WHO SHOULD WE IMITATE?

By ZOL President.

Once again I would like to throw a little jab on the Post newspaper, the biggest and most consistent champions of centralist planning and paternalistic socialism in Zambia. It is clear that they have become quite influential to the government these days, since the new deal government has decided to take them very seriously – in extreme contrast to the attitude of the Chiluba administration, which seemed completely oblivious to the views of the media and other people. The result is that the government is becoming more and more sure that their socialist policies and their centralist approach to “economic planning” is the right way to go.

But why would anyone follow a philosophy that has no existential evidence for any positive results? There is no country in the history of the world that became rich by pursuing the philosophies being propagated by the Post newspaper. Perhaps they believe they have just invented a way of making it work for the first time – seeing that they always chant about the need for Africans to develop their own “African solutions”. This ambition is of course pointless in a world in which the wheel has already been invented. They might as well propagate an “African solution” to computational problems in quantum gravity – why should it be limited to the field of political and economic practice?

We do not need an African solution to our problems, or to any problem for that matter – just as we do not need an American solution or a Japanese solution. What we need is a solution, period, whether it is African, Asian or even extraterrestrial. What the person in the village wants is some food on his table; whether it comes from the thinking of John Banda or John Hopkins or John Kuzusuki is inconsequential to him.  He just wants a way of being alive tomorrow.

Right now we know that there are some nations in the world that have prospered tremendously. If we had any sense at all, we should have been preoccupied to a near obsessive level with the achievements of these nations so that we could identify precisely how they did it. To concentrate on nations that are mediocre or half-failures bespeaks a lack of sanity. The Post exalts nations like Cuba, which by any metric or measure are clear under-performers (poor). The economy of Cuba is nowhere near its potential under global comparisons of economic performance. Fidel Castro’s policies should not therefore be our model for “development”, unless we want to end up like him.

For some reason, the Post believes Cuba is quite a prosperous nation. If they truly and sincerely believe this then they are grossly incompetent as journalists. There is not a month that passes in international media without a report of Cubans risking their lives to cross into the United States of America or other nations. Now, I might be just naive but I do not see how anyone can risk his life trying to escape from a life of abundant prosperity! Common sense dictates a different interpretation: they hate Cuba! When was the last time people risked their lives to escape from Switzerland?

I certainly would not like Zambia to “develop” to a point where we will be risking our lives to migrate to another nation. The rate of emigration from a nation is the surest measure of its quality of life. It is only in the world of the Post editors that this does not indicate anything; or it indicates a good measure of success.

The policies being sold by the Post newspaper and other well-meaning Zambian ‘intellectuals’ are identical to the ones Fidel Castro practices in his own nation. He believes the government should direct everything in the economy, even if they do not necessarily own everything. The government determines what they should import, what they should export, what the people should consume (they condemn what they call a ‘consumerist’ society, so they decide for the people what their ‘important needs’ are!). We have people in Zambia who have studied these policies and they believe these will make us prosper. How someone can make a scientific connection between prosperity and policies that have made other nations fail is of course something that is puzzling. The only reason it is not funny is that our government leaders have started echoing these paternalistic socialist policies as they propose a stronger role for the government in the economy.

Instead of spending even one precious minute studying the policies of Fidel Castro, a sensible man should be studying the economies and cultures of more developed nations. What we have instead are intellectuals who are voluntarily blind to all these positive aspects of developed nations’ cultures, preferring instead to view them as “evil neocolonialists”, and “global imperialists,” and other terms that effectively say nothing.

Neocolonialism is a belief that the Western nations are out to get us. That sounds like neo-paranoia to me. What every believer in neo-colonialism fails to answer is the simple question: why do they want to colonise us? The answer that comes is unbelievably artless: they did it to us in the past, so they want to do it again. Our intellectuals even have a way of arranging this doctrine chronologically: first there was the slave trade in which they conquered us physically, and then there was colonialism, which was political conquest; and now we have economic colonisation.

This of course does not answer the question ‘why’. In the slave trade there was a very objective reason why they came to get the slaves – they wanted free labour on their farms. In the colonial era, they wanted our minerals and other natural resources. So we see that in both cases it was economic considerations at issue – not physical conquest or political domination, both of which were just auxiliary to their main purpose. One should therefore wonder how they now plan to conquer us (i.e., the poorest continent in the world) for their economic benefit – in the post-colonial era.

