![bruce wharton]()
Bruce Wharton
The Scottish bid for secession has failed, and hey, what a relief to the British pound! The whole world was waiting with baited laugher to see if Britain was going to balkanize, begin to disintegrate, thereby matching in physical, geographical terms its millenarian decline by way of global influence.
The consequences would have reverberated throughout Europe, and well beyond, thanks to the massive blowback. Spain watched the whole drama with angst, as did Russia, but both for different and opposite reasons.
Spain feared British irredentism would inspire, nay legitimise, her own breakaway politics quite often given to violent convulsions.
Russia favoured a British breakaway, itself a good precedent for many former Soviet states which have, or are set, to exfoliate from many of its rebellious neighbours, principally Georgia and Ukraine.
Within Britain itself, Wales was watching, hopeful. The Welsh have always felt internally colonised by the English.
Back home, I notice Mthwakazi was hoping a British precedent would provide a fillip to its own hopeless, breakaway politics that can only hurt it. It continues to hiss in feigned menace, hoping to attract fear or concessions.
Throughout history, the disintegration of an empire creates tumultuous ferments. Remember the Ottoman Empire, the resultant fermentation in the Balkans!
Precursors of Hitler
But many missed the ironic, even humorous, side of the whole referendum. Go back to our unhappy colonial history and check personalities behind the whole venture. David Livingstone, Robert Moffat, John Boden
Thomson, all these were Scottish forerunners to the opening and/or colonization of Zimbabwe and many other African countries. Or more directly, look at Star Jameson, or Ian Douglas Smith, the son of a Scottish butcher who became a rebel prime minister in colonial Zimbabwe, and you have an idea of the Scottish factor in pushing for a larger England, a wider, imperial Britain in history.
The Scottish vista has always been wider, transcontinental.
The Blairs, the Browns, all followed that Scottish gene of finding “living space” for the Briton, something that made them forerunners of Adolf Hitler and his notion of “lebensraum”.
But just how a race so given to colonial expansionism, given to an expansive world view, suddenly finds itself ruled by a passion of narrowness, and in this global moment in human affairs,
I certainly can’t understand. It sounds contrapuntal. But there we have it, civilisation not as evolution to greater, wider, higher habitats, but civilisation as a return, as a nostalgic sentiment — antediluvian — for the highland village.
Those that punt the hymn of a global village as a substitute for a village on the globe, must think again. The margin of defeat for villagers was too small, too slander, to be aberrational.
There is a deep, abiding dynamic at work, a tag towards the aboriginal, something the British government hopes to appease through greater devolution.
“Neither free, nor fair”
But I enjoyed the Russian jab. Russia has dismissed the Scottish vote as unfree, unfair and un-transparent, in which case as failing to reflect the will of the Scottish people.
The Russian observer team failed the referendum which saw 55,3 percent voting against secession, and 44,7 percent voting in favour.
The Russians decried the fact that counting was being done in huge venues, in one instance in an aircraft hangar of 150x300m dimensions.
Voter slips kept coming in from nowhere, counting progressing simultaneously and expansively such that monitors simply could not encompass the process!
Britain might come under sanctions, come under ZDERA.
![Russian President Vladimir Putin]()
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Or is it BDERA? Signed by Putin, later Medvedev! Of course the Russians are not making a serious charge, only seeking to miff and taunt the Brits.
But that is what gives a serious side to the whole matter. I hope the British are irritated enough by that, for once getting them to live actually (not vicariously) how it feels like when someone, an outsider, meddles, superciliously meddles in our elections.
“Let me tell you what I know”
This United States ambassador here must think us very dumb, unthinking and unreflective. This ambassador, one Bruce Wharton, magisterially tells us thus: “The competition between the US and China is not ideological.
“We strongly believe American companies can do better business with Zimbabwe than their Chinese counterparts whose business practices are less transparent”. He echoes a message we once got from Mai Clinton, speaking to the whole of Africa, from Zambia.
One hopes he was marketing his own country, his own country business, in which case no comparison is deadly, all talk, steeped in marketing, then gets understandably hyperbolic.
But I doubt that. The man was serious, concerned, the tenor of his speech normative, even peremptorily advisory. He was cautioning a lesser brother, one given to irrational choices that hurt him.
That is the spirit,very American. Very condescending. I read a lot of that in the interface between Victorian England’s forerunners here, and the barbarous native “up North”, up North being here.
Always an interface of unequals, of grown up geniuses pitted against unthinking nerds, or timeless infantiles, the exchange suggests two epochs juxtaposed for effect: one in the beginning, another in the end, the end of history.
The age of the “arrivants”!
Gaming without kit
What have we done to deserve this wise counsel? Well, like Obama, we have courted the Chinese, but without the intricate, balancing skills of Obama.
That is what Bruce thinks. We are simpletons playing high game without the kit. Our survival rests of the conscience of big players, moral ones led by America which is “more transparent”, unlike the Chinese.
