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By Wisdom Mumera

(Zimbabwe) – In an article titled Keep your identity Small, the writer speaks about the universal acumenship that is seemingly possessed by everyone when it comes to matters political and religious.

“Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions”

“Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there’s no back pressure on people’s opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs” he says.

Since the Zimbabwean economy found itself in a tight spot almost every journalist has become a mini-economist.

All subjects are ultimately swirling towards the core of a failed economy if you are from opposition politics and a new economy if you believe the Finance Minister’s revelatory budgetary statement.

With the centrality of the economy situations and events ultimately require of one to give opinions and advice. Thus daily in papers one is always stumbling in the bog of sticky things such as liquidity crunch.

Over the time liquidity crunch has grown to have a meaning independent of its linguistic origin.

Liquidity crunch no longer refers directly to the scarcity of money in the financial system, rendering banks useless in some instances, but it has become a disease that Zimbabwe is suffering from.

It’s like saying malaria. The word malaria itself need not be have some meaning hidden behind its composition of letters other than to be taken for the referral term for a fatal disease.

That’s what liquidity crunch has become, a disease from which the country is suffering from. Since every one of us is bearing the brunt of it suddenly we all have opinions to give about it.

“We are letting fly”.

The issue of the liquidity crunch has become an issue about our identity.

“I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan” the writer of Keep Your Identity Small says.

In the race to extricate ourselves from the problem of a fiscal system that does not have the necessary money to run it, many have found themselves stuck in the battle of defending their identity. That’s why the high pile of partisan arguments from a cross section of economists.

In instances where the answer to the problem is very plain before us all the puzzle has been allowed to grow to into a labyrinthine maze as everyone has gotten down to defending his identity.

The debates for what needs to be done have been allowed to grow way beyond the field of progressive arguments and much of what is being entertained in the press is pure partisan zeal for one’s identity.

For starters there is the ongoing repetition of what a crisis we are in. That was Biti at a SAPES conference. He says there is crisis of leadership, of the economy and just about everything that matters in a situation like ours.

That’s why there is a liquidity crunch. Crisis’ pervading every facet of the Zimbabwean country. The country is sick from a liquidity crunch because there is a crisis.

Underlying this diagnosis is the hidden need by yours truly to be incorporated into the transformative leadership. That would heal away the crisis of leadership and that would heal the country of the disease of a liquidity crunch. Therein is the man’s identity.

He is no longer fighting the problem per se, but has begun to identify himself with a certain portion of the battle. That’s why no solution is going to come from Biti and those of his mental ilk that won’t involve incorporating them into the remedy.

The solution is part of them.

Finance Minister Chinamasa has decided that slashing executive salaries and reviewing the Labour Act will do the magic. Though that is just a part of a bigger scheme it’s a telling turn of events that shows that he is not beyond the battle of defending his identity.

As the Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions (ZFTU) said, in the bigger context of our hiccupping industry, slashing executive salaries won’t really transform much. It’s more of a sentimental action that will soothe aching joints of the state fiscus without really removing the root cause of the problem.

However as a party, ZANU (PF) has been trying to identify itself with the suffering masses. Standing in the corner of the sanctioned and hyper-inflation-ed mob has become part of its identity such that the Finance Minister is willing to resort to knee jerk and populistic actions that resonate with partisan defence of one’s identity.

The media on its part defends its identity too. In the capitalistic world of now you don’t go around delivering truth that does not sell, like a spirit preacher.

Thus for the independent media the thematic subjects revolve around revealing the mishaps, the corruption, the profligacy of the ruling leaders and the dire ledge upon which we stand.

For the government media the sanctions story is now old copy and the burden is to sell the indigenisation issue, hint at some great financial agreement beckoning and paint the future in courageous colors of a warrior people paving the new African way of economic emancipation.

I can hear Julius Malema and Baffour Ankomah whistling encouragement.

However the solution remains out there, waiting beyond the debris of our clattering and exploding arguments.

Whether it’s the head-on progression along the path of Indigenisation or it’s a fusion of that with promotion of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the economists know. In the while, just like many of the economically illiterate journalists out there, I will also keep on stating how the liquidity crunch is such a killer disease.

The easiest argument however is to advocate for the removal of ZANU (PF) or the election of Tsvangirai. In a minuscule line of thinking i would have both diagnosed the problem and revealed the medicine to a vexed population.

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