To Prime Minister Mugabe
New African May 1980
Open letter to Prime Minister Mugabe
Dear Comrade Mugabe,
Warm congratulations on your victory and comradely salutations
from your admirers!
In the last five years or so since you took over the reins of ZANU
you have shown magnificent qualities of leadership – resolute
without being dogmatic, daring without being adventurist, and
flexible without being lax.
But above all, you have revealed yourself during this period as an
outstanding strategist and tactician both in political organisation
and in war.
With all these rare qualities it would be presumptuous even to
attempt to tell you and your gallant comrades-in-arms what is to
be done in independent Zimbabwe. Moreover, you know better
than any outsider the concrete situation in the country. This
letter does not claim to tell you anything you don’t know; it only
seeks to reemphasise some salient points which we may lose sight
of in the euphoria of freedom.
The enemies of Africa are anxious to prove that every new African
country is doomed to failure and, to ensure that this does indeed
take place, they will want to entangle you deeply in their world
system so as to destroy you. Proof? Look at what is happening in
practically all sister countries: economic chaos, shortage of food
and other basic necessities, corruption, and so on, is the order of
the day. You, as a revolutionary, will be a special target
particularly because of Zimbabwe’s proximity to South Africa.
You are, however, fortunate in that Zimbabwe is the last but one
arrival into the world arena, as a proud, free country, and so you
can learn from the mistakes of other countries that have
preceded you. This is the purpose of this open letter. If you have
thought about the problem along the lines discussed below then
this letter is redundant. If you don’t agree with it, then it is
irrelevant. In either case, it will still be worth our whole to repeat
to ourselves all the points raised if only to keep them fresh in our
minds.
The other reason for this exercise is that we owe it to Africa and
to history to share our past and present experience in order to
arm ourselves against possible pitfalls which are all too common
in the challenging period of national reconstruction. We have
been struggling and continue to struggle against many odds,
natural and man-made, and we need not be ashamed or scared of
making mistakes. We learn through mistakes. Our task is to
minimise them when we can, and this we can do by reminding
ourselves again and again of the obvious ones. This is the spirit
of the letter.
Unlike many developing countries, you are taking over a country
with considerable potential. Let me give some comparative
statistics. Kenya, a fairly “prosperous” country, has double the
population of Zimbabwe (14m to your 7 m) and yet its Gross
Domestic Product is only $2 900m compared to your $3 560m
(1976 World Bank figures), or a per capita income of $220 to
your $550. (Incidentally when the bourgeoisie took over France
in 1792 the country’s per capita income was just about $600.)
Zimbabwe has a fairly solid industrial base most of which was
made possible thanks to the “sanctions” which forced the country
to look inward. It was what you might call a blessing in disguise.
(Looking back, one wishes that sanctions had been imposed
against all African countries soon after independence. What a
happy people we would have been! It was “aid” that proved to be
the kiss of death.) Your agricultural base, too, is fairly healthy.
From this level Zimbabwe has an excellent chance to move rapidly
to a self-sustaining development. As a socialist you will no doubt
want this development to be accompanied with social justice. And
here is the crux of the matter.
How do we restructure an economy whose social basis was to
exploit the majority for the benefit of the minority? Seemingly the
easiest way is to take over the “commanding heights” of the
economy and transform it into a popular based one. But this is
easier said than done, with enormous potential dangers. We often
tend to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and
consequently fail to raise the most essential, most basis question:
Where to begin?
While it is impossible for outsiders to know the concrete situation
without a thorough investigation, there are, nevertheless,
generally acceptable principles that may be applicable to any
country at a given level of the development of its productive
forces. If the latter are at a low level then it is imperative that
their development be regarded as top priority, even over that of
the relations of production. In Maoist terms, development of the
productive forces in this case becomes the principal aspect of the
contradiction with production relations as a secondary one. This
strategy has variously been called the New Economic Policy, or
N.E.P, or the New Democracy, in which capitalist relations are
allowed to co-exist with socialist ones. And this was done for very
practical reasons: to allow maximum opportunity and facility for
the productive forces to develop as rapidly as possible without in
the meantime causing economic dislocations and subjecting the
people to unjustified hardships. It cannot be over-emphasised
that people are our most precious capital and, therefore, they
must eat well, be housed and clothed well.
This, then, is our starting point. The economy must be so
structured as to provide adequate food, good housing and cheap
but good clothing. In the course of providing these the economy
will also develop a good agricultural foundation, together with
engineering and extensive textile industries. All these will create
vast employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of
people currently un- or under-employed, who in turn will help
expand the home market- essential for further industrial and
agricultural development.
