Parliament must introduce anti-sanctions Bill | The Herald

via Parliament must introduce anti-sanctions Bill | The Herald November 26, 2013 by Shortie Bwidi

THE urgent formulation and enactment of an Anti-Sanctions bill will in the long term greatly complement our other national strategies in the fight against sanctions, the prevailing tight liquidity and the general suffering of the majority of ordinary Zimbabweans.Our country has the capacity to formulate such a bill, and there is nothing at all that will prevent the bill from passing through both the House of Assembly and Senate with a majority.

It is not an option but a necessity for patriots to appreciate adequately that an Anti-sanctions law will leverage the success of Government’s economic blueprint, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset).

While it is obvious that Zim Asset will not be implemented in a vacuum, it is galling to realise that the economic blueprint is already under sanctions regardless of its apparent good intentions. The majority of our citizens should remain vigilant, accepting that our nation is under the dark cloud of a mafia-styled illegal sanctions regime. Such vigilance defeats national complacency and despondency which some naysayers daily seek to induce and sustain for their sinister ulterior motives.

With the Anti-Sanctions law in place, we will be empowered to bring before the courts of law anyone accused of breaking the laid down provisions of the law. People who deny the existence of sanctions will have the great chance to tell the courts why they say there are no sanctions. But there could be stiff punishment for them to suffer if they fail to convince the courts with their denial arguments. The

Anti-Sanctions law will also enable our nation to deal effectively with saboteurs and locally-based individual or institutional Western proxies that daily work clandestinely to ensure that the sanctions are biting.

Of course, the Anti-sanctions law will clip the long tails of quisling politicians with inflated egos who, whenever they open their mouths in public, leave no one in doubt that they are citizens of a country other than the Zimbabwe they disparage all the time.

An Anti-sanctions law will place bits in the mouths of the Deborah Bronnerts and Bruce Whartons of the diplomatic world.

It is not a crime for patriots to be radical and practical at this point in time when our nation suffers the headaches of tight liquidity in a sanctioned economy.

The tight liquidity phenomenon in our economy could be seized as an opportunity for Zimbabwe to introduce the Yuan, the Chinese currency, to fill up the liquidity vacuum as a short and long term measure. If the nation had its own currency, perhaps the Reserve Bank of

Zimbabwe could have considered injecting some cash into the banking system at this juncture.

The Minister of Finance could consider the introduction of the Yuan in his forthcoming national budget announcement and each and every sector’s financial allotment could be measured in USD and Yuan values placed side by side to educate the nation on the desirability of the Yuan. As a nation we may not have sacks of Yuan notes on hand at the time of the national budget announcement, but still the introduction of the Yuan could be an announcement of a policy position aimed at making Zim Asset a success.

Who knows? The Chinese could open banks here in Zimbabwe in the course of the next five years of the implementation of Zim Asset. We have the expertise to work out the modalities of adopting the Yuan as our borrowed currency.
It is instructive to note that announcing that we as a nation have decided to use the Yuan is a strategic economic and political statement in the struggle to neutralise the illegal sanctions imposed on us.

It makes much more sense, in the absence of our own national currency, to be using the currency of a friendly China than the currency of the hostile West. The US, UK and the European Union have imposed callous economic sanctions on our country because she dared to correct the skewed colonial land ownership pattern.

Fortunately, the whole world now knows that the British internationalised a bilateral dispute with Zimbabwe because of the subtle British big brother mentality that stupidly led the British government to render overt and covert moral and financial support to its kinsfolk, the white former commercial farmers, against our national interests.

Our ultimate goal as a nation should be to create and sustain a sanction-less economic environment conducive for the introduction of our own national currency and its survival. The introduction of a national currency at some opportune point in time should ease tight liquidity in the long term and fuel our national development and prosperity.

It should be noted that the prevailing tight liquidity typifies the strategic use of safe warfare by nations hostile to our national interests. They could be using their local agent businesses,institutions and individuals to drain almost all the cash in circulation and lock it up in their safes just to create tight liquidity and crises that foment public outcries and despondency. They want the electorate to engage in uprisings, Egypt-style.

So, there is no need for some ‘economic experts’ to wax professorial in the interpretation of the prevailing tight liquidity, when they end up not proposing any radical and workable economic solutions. We had grown sick and tired of armchair bookishness in the hyperinflation period because it never provided practical solutions to our sanctions-induced national economic problems.

For some patriots, it became increasingly difficult during the hyperinflation period to tell whether the nation had bona fide economic commentators, or opposition political activists hiding behind their excellent qualifications and experience in the field of economics. The nation knows those ‘expert economic commentators’, they are still alive.

One would expect to hear new and patriotic economic voices of wisdom, not the voices of economic cynics whose undeclared aim since 1999 has always been to promote and protect Western imperialistic interests in return for personal gain.
It took a practical thinker, not coming from the field of economics after all,to introduce the multi-currency regime that rescued our economy from total collapse. That practical thinker should be accorded an award for his ingenuity that occasioned a remarkable economic paradigm shift in our country.

One would expect the national budget the Finance Minister is going to announce to be characterised by sanctions busting strategies, in addition to other equally important developmental considerations.