eBusiness Weekly
Clifford Shambare
When considering such a subject, the temptation is to ask; does democracy lead to economic prosperity? I am sure you can see that this is a leading question.
And there is something not quite right about asking leading questions. This is why they are normally discouraged in research survey questionnaires, among other similar situations. That said, if one were to bring up such a topic for discussion in a country such as Zimbabwe today, it is not an exaggeration to posit that, quite a sizeable proportion of people — especially the urbanites — would automatically become emotional. But why?
The way I see the matter, the main reason is that there has been so much propaganda spread among the people, especially from outsiders, that “Zimbabwe is currently being ruled by dictators who violate human rights, rig election results, and indulge in all manner of evil”. And Robert Mugabe, the former president of this country, has become the epitome of that phenomenon.
But if that be the case, Mugabe has not been the only one on the continent doing such things since there have been many ‘dictators’ there.
Nor is Africa the origin of the phenomenon. In this case, the names that easily come to mind are; Muammar Qaddafi (Libya), Jean Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Omar Hassan al Basheer (Sudan) and the current Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, among the most prominent ones.
Then there are those on whom the “judges” do not always agree regarding this attribute — that is that of [being] a dictator — these being Kwameh Nkrumah, Paul Kagame, Ian Khama Seretse Khama — a darling of the West — the latter may be because of his interracial genetic makeup of a British mother and a Tswana father. Then there is John Magufuli, the former president of Tanzania who died suddenly, apparently from the Covid 19 pandemic in 2021— a man they have dubbed ‘the bulldozer’, whom they also admire for effectively dealing with corruption in that country. Paradoxically, the said corruption did not take place during his time but that of Jakaya Kikwete, another darling of the West.
But it is also not an exaggeration to posit that, not everyone who is actively involved in Zimbabwe’s politics today, knows about these other African leaders.
So back to our subject of democracy. Today many Zimbabweans have been made to think that anyone who questions the legitimacy of democracy must be a sympathiser of dictators and dictatorship.
But nothing could be further from the truth since there is a lot of evidence to disprove such thinking.
To begin with, in the West where they do not take unquestioning positions on any issue, they have carried out a lot of studies to probe this matter.
However, it will be premature to start discussing their findings at this stage, so we shall bide our time on this aspect of the matter until we get to the right stage.
At this juncture, I feel that in order to get to the gist of the matter, we need to first go back to the history of the subject of democracy.
If and when we do this, we come to realise that this form of rule is very old. Democracy is said to have been started in the city of Athens by Pericles, the Greek philosopher and politician, between 508 and 507 BCE.
But then it died, or shall we say—went underground for a period of about 2000 years until it resurfaced starting with the formation of the Dutch Republic in 1581, followed by the French Revolution in 1792. In Great Britain some pertinent changes in this direction took place from 1649 when Oliver Cromwell was the prime minister of that country.
This is the same year in which Charles I the then king of England, was executed for treason.
Now, it is critical here, to study the events that took place during the interim period since they practically affect, to a great extent, everything that is taking place in the world today in the sphere of politics and economics. Ignoring these events will mask these phenomena that have been critical to the current state of the whole world’s economy. Here I have in mind the phenomena of mercantilism and capitalism.
These are phenomena from which the developed economies got such an advantage over the developing ones that it will simply not be possible for the latter to catch up with them on this side of eternity.
And these are conditions in which we are made to believe that democracy is synonymous with, or will automatically lead to, economic prosperity in any economy. When the matter is considered from this perspective, it will not seem weird after all, to question the link between democracy — a political system, and prosperity (or lack thereof) — the latter being a system that is related to economics.
At this stage of our discourse, I am sure those of us who are scientific minded will already be itching for a study in which the correlation or regression between the two, is brought into the question.
Fortunately for us, such work has already been, and still is, being carried out. So at this stage we are free to discuss the findings so far, from such work without seeming crazy in the process.
Here we have scientists like David Barro and David Prezowsky whose findings can be summarised as follows: “It has been established that democracy is most effective in bringing about economic prosperity at the middle level of development and that at the lowest level where most developing economies (Zimbabwe included) fall, dictatorship may even be beneficial! At the top level where most developed economies fall, democracy’s impact on economic prosperity has been found to wane.”
That said, there is not enough scope in this discourse, to delve into the reasons behind those findings.
But, however, I am tempted to suggest that at its topmost level, the capitalist system has had, and still appear to have, little appetite for the democratic practice.
In this respect, consider that at board level, decisions are made by a few individuals — that is, the chairman and the directors. Here, not even the shareholders/stakeholders, who are the majority, are not allowed to have a say in the way the organisation is run on a daily basis.
Consider also, the often strained relationship between workers’ committees and management.
For example, here we have the Walmart case and that of the Marikana mine in South Africa. Both of these cases took many years to resolve. And even then, the Walmart case is still problematic!
The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ campaign — that is almost forgotten phenomenon whose outcome was not very clear — is another indictment to unbridled capitalism. And still, Donald Trump’s attitude and behaviour when he was still in office as the US president, seemed undemocratic in spite of him having been elected in a democratic system!
