Picture this: the first time I picked up a guitar, I proved a natural. Indeed, my folks, when they heard me strum away with such ease came up with some surprising theories. One of which was that my father—the block I have yet to see fifty-three years later—had been a musician. The stuff some girls fall for! Music hardly bought a piece of stale bread in the fifties… But there I was weaving through every conceivable musical chord.
The problem, though, was that my amateur tutor showed me every chord in the book: A-minor, D-flat, G, F you name it. He even showed me how to tune a guitar. To this day I have the knack to leave even the most seasoned musician with a moist eye or two when I pick up the guitar and pitch it up to levels many a professional just cannot. However, my tutor forgot to show me how to string out and play songs or music! You know why? It is because when I listen to most songs they are but one chord done over and over. That—the simple and monotonous part: rusty chords and harmonies—is what he did not teach me. In other words, I can play chords but can’t play music! Damn!
Do you know someone else like that? I do: African economists and PhDs generally. They know every chord but cannot play music! Somewhere I wrote ‘even Margaret Thatcher, with all her liberalist theories and practice—including banging up the post-colonial British economy into something with a semblance of respectability—would be hard put just cranking up this [an African caricature] economy into action again…’ All chords but no simple music! In other words, Thatcher had the know-how to manage a more sophisticated British system but would struggle managing a simple ‘hand-to-mouth’ African economy. And her problem would have had nothing to do with Khadafy and his motorcade traveling though African with their noses covered up against the ‘African stench’ only to have his own people cover up against his rotting cadaver!
And this is no exaggeration the bulk of our educated Africans have internalized Thatcherite levels of management sophistication—musical chords dexterity—that they hardly understand that African economic systems require but simple and monotonous strum approaches to transformation.
I arrived at this conclusion the other day when I was preparing for a blog on the Leontief Model. It is such a simple thing to understand. It makes you want to look down at all those ‘experts’ filling Malawi’s airwaves and TV screens with their ‘value-chain’ and ‘beneficiation’ talk-talk. They appear to have very little to offer than state the obvious and usually such ‘obviousity’, to an uninformed and/ or hungry man standing in a fuel queue for days on end, is exactly that: aimless chatter by an overfed someone. Too many chords…
But worried that I could be talking out of turn and get caught up by those chordful ‘talking faces’, I dug deeper into Leontief only to discover he had been a Russian-American economist called Wassily and he had had followers/ doctoral students called Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow and Vernon L. Smith. These guys were notable for research into how changes in one economic sector may have an effect on other sectors and they got Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences for that. But I also learned that their work has branched off into fields and/ or economic analysis areas such as ‘gross output’, ‘net output’, ‘computable general equilibrium’, ‘economic base analysis’, ‘IPO Model’, ‘Industrial Organization’, ‘EOICLA’, ‘Shift-share Analysis’ etc [en. Wikipedia /Wassily Leontief]. Naturally, we have our own Malawian economist who imbibed these four guys’ intelligence it oozes out of their ears. One just doesn’t enter their territory and not expect some esoteric backlash.
Though Wassily was around during the post-First World War depression—and Kamuzu [either leaving the USA or already in London] had some inkling about input-output modeling, he appeared not to notice this sense. Indeed, it was only in the late 70s—when Kamuzu had already installed the bulk of his ISI ignominy—that the Input-Output Model became popular. Leontief’s Nobel Prize in 1973 the year of the Yom Kippur War and its implications on sources and supply of global oil. It is thus the year so called 'success story' African economies, including the Malawian economic bubble, went into a tailspin. Yet, poor Kamuzu ignored or did not understand Leontief’s input-output tables and thier implications on Malawi's prefered model of economic development and national accumulation.
Briefly, the Leontief tables analyze the process by which inputs from one industry produce outputs for consumption or for inputs for another industry. One mine filled term I must clear here is 'consumption'. This is not as we, poor you and me, understand it. 'Consumption' is actually more related to 'processing or manufacturing etc'.
Presented in a diagram, the tables are thus:
In other words, the 'inputs' from one part of Malawi must be used [that is consumed] to 'process' semi- or finished goods that become 'outputs' in a form that markets and/ or consumers want. Implied is an interconnected system with return loops. In that situation, you cannot afford to create national compartments—rural Malawi and urban Malawi where the poor are denied the right to produce certain cash crops and a 'spearhead' middle class tasked to boss it over the poor. This is where Kamuzu's ISI model simply went flat against the Leontief Model. His ‘take off’ industrialization—premised on imported raw materials—all the time unaware of the cyclical impacts of one action on another, soon died on him and finally in 2011 the Kamuzu chickens-of-folly have come to roost!
Briefly, the Leontief tables analyze the process by which inputs from one industry produce outputs for consumption or for inputs for another industry. One mine filled term I must clear here is 'consumption'. This is not as we, poor you and me, understand it. 'Consumption' is actually more related to 'processing or manufacturing etc'.
Presented in a diagram, the tables are thus:
In other words, the 'inputs' from one part of Malawi must be used [that is consumed] to 'process' semi- or finished goods that become 'outputs' in a form that markets and/ or consumers want. Implied is an interconnected system with return loops. In that situation, you cannot afford to create national compartments—rural Malawi and urban Malawi where the poor are denied the right to produce certain cash crops and a 'spearhead' middle class tasked to boss it over the poor. This is where Kamuzu's ISI model simply went flat against the Leontief Model. His ‘take off’ industrialization—premised on imported raw materials—all the time unaware of the cyclical impacts of one action on another, soon died on him and finally in 2011 the Kamuzu chickens-of-folly have come to roost!
