Who is indigenous?

Chinese steel giant snaps up 67pc stake in Zimasco A Chinese company, Sinosteel Corporation, has acquired 67% stake in Zimbabwe’s leading ferrochrome producer and exporter Zimasco Holdings for an undisclosed amount, becoming the majority shareholder.  The deal is yet another show of foreign investors’ confidence in the country’s economy despite the current challenges and misconceptions about the Government’s indigenisation policy.

Now who has misconceptions about the then government’s indigenisation policy?

I thought indigenisation’ meant ‘making indigenous’ and ‘indigenous’, according to my dictionary: ‘aboriginal, local, national, native’ – but not here in Zimbabwe, it seems.

That wasn’t an isolated example. The Herald reported on March 18:

IDC repays US$2,8m to Chinese Eximbank THE Industrial Development Corporation has so far managed to repay about US$2,8 million of the US$17,9 million owed to the Chinese Eximbank. The loan was used to fund construction of the SinoZimbabwe Cement Plant in 1997. . . . . . . .

IDC holds a 35% stake in the Cement Company with the other 65% stake belonging to the Chinese Building and Material Company.

We have here plenty of disciples of the man who said ‘when I use a word, it means precisely what I want it to mean, no more and no less.’ If they want indigenous to include those well-known Zimbabwean commercial farmers Mbingu wa Mutharika and Mengistu Haile Mariam they do, but not my impeccably Shona old friend Nhamo, also a Zimbabwean commercial farmer. Maybe Nhamo (not his real name, for obvious reasons) didn’t qualify because he bought his farm instead of waiting for ZANU (PF) to give him one. Maybe he didn’t have a party card. I don’t know, but he was so busy farming he might not have had time to attend to trivialities like that.

At one time I was amused to hear a Ghanaian business man called ‘indigenous’, but it isn’t so funny when farm workers, with their wives, children and grandchildren are driven from the farms where they were born because they are ‘foreign’.

Naybe in the last case, the deciding factor was not where they were born, not the colour of their skin, but the colour of their money and of their party card.  The Ghanaian presumably had a nice fat bank account and, since he had friends in ZANU (PF), he might have had the required card. A farm worker, on the other hand, can’t afford a bank account and nobody thought of selling him a party card until people were being expelled from their houses and beaten to a pulp for not having those funny bits of paper.

And can companies be indigenous, even if they are based on another continent (as long as it isn’t Europe or north America) and their owners don’t have black skins (as long as they aren’t white)?

Or is ‘indigenisation’ just the assertion of a local chef’s right to give the people’s assets to any foreign patron he likes? Was agreeing to the Rudd Concession an example of Lobengula’s indigenisation policy?