Zimbabwe is not a horse to be ridden

Hardly anything defensible! Zimbabwe has no other “mother” except itself. It must produce the milk that its children suckles, and which nourishes them. Similarly, Zimbabwe is not a horse to be ridden; rather, it is a sovereign country looking to engage and re-engage with other sovereign nations of the world, all on the principle of equality and mutual gain. Above all, it is a young, ambitious nation anxious and ready to leapfrog, so it industrialises and modernises itself rapidly.

We must use all our finite mineral resources to build our capacity to transform and industrialise our economy. Only that way do we develop and modernise our people and society.

We can never do so for as long as we see ourselves as suppliers of raw materials to other countries and continents, for their exclusive processing, so, in turn, they turn us into mere buyers and consumers of expensive goods made out of raw materials they will have secured from us for pittance.

In the end, we lose finite resources; we lose value; we lose jobs and skills, simply because we have agreed to be frozen for endless time as producers and exporters of raw materials, including mineral ores! We have to break that colonially-derived legacy.

The time has now come to break false and artificial enclaves created by the colonial mode of production in our economies. Our mining sector must talk to industry, indeed trigger industrialisation in our country where mining takes place. This cannot happen for as long as raw, unprocessed ores are being sent abroad. The time, too, has come to use our comparative advantage as sources of finite raw materials to cause global capital to relocate to where the resource exists, namely in our country and on our continent.

That way, even skills we lost to the developed world will return home to complement those we build through our own efforts. A new political economy must begin to emerge, until we get to that critical stage where all processing and all value chains are domesticated in our country. This is the vision I have; indeed, the thinking behind recent measures we took in respect of mining. All those factors, which Professor Beckert identified as transforming global capitalism in a grand way, must now find expression in our country and on our continent.

My call to all Zimbabweans, both at home and abroad, is for us to develop a new consciousness which is oriented towards a new socio-economy in which transformational processes are domesticated to become resident in our country. We can no longer be happy to circumvent national markets we create for our minerals, in favour of foreign ones where we are duped and where value is lost or traded cheaply. We need a new nationalism which contests net national value loss through un-strategic exportation of our non-renewables.

And much more. We need to set new sights on skills development and rapid technology uptake so we become useful players in the emerging value-driven socio-economy.

Focused research and development must become the new calling. It is not enough to ban raw mineral ores; we must begin to apply ourselves towards building industrial processes and structures, which transform those ores into semi-to finished products here at home.

On its part, Government will be ready to support and encourage, both through policy and through facilities, any efforts aimed at advancing a value-chain driven socio-economy.

Above all, Government will now proceed by identifying clusters of minerals which together underpin any one value chain so we rapidly take off.

The question we should be asking ourselves in respect of lithium is, what minerals, what capital, what industrial structures, what skills set and what strategic partnerships do we need to launch a new energy industry for a new global age in which Zimbabwe is a notable player?

That is the National Question and challenge.

Nyika inovakwa nekutongwa nevene vayo!

(113 VIEWS)