But despite poor Ngozo’s failures, how does one explain away the rising tribe of modern day talking-faces—armed with so much Leontief hindsight—yet so myopic? Where are they coming from. With so much geniuses why do we continue to live in this fuel-less jungle? Why do they spend so much time talking their heads off about nothing? Why aren't they seriously doing something about the things Leontief dealt with—'gross', 'net', 'base analysis' and/ or 'shift-share analysis'? Isn't this where should arise answers as to where our next gallon of fuel will materialize and in a sustainable manner too?
Chords, chords and chords that is how we were all trained under Kamuzu—that 'One-eyed Philosopher King among the blind'. We were not supposed to know the sources of the Holy Grail and his vision is coming to pass! Noises aside—no one is actually put these chords together to produce the requisite fuel-begetting monotony.
The reality though is clear: this place no longer need chord masters. It needs seasoned musicians. The problem—in this world where economists are increasingly trained into econometrics, ‘unreal’ economics and how to play the 'stock market'—seasoned musicians have gone scarce. Instead, today’s economists play 'Monopoly Economics'. They are more and more involved in share trading. It's monopoly. It's money making rubbish, alright. It is the murky stuff that has since sunk the West into its worst economic quagmire: a dead-end game. Hence, someone recently asked of the muted Euro bail out plans: ‘if it requires so many trillions of Euros to bail out Euro Economies who exactly are these people—in an input-output situation—who are collecting the trillions coming out on the other end?’
Chords, chords and chords that is how we were all trained under Kamuzu—that 'One-eyed Philosopher King among the blind'. We were not supposed to know the sources of the Holy Grail and his vision is coming to pass! Noises aside—no one is actually put these chords together to produce the requisite fuel-begetting monotony.
The reality though is clear: this place no longer need chord masters. It needs seasoned musicians. The problem—in this world where economists are increasingly trained into econometrics, ‘unreal’ economics and how to play the 'stock market'—seasoned musicians have gone scarce. Instead, today’s economists play 'Monopoly Economics'. They are more and more involved in share trading. It's monopoly. It's money making rubbish, alright. It is the murky stuff that has since sunk the West into its worst economic quagmire: a dead-end game. Hence, someone recently asked of the muted Euro bail out plans: ‘if it requires so many trillions of Euros to bail out Euro Economies who exactly are these people—in an input-output situation—who are collecting the trillions coming out on the other end?’
The answer is simple: these are Monopoly Trillions. They are exactly that: Monopoly Paper. If you have ever played the Monopoly game you will know what I am talking about. At the end of the game you gather the money-like paper and stash it back into the box; so that you can play the game another day! It is the psychological satisfaction—just like taking your hard-earned MK50,000 into Zambia and change it into millions of Zambian Kwacha. You get to be a millionaire for an hour! In a monopoly game no one collects anything!
Unfortunately, the so called ‘smartest economists’ in Malawi today are into that psycho and sometimes deadly cheating against the unsuspecting poor. The saddest part of this story is that everyone is busy pursuing these 'economist': to explain what they don’t know or can’t even explain. They cannot, read my lips, supply us with simple monotonous ways of transforming this economy that Kamuzu condemned into ‘importing luxuries while not exporting luxuries to sustain those luxuries’.
Mouthful you think? Then try this: for the Leontief model to tick Malawi must be taught the monotonous song of exporting something valuable so that it can be able import the luxuries her ‘unreal economists’ were pampered upon as they grew up! Because they don’t dish out paper-made lunches at monopoly tables and once the monopoly games have been played, people need to break off for real meals, bought with real money in the national kitchen, someone must generate that real money! Aunt Tiwo and Chimbalanga kapena?
Mouthful you think? Then try this: for the Leontief model to tick Malawi must be taught the monotonous song of exporting something valuable so that it can be able import the luxuries her ‘unreal economists’ were pampered upon as they grew up! Because they don’t dish out paper-made lunches at monopoly tables and once the monopoly games have been played, people need to break off for real meals, bought with real money in the national kitchen, someone must generate that real money! Aunt Tiwo and Chimbalanga kapena?
This requires that the ‘talking faces’ and our ‘unreal economics brothers’ sufficiently explain what goes into a down-to-earth Malawian value chain and where exactly and when this 'beneficiation' mumble jumble they make is going to happen. They really must enunciate what is involved in Leontief areas of ‘economic base analysis’, ‘IPO [input-processor-output] Modeling’, ‘Industrial Organization Modeling’ and 'Structuring Modeling'. That is the stuff Ngozo did not sufficiently understand and out here, in Ngozo's Platonian caves—where the eternal fires are fast cooling down—we are still in the dark and freezing in the scorching African sun. Can our economist explain Shift-share Analysis’ [SSA]—what goes into it and how this is causing fuel queues? How can SSA enables Malawi to get out of the erroneous belief that somehow those companies in Kanengo and Makata—holding foreign licenses for the ever disappearing soft drinks—actually possess veritable answers to our national exporting woes?
Now you know: music [or is it economic development] is not perfection in chord strumming. It is the monotonous and dirty harmonies; fleshed and sweated out into a soulful tune for a transforming and successful Malawi.
Author can also be contacted at zivaiclaude@gmail.com
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