For this to take place, one will of course need to generate
investible resources or accumulation for investment. One of the
most unfortunate experiences of developing countries is that they
all sought these resources from external sources, either in the
form of loans or aid, which has led to heavy and unbearable debt
burdens (bankruptcy, you might say) which now threaten our
very survival as sovereign states. To avoid this monumental
pitfall, it is essential for a country to generate its investible
resources internally, first and foremost.
How? There are two ways: by taxing (but not over taxing) the
private sector; and by utilising for this purpose the surpluses
that will come from future state enterprises.
At this level of development it may be advisable to allow
maximum (but disciplined) play of individual initiative in
economic activity guided by the principle of “utilise, win over and
control”. You utilise the existing private skills and resources for
rapid development of the productive forces; you win over through
education and persuasion all good elements to serve social rather
than individual ends; and you control private sector incomes
through fixing the sale prices of their products (allowing, of
course, for proper incentives); tax their profits, control its
repatriation and encourage ploughing back.
It could be made into a principle that at least 50 % of the
accumulation from this source should go into state productive
investments annually and the rest can go into paying recurrent
expenditure and the building up of economic and social
infrastructures. This principle will discipline the bureaucracy and
prevent them from indulging in unnecessary low priority
expenditure while, at the same time it will help to build step by
step the state industrial sector that is nonexistent at the
moment, for example, iron and steel industries, machine tool
industry, metallurgy, petrochemical industry and so on; in short,
heavy industry or Department No.1.
It will not be worthwhile to pay serious attention to such pundits
as Rene Dumont1 and their like who urge us to concentrate on
small-scale production on the argument that small is beautiful.
No country in history has developed on that basis. But given our
condition of uneven development in Africa, perhaps the best way
will be to combine large-scale and intermediate production.
Where, for instance, you already have large farms you either
expand them where necessary or you maintain them at their
present level and thereby enjoy the benefits of large-scale
farming. Where production is still peasant based you may want
to develop it to an intermediate level with producers cooperatives
as their basic units.
Experience elsewhere has taught us that the taking over of
ongoing viable farms has invariably led to almost total collapse of
agricultural production and has forced the countries concerned
to incur heavy foreign debt to import food. As foreign borrowing
without repayment cannot be sustained for a long time the
countries are forced literally to beg for food on an international
scale. This is undesirable from both the economic and political
standpoints, to say nothing of national dignity.
It is a painful history fact that in Zimbabwe such large-scale
farms are owned by white settlers, some of whom are liberal and
others incorrigibly reactionary. To expropriate them will amount
to economic disaster, at least in the short run. To allow them to
continue as before will amount to perpetuating a national
injustice. This is a serious dilemma. Probably you and your party
have already made up your minds on how to tackle it. To an
outsider it will seem possible to avoid both of these undesirable
consequences by:
*where possible, surrounding all these settler farms by producer
agricultural cooperatives;
* making obligatory for the settler farms, as a condition for their
existence to share their facilities (farm implements, expertise,
marketing, dispensary service etc.) with the newly established
cooperatives.
This will help; first, to develop viable cooperative farms at a
minimum cost and make maximum use of the existing stock of
agricultural implements in the country. Secondly, it will help
diminish the imbalance between settlers’ and people’s production
and thereby correct the existing situation in which the settler
farms are isolated like prosperous islands in the midst of mass
poverty. Thirdly, it will help distinguish between good elements
among the settlers who are genuinely willing to work with the
new government in improving the living conditions of the people,
and the diehards. It will then be possible to win over the first
group and isolate and eventually ease out the latter. Fourthly,
and this is most important it will help consolidate people’s as
opposed to individual production without any large-scale
economic dislocation (and its attendant consequences) during the
transition.
The rising rural incomes entailed in this strategy will expand the
home market for industrial consumer products as well as
broaden the tax base. It will then be possible to accumulate from
the latter to pay for further development of the former, which
means not only the development of nationally integrated,
independent industrialisation but also the rapid rise of the
proletariat. All this, of course, is based on the assumption of a
planned and proportional development of the national economy.
Going by your public statements since you took over, it appears
that this is broadly what you have in mind. If so, you are
definitely on the right track; and all well-meaning people will
back you in your obviously very difficult task. We will all wish
you the very best.
Yours fraternally,
Abdulrahman M. Babu
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