An answer is usually posited even to that question: they do it through imposing their imperialist, neoliberal policies on us. They tell us to privatise our companies, and to liberalise our markets. But this still begs the question, how does this lead to their economic benefit? The apparently obvious answer is that they want to buy up our companies when we privatise them, and they want to sell their products to us when we liberalise our market (allowing foreign goods to come in cheaply).

Already one sees a contradiction here. Why should they want us to sell our companies to them and then open these companies to intense competition from outside imports – eg south Africa? Why would the same imperialists ask us to sell them Kapiri Glass Company and then force us to permit Johannesburg Glass Manufacturers to sell their cheaply produced glass here? Wouldn’t that be suicidal to them?

Obviously, if logic means anything, these two propositions cannot both be correct. We have to reject one premise, or else we should qualify one of our theories. Perhaps we should say that they only want to buy those companies that would face no competition from outside companies in the liberalisation process. But we would be hard pressed to find such companies, except perhaps in the export sector which does not depend on the local market.

But even if it was true that the imperialists wanted to buy the exporting companies, like the mining companies, we still have to account for other issues in our experience of this process. For example, how many of the privatised mines were bought by American imperialists? Since we are told that Americans are the chief imperialists in the whole equation, using the World Bank and IMF as their pawns to effect their imperialist strategy, we should expect that Americans are the ones buying most of our companies. Evidence does not show that at all. The mines were bought by all sorts of people from any parts of the world, including India and South Africa. If the privatisation process was an American imperialist strategy then evidently they did not execute it very well for themselves.

Even the other charge - that they want us to open up our market so that they could sell their goods to us - is only sensible if one does not have empirical facts. The value of the Zambian market, according to official statistics is less than 3 billion dollars. Why would anyone go to such lengths to conquer a market that is relatively so small that it is not even pocket change to him? 3 billion dollars is not even ten per cent of what Warren Buffet, an individual citizen in the U.S., possesses (not to mention Bill Gates himself). 3 billion dollars is not even equal to the money the US government spends to just monitor the weather in one state!

Some anti-imperialist intellectuals have even suggested that the reason the IMF advised us to open up a stock market exchange was so that they could also conquer us through this avenue. Again statistics makes this allegation suspiciously absurd. Did you know that the volume of trade that takes place on all the stock markets of Africa put together (excluding south Africa) FOR THE WHOLE YEAR, is equal to the trade that happens in only one morning on the New York Stock Exchange? Seriously. And again, we are talking about ALL the stock markets combined – for the WHOLE year! Why would anyone be passionate about conquering a few minutes’ worth of trade for the whole year?

When one gets acquainted with the facts they might stop giving all their nonsensical theories they give about neo-colonialism and just get a little serious about their own strategies for development. Realising just how wide these disparities are should make one realise that the sort of strategies that are needed are completely radical and revolutionary (but still existentially logical).

I also do not believe that Zambia can ever develop by following the capitalist policies of the IMF. But I believe this only because I do not believe the IMF is capitalist enough. They are too conservative and too slow, and sometimes they are also too timid because of the opposition they have received so far from the Marxist world. If they were really capitalist, they should not have allowed us to take so long to privatise our “strategic” parastatals, for instance. They should have demanded that ZESCO, ZCCM, ZAMTEL, ZANACO should be privatised in the first year itself – or else no donor money. And they should have demanded immediate tax reduction for the whole economy, immediate reduction of government size, etc. That’s what I would call real capitalism. That would be radical.

But such prescriptions can never come from the IMF because they are afraid of offending the international community of Marxist socialists, or perhaps they just don’t know that this is the only way we can get out of our problems quickly. This is why we need someone within (a president) who will do things one day that are so radical that even the IMF will fear. That’s the only hope we have. We can not do it at their pace; we have to beat them.

Even Zambians who are a bit sympathetic with the IMF policies say that Chiluba’s mistake was to do those things too quickly. They believed his privatisation and liberalisation program was too fast. But the truth, once again, is that his program was way too slow, and this is why the people felt the painful results of his policies over a protracted period of time.

It’s like a medical doctor who injects your vein very slowly, while he is also talking to other doctors and even fighting with them. The doctor’s injection must be very quick so that pain can last for only a short time. What we had in Zambia was not too fast implementation but too slow. While the doctor had his needle in our vein, he was taking his time fighting his political enemies (‘dribbling’ and ‘political engineering’ them), just wasting our time for nothing. We ended up with a process that only produced pain, and the people started blaming the needle and the medicine for the pain. And they said they should discontinue the medication because the pain from the needle was even stronger than the pain from the sickness in the first place. This is very true. But it was because of the doctor. Not only was he incompetent (next time we should have a real doctor), he was also more interested in his own personal programs.

