Policy discord harming Zimbabwe says Dutch envoy

Academic and former Tanzanian Foreign Minister Abdulrahman Babu argues in the postscript to Walter Rodney’s book: How Europe underdeveloped Africa: “Are we not underdeveloped now because we have been colonised in the past? There is no clear explanation to the fact that practically the whole of the underdeveloped world has been colonised either directly or indirectly by the western powers.

“And what is colonialism if it is not a system of ‘foreign investments’ by the metropolitan power? If it has contributed to our underdevelopment in the past, is it not likely to contribute to our underdevelopment now, even if the political reins are in our hands?

“Put in this way the question of underdevelopment is immediately rendered more intelligible, even to the uninitiated. And this is how Dr Rodney is directing us to pose our questions.

“The inevitable conclusion is that foreign investment does not only help to undermine our economies by extracting enormous profits, etc., but it does more serious damage to the economies by distorting them into lopsidedness and if the process is not arrested in time, the distortion could be permanent.

“As long as we continue, as we have done for centuries, to produce for the so-called ‘world market’ which was founded on the hard rock of slavery and colonialism, our economies will remain colonial. Any development will be entirely incidental, leaving the vast majority of the population wholly uninvolved in the economic activity.

“The more we invest in export branches in order to capture the ‘world market’ the more we divert away from investing for people’s development and, consequently, the least effective our development effort.”

http://www.insiderzim.com/foreign-investment-is-not-the-answer/

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