was born; slaves would be caught and sold, Africa would be partitioned and globalization, as we know it to day, would come. But I anticipate myself.
More importantly Mercantilism—defined as 'a nation manufacturing and exporting to earn bullion and wealth'—was born. J. Michael Friend [WTO: Trade and Development Handbook] has given a practical and brutal definition of mercantilism as: 'the scientific art of pushing one’s 'thieving' hand into your neighbor’s pocket while working ever so hard to remove his 'thieving' hand from your pocket'. Kamuzu—the so called student of Roman and Mercantile history and a church-elder to boot—failed to fully understand this aspect of the gentlemanly art at trickery.
Kamuzu’s ISI was basically a failed ‘rent seeking’ adventure. J. Michael Friend calls ‘rent-seeking’: 'the art of pushing one's hand into one’s own pocket while pretending nothing is amiss'! Sounds familiar? All you students and products of Kamuzu are rent seekers. Self-thieving artists! You are no more different from the guy who gives spare money to his wife in the morning—to bake some ‘mandasi’ to sell outside his posh house in the suburbs—'hoping' some passerby will purchase them. First mistake—operating on unfounded hope. The second and rent seeking mistake is to return home in the evening—find the mandasi still unsold—and 'throw' a one-man tea party on your very own ‘mandasi’! That is the cleverness of an idiot and we have been doing that for the last forty-seven years. You know the familiar saying: ‘kulima mlimi’ or building ADMARC flats with peasant surpluses or driving your posh Merc using peasant-earned forex and fuel. Sounds fiendishly clever when we did it, isn't it? But it is rent-seeking because all this long we have been pushing a ‘thieving’ hand in our own pockets and tickling what really ought not be tickled down there.
The above is a Mercantilist or Export-oriented approach to industrialization [EOI]. Kamuzu thought he had it when he designed the ISI one [discussed in my previous blog]. As said, the Mercantilist concept has been around ever since. But—for various reasons—we chose against it. EOI is now implied in the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy [MGDS] of 2007. However—once you have tasted Kamuzu's ISI ‘easy-way-out’—EOI is quite a taxing pursuit. It’s like asking a selfish man to experience a woman’s labor pains. His typical response will be: 'To what end but the anticipation of future illusory pleasures!'
EOI is about rearranging our communities from ‘homestead’ to the ‘export city’. Capitalism—since Martin Luther—organized the guilds or the peasant villagers of today into structured systems of production. Using the resultant system Capitalism was able to physically invade enemy’s territory to market their products. That is why subsidiaries of transnational companies [TNCs]—providing us with everything from detergent to soft drinks—are in our backyard. Where is our TNCs in their backyards? Yes, they have their profligate hand in our pocket. Yes, the other year [when their cousins had a field day destroying Kamuzu’s ‘toy’ industries in Makata and Kanengo] they destroyed our capacity to put a hand into their pockets!
So, were we defeated? Can we not organize ourselves towards that single objective—'pushing our 'thieving' hand into their pocket with little collateral losses to us'. It is possible if we organize ourselves because Mercantilism is a single-minded pursuit. You cannot, unfortunately, afford to have internal definitions leading to internal fractus—running 'thieving-hand' clubs against your own people; stealing from the poor in the countryside.
In my previous blog I showed how we are good at mouthing and perfecting self-thieving concepts, terminologies and arguments. We even promote defeatist arguments on why EOI was not made in and is not for this country. We have come full circle though. Given, no one wants to smoke our tobacco we need—and very fast!—to define an alternative accumulation system. This one should be based on a hierarchy of internal competence-exploitation in pursuit of wealth extracted from our external neighbors. Put crudely: we need better 'thieving' techniques to relieve our neighbors of their hard earned wealth!
And the external environment has changed. Damn these whites: always shifting the goalposts every time we have something good going for us! Unlike in the olden Capitalist days when slaves, then serfs and finally paid labor were readily available sources of surplus that one could capture, the 'foreign customer' is now the new Capitalist ‘slave’. And, boy, is she smart, fickle and elusive! To trap the contents of her purse, you really have to be on top of your game. One slip and your whole national economy is in tatters.