Had everything been done in the first few years, the effects would have been different. Critics of the so-called neoliberal policies have a lot of countries to use as examples of the failure of these policies. But what is omitted is the fact that all these nations had a very slow and very conservative approach to these reforms, moving at the snail pace of the beleaguered IMF. We also have nations like some of those in the former communist Eastern Europe, like Lithuania, which had a very radical program of free market reforms, doing it very quickly and boldly, wasting no time in politicking and squabbling and stealing. They stand out today as some of the best examples of the positive power of capitalism.

The president of one of these prospering nations was once asked what his secret was. He said, “ I have read the books of Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek.” Friedman and Hayek are some of the most radical free market philosophers who have ever lived (the former is still alive). Professor Friedman, an economics nobel prize laureate, is so radical that he does not believe the IMF and World Bank are capitalist institutions, but socialist ones! It was Friedman who was consulted by the Chinese government itself before they started on their current path of capitalism; and he was the one who inspired the radical “supply side” capitalist revolution of both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Reagonomics and Thatcherism). Friedman thinks the IMF is not capitalistic at all; African intellectuals think the IMF is too capitalistic. Until we cross to the other side of this perspective position, we have no hope of ever coming out of our hell.

We have to become more capitalist than the capitalists themselves. We have to be neo-neoliberalist. When your entire GDP is less than the money another nation on the same planet uses to monitor its weather, you cannot afford to be conventional. The IMF’s capitalist policies are said to have the potential of giving us 5 per cent annual growth rate if we follow them faithfully. We should find real capitalist policies that will give us 12 per cent or higher growth rate – even 20 per cent is possible. China was growing at 12 per cent after consulting with radical capitalists like Milton Friedman and his colleagues. They did not even completely follow his recommendations, but they did enough to achieve such “miraculous” growth rates every year.

Mozambique is experiencing a very high growth rate because it is following relatively radical capitalist policies, without pretensions of any sorts and without concentrating on political infightings. Uganda has also tried to follow such policies, even if it is with great difficulty. In spite of the president of Uganda’s controversial political record, his economic performance has been one of the best on the continent. This has inspired his neighbors to do it even more than him. Rwanda is pursuing the privatisation process with a religious commitment and they are already beginning to see the positive results of this. The reason Museveni of Uganda banned political parties was precisely because he wanted the nation to concentrate on capitalist economic rebuilding instead of political squabbles; Chiluba, on the other hand, was in the forefront of our squabbles while he pretended to be fixing the economy.

Zambia was supposed to have been a showcase for positive results of capitalist policies, had our president not become a political engineer (as he called himself) and a “political dribbler”. We would have been the great example of radical capitalism had he not pretended to do what he was not really doing (thus “dribbling” the IMF and World Bank). We would have become a great nation if he had cut expenditure as much as he said he would (he kept increasing it) – he introduced huge trips abroad, big conferences at home, new government positions at district level, new government ministries, and of course, corrupt awards of contracts to questionable companies – all these made the economy weaker, not stronger. And to make things worse, he started the privatisation process at a very fast pace, except the companies he started with were mostly already dead, thus giving only a false picture of radical privatisation (so what if you privatise one hundred dead companies in a year?), and then he completely slowed down. When it came to the companies that were actually alive, he started delaying tactics (ZCCM was only sold in 2000, and the other big parastatals are still in government hands).

Some say that we should not privatise ZESCO and ZAMTEL because even developed nations took long to privatise such companies. That might be true, but it is not logical. Just because it took someone one hundred years before he started using light bulbs at night does not mean it should take us that long. Chiluba used to give a similar excuse for not perfecting the democratic process quickly – just because it took the developed nations long before they became democratic, he thought we should also take our time. I wish he said the same thing about driving vehicles – it took the developed nations many years before their politicians could drive luxury cars. Somehow we could not wait that long for this one – our ministers drove four such cars from day one of the new dispensation!

I believe we should see how the developed nations developed, but we should do whatever they have done much more than them, and much, much faster. This is because our situation is much more desperate than any of these nations have ever been in. But what is senseless, of course, is to imitate those nations that have failed – like Cuba.

Development, according to Nobel laureate Kenneth Galbraith, is just the faithful imitation of the developed.

END

Click here to read a short article by radical capitalist Milton Friedman.