We have no interests. Or don’t know them, let alone know how to pursue them, defend them even, in international relations.
Hence this warm, brotherly homily from Big Brother Wharton, meant to redeem us from “unscrupulous” China!
But what are the facts on the American ground?
When flow was unidirectional
From the days of Deng, Chinese economy, while quite hospitable to foreign direct investment — American FDI specifically and same from the Asian market — was not outward. It could not have been.
China was still making her first, hesitant steps out of reclusion, into a competitive world. It was hesitant, far from being bold.
Then in the late nineties it started buying into US Treasurys, while honing its business skills using Hong Kong, its newly liberated territory, now an FDI and technology entrepôt.
By the twenties, China was graduating into a global player, but one still feeble, while promising sprite days ahead. Between US and China, the flow of FDI was uni-directional, the flow always starting in the US, ending in low-labour cost locational China.
Statistics from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, BEA, then showed US FDI stock in China as between USUS$50 to USUS$70bn.
Then it dipped, in sympathy with generalised US’s terminal decline in economic and world affairs, or the obverse, US’s rise in world wars.
The China that employs Americans
Come around 2007 to 2010, a new trend, albeit still incipient, began to show: a confident, venturesome State-capitalist China. BEA statistics began to admit to a counterflow from China, in gushes!
With reserves of well over US$4trillion, and about US$2 trillion in US Treasurys, China went on an outward FDI path, mainly targeting Wharton’s United States of America.
I don’t know whether he was ambassador already, this old functionary of USIA who must have figures on his fingertips always. As should all good information officers. From about 2010 to 2012 — a space of two short years — China’s FDI stock in the US had risen from US$585 million to US$5,2 billion.
Even this is not too accurate, admits International Investment Position (IIP) methodologies. The US$5,2 billion measures direct stock. But the Chinese are in the habit of reaching or buying into US via third countries.
Taking that into account, the value of Chinese stock balloons to twice as much, US$10,5 bn, in the United States of America. Yes, in the USA!
The Chinese commerce ministry statistics put the value at US$17,1bn in 2012. Chinese firms now have more than 70 000 Americans on their payrolls, up from a mere 10 000 in 2007.
Bhopal was not Chinese
Now, if Chinese capital is so bad for Zimbabwe, so non-transparent, why are Americans being so generous with it? So affable to bad Chinese capital?
Why is this very bad, Confucian capital carrying and caring for the lives of 70 000 Americans, instead of ruining them the way American firms ruined us here in chrome pits back in the Rhodesian days?
America would not fall in with UN sanctions against errant Rhodesia, citing its strategic interest in chrome which it said it needed for its defence industry. Union Carbide, the killer of Bhopal, was here, mining our chrome using African labour.
To this day we don’t know how many tones of ore they shipped out, these most transparent American businesses!
Why is bad Chinese capital the begetter of such vast good for stressed America?
But a begetter of non-transparent business here? And America’s transparent, scrupulous capital, what has it done for Africa, for Zimbabwe specifically? Not over years, but just between 2000 and now?
But America’s man here provides a clue. He says: “We continue to engage the people in Washington through our embassy here so that they understand the situation on the ground.”
Zimbabwe ground, that is! That strikes me like a statement of frustration? Or am I wrong?
Is Bruce Wharton finding himself in the same predicament as that faced by his predecessors?
Just what is the situation on the ground here? One of “an unusual continuing extraordinary threat” to American interests?
Sordid facts in Bruce’s face
Here are the sordid facts surrounding Bruce Wharton as he performs his diplomatic gymnastics in a post-2013 Zimbabwe. MDC, American and western Trojan Horse here is dead, twitching against the onset of rigor mortis.
Two and linked to that, American and western influence over an increasingly assertive Zimbabwe diminishes by the day.
Three, whilst Zimbabwe has been talking East all along, today it is doing East, using it’s highly mineralized attribute as leverage. And it sets its eyes higher, all towards value addition within an empowerment ethic.
Four, both by capital and by technology, the world is now a multipolar proposition, one complex entity with many power points, none always or forever dominant. You now look everywhere to look forward.
The American century is gone, never to come back.
A shovel of something
There is a detail which must worry Wharton particularly. By spurning Russia, America has created a monster for itself, a friend for Zimbabwe.
Between these two, two-thirds of world platinum deposits are controlled, with South Africa, the only other known producer, still coming within Russia’s orbit via BRICS.
In future, America have to get its platinum needs via Russia. Now, Mugabe is politically formidable, a very old, experienced hand.
A left one too, if one goes ideological. You don’t want to give him formidable economic partners by way of the Chinese and Russians. Or hope to scare him off them through old wives’ terror tales.
He is obdurate. Scare-mongering won’t work, which is why Bruce’ s advice gets received here, well, not so much with a pinch of salt, as with a shovel of sh*t.
But this is United Nations time, and all roads lead to New York. Prepare for a shocker, as America comes to her senses to recognise the inevitable.
Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