All the more reason, see diagram, we need secure internal self-sufficiency and economic self-defense strategies. These must be set far back into the national system; not the Kamuzu mistake that had these right at the national-global axis. Protect these just so the Capitalist ‘slave’ experiences one of her periodic bust cycles and your thieving hand has to come out and temporarily rely on internal reserve in the rent-seeking pocket [RSP]. The problem with the Kamuzu model is we have over relied on the 'sufficiency' sector that it has collapsed on us.
That RSP happens to be the local 'rurals' and we have been stealing from them blindly. And, girl, are the 'rurals' are urbanizing like hell. Sixty percent of us will be living in towns by 2050 and if we do not properly reach out and link hands with these future neighbors then brace for the universal squalor that is coming.
Compared to the ISI diagram, the EOI looks and sounds quite simple. It is like the other man said: 'it takes fifteen muscles to smile and hundreds more to look serious and intimidating'. Yet, we simply love to look intimidating—complicate our lives as the ISI diagrams shows. But, a chabwino thing is never complicated. ISI is complicated yet looks deceptively simple. EOI is easy because it is simple.
Whichever way we cannot continue to steal and abuse the very poor who are the foundations of our future growth and development and wonder why we are still poor forty-seven years later! The reasons are in our rent-seeking nature. But so be it—if some guys renders himself exploitable by all means go ahead; help him maximize his self-imposed stupidity. The unfortunate part is that the self-sacrificing, exploitable person is no other than ourselves! Yes—you the product of Kamuzu’s teachings. We are the one’s with the persecution complex—avidly pandering to ISI teachings and way of life.
It was us—for no obvious benefit—who cheered Kamuzu when he drove the Asians out of No1 in Thyolo or Songani in Zomba. Just so the places could become perfect 'economic deserts' they are today! Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we achieved because in that act we ‘forced’ the rural poor to frequent the same cities we had once declared 'no-go' areas to them. And when they arrived—this time disguised as ‘thieves’ and ‘vendors’—what did we do? We avidly drove them out. Remember ‘Operation Dongosolo’? That had nothing to do with the Boss on the hill or the IMF saying so. Those guys simply okayed what we had wanted all along—get those ‘khwema-rized’ peasants out of our cities!
What kind of love-hate relationship do we have here? What exactly do we want: The poor in the countryside? The poor among us? And we think we can build a united country without getting this human dynamic right once and for all? Either, we are united Mercantilist or divided Rent-seekers.
Whichever way we cannot continue to steal and abuse the very poor who are the foundations of our future growth and development and wonder why we are still poor forty-seven years later! The reasons are in our rent-seeking nature. But so be it—if some guys renders himself exploitable by all means go ahead; help him maximize his self-imposed stupidity. The unfortunate part is that the self-sacrificing, exploitable person is no other than ourselves! Yes—you the product of Kamuzu’s teachings. We are the one’s with the persecution complex—avidly pandering to ISI teachings and way of life.
It was us—for no obvious benefit—who cheered Kamuzu when he drove the Asians out of No1 in Thyolo or Songani in Zomba. Just so the places could become perfect 'economic deserts' they are today! Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we achieved because in that act we ‘forced’ the rural poor to frequent the same cities we had once declared 'no-go' areas to them. And when they arrived—this time disguised as ‘thieves’ and ‘vendors’—what did we do? We avidly drove them out. Remember ‘Operation Dongosolo’? That had nothing to do with the Boss on the hill or the IMF saying so. Those guys simply okayed what we had wanted all along—get those ‘khwema-rized’ peasants out of our cities!
What kind of love-hate relationship do we have here? What exactly do we want: The poor in the countryside? The poor among us? And we think we can build a united country without getting this human dynamic right once and for all? Either, we are united Mercantilist or divided Rent-seekers.
That decided it become easy to determine into whose pocket we really ought to push our 'thieving' hand. We cannot dispatch away our peasants every time a TNC lies that it is operating in this country because it wants to help us ‘export’ what its parent company is already ‘exporting’ into our economy! Those TNC subsidiaries around you are counters or outlets for their parent companies. They have no mandate to re-export nothing! There's is a clever turn of phrase to babies in development economics. We are adults around here, aren't we?
Let's build a properly integrated EOI production system that starts with enjoining rural smells to our ambitions to rule the world.
While we feverishly work to sort out the "comments' problem, please feel free to contact the author at zivaiclaude@gmail.com
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