FAILURE THE ONLY OPTION (08-02-07)

ess people and the ever-present black marketers. Some of the latter had horded thousands of foreign currency notes in anticipation of the devaluation, and now they are struggling to sell them. Such is the nature of the Zimbabwean economy these days.
Governor Gono’s statement highlighted numerous ills inflicting this economy and some of us were not hesitant to scream, “We told you so!” Most impressive among the ills Gono identified was the corruption among senior politicians and government officials who buy maize dirty cheaply from the Grain Marketing Board and re-sell it to the same parastatals at the government gazetted price, which is nearly ten times higher. They do the same with government subsidised fuel.
Sadly, Gono had little by way of solutions to these social and economic maladies. Instead he proffered a sterile solution by placing his whole trust in the so-called social contract. Gono, of all people, should be aware that a social contract requires high levels of consensus politics in order to succeed. The various entities that need to agree on the tenets of the social contract have to reach a consensus on the problem, the causes(s) of the problem, and the possible solutions.
My reading of the Zimbabwean body politic is that no such consensus exists among the key players in the economy. Let’s take, for example, the Tripartite Negotiating Forum (TNF), a crucial element of the social contract. The TNF is hardly functioning because only one of the three legs of that three-legged pot is somewhat operational. The other two, the business and the labour, have virtually collapsed.
Both business and labour have been so depleted due to the economic quagmire that Zimbabwe is experiencing that their viability in forging a meaningful social contract is highly questionable. With the rate of unemployment at +80% we are really talking about only 20% of the workforce in the formal sector, and the rest are in the informal sector.
To all intents and purposes, those in the informal sector have no role to play in the forging of the social contract. The remnants of business in Zimbabwe are mostly operating at about 25% of capacity. This also weakens their capability to make any decisions that will impact significantly on the social contract. Further, the only strong leg of the three-legged pot is itself gravely deformed by all manner of political and policy defects.
Gono came closest to stating that the socio-economic problems that are facing Zimbabwe are essentially political. Without dealing with the political deformities, no social contract, however well devised, will work in this country. Some of the political absurdities that Gono could have identified, but did not, include: the existence of a national dictator whose expiry date passed more than ten years ago, a bunch of looters and swindlers right within government and the ruling party structures, defective policies that are devised by half-wits, drunks and sick rulers, and the transformation of a once vibrant nation into a predatory state that feeds on the blood of its own people.
Further, what Gono spelt out was an unequivocal admission that the breakdown of the rule of law has reached phenomenal levels in Zimbabwe, where even the business enterprises of the perpetrators of lawlessness are now also threatened. My message to Gideon is simply that there will be no solution to Zimbabwe’s economic problems without regime change.