At this juncture, I am pretty certain that most of us will be surprised by these findings. However, this should not be the case since under such circumstances as found in a developing economy, it is not an exaggeration to assert that the relationship between the electorate and the political leadership is still full of intrigue.
In such circumstances, one cannot safely assume that the two parties understand all pertinent political and economic issues to the same degree.
If in doubt of this assertion, consider ZDERA in this country. It is most likely that a sizeable proportion of the man in the street — or even a good number of those in politics in this country — do not know about the existence of this US Act — an act on a country outside the USA— let alone understand its contents.
Moreover, this democracy thing is so full of intrigue that it cannot be taken as sacrosanct. Here I want to refer you to Peter Nathan in his small book, “The Psychology of Fascism”, published by Faber and Faber in 1955, in which he discusses what happens in a fascist system of government as practiced by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, just before and during the Second World War between 1938 and 1945.
Nathan talks of conditions when the people become unquestioningly loyal to leadership — a condition he refers to as “The leader Principle”.
In that book Nathan also claims that, “A democracy can only remain democratic as long as the people want it to, when in their minds the government has ceased to be ‘we’ and become ‘they’, the people are ready for dictatorship ( . . . )”.
But this is exactly the opposite of what has been happening in Zimbabwe for the past couple of decades — a period in which the majority of Zimbabweans have believed that the system — that is the country, the government, the economy, and all, have become theirs. In another chapter in the same book, Nathan claims that ‘after a revolution when people do not fully understand the trend of things, they want strong leadership that comes from a dictatorship. In this respect, I want to draw your attention to what I have actually witnessed myself.
A short period from the time he died, people from both sides of our very polarised political divide started to yearn for the return of Mugabe — a “dictator”, “to effectively deal with” the price rises that were causing them much pain, a phenomenon that they did not understand.
During the same period, specifically, on November 1,2019, I and my wife stopped to have a meal of grilled chicken and sadza at a small roadside outlet near Norton, that sells such a meal, plus a bar.
While there, I overhead someone claim, over a beer drink, that Mthuli Ncube, the current Minister of Finance and Economic Development “is the best finance minister so far because he has stopped people from playing with electricity”.
He went on to explain that in the UK, one would be “crazy” to use electricity for cooking since it is forbiddingly expensive to do so.
“In that country where I lived for many years, they use gas for that purpose!”, he announced rather smugly.
At that juncture, I became curious enough to interject, after which he surprised me by claiming that “Mugabe was the problem”.
“Why?”, I asked him, rather surprised.
“Because he spoiled the people”.
“How?”, I asked him, getting more curious.
“By making us believe that life was easy—by overprotecting us”.
At that very point, I was not able to tell whether the man was being sincere or (being) sarcastic since he looked a bit tipsy then. But whatever the case may be, it still remains pertinent to ask this question: What do you yourself, make of such a state of affairs, and such thinking?
What all this boils down to is that here we are very likely to be being misled to assume that under our current circumstances, democracy will automatically lead to economic success and /or prosperity.
This is particularly so regarding the eventual ownership of this economy by its indigenes, the blacks.
But, however, arguing this way is a bit scary to some of us today in this country.
Be that as it may, consider the case of Lee Kuan Yoo— a well proven dictator who stayed in office for thirty years and his son Joko Widodo who succeeded him in Singapore — a country whose economic success is there for all to see.
Consider also the case of Paul Kagame and his touted economic success in Rwanda. And paradoxically, the West has surprisingly (for some unclear reason) been quite tolerant of these two regimes so far!
That said, I am not insinuating that democracy itself, is necessarily a bad system of Government.
In fact, the opposite is true. However, when those who are overzealous about the subject—who interestingly, include a sizeable proportion of my fellow Zimbabweans — want to make me believe that it is also a panacea for our economic woes, then I have problems imbibing such thinking.
This is especially the case when some of them throw the element of racism into the issue, as they often do.
But then, you may be thinking that I am now trying to dodge the issue.
So in that case, you may still want to argue that racism is dead as some of us claim. But like Eric Bronfmann and Elizabeth Zutsmann, who themselves are (American) Jews — a race that has so far, experienced rather scary racism through the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, mostly from fellow whites — claim in their book: “Jewish Rennaisance, Hope not fear”, racism will never end. It will only go underground, only to resurface from time to time, when its protagonists find it necessary to practice it.
In this case, remember South Africa, a country in which the phenomenon has sometimes — even today — assumed crazy proportions.
For example, today in that country, at a resort near Cape Town — an Afrikaner man and his spouse, also white, have declared, and are actually forbidding, black people from coming to their resort.
And apparently, because of the democratic system — a system for which that country is now receiving accolades from the West for implementing after many years of apartheid—no one, and no [existing] law dares (to)stop them from carrying out their wishes!
So at this juncture, I leave you the reader, to continue pondering over the issues I have scratched into through this discourse. I say ‘scratched’ since this is a vast and provocative subject that cannot be done justice to, through such a brief article as this one.
Clifford Shambare is an agriculture economist based in Chinhoyi and is reachable on 0714045435
