We note with deep concern the rigorous approach undertaken by Masisi`s State to put - on wholesale, government property and assets on the assumptions that the public service is dysfunctional and therefore ought to be handed over to the private individuals. The BDP State uses the wage - bill as both excuse and opportunity to privatize public services, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. This presumption of privatisation of publicly owned assets by Masisi`s BDP State conceals more than its elucidates. While Masisi claims the privatisation of state owned enterprises will help government to significantly save its revenues, on the contrary, the state will continue to have a central role in subsidising private actors and enforcing economic policies that benefit those who already have financial assets and punish those who do not. The true result of such undertaking will be a state that is lenient towards big business and international corporations under the guise of Foreign Direct Investment drive and, at the same time, increasingly be unable to guarantee citizens’ basic economic and social rights, thus leading to growing social insecurity and decline in political participation.
The re-set transformational agenda by Masisi`s regime also needs to be understood within the context of Neoliberalism. According to Harvey (2005: 2), “neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”. In this theory, “state intervention has to be limited to those functions that secure private property rights (Harvey 2005), while those who do not own private property are offered no or very minimal social protection”. Neoliberalism as political rationality is in relation to the practices adopted by private agencies depriving workers of social security and employee rights by replacing their employment contracts by civil-law freelance contracts; low salaries, lay-offs and irregular payment of wages on the pretext of economic crisis; illegal evictions and the non-existence of the right to housing, and the lack of affordable care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities, lack of recognition of women’s unpaid reproductive labour. Waste of human capital – is of more value than the human-rights under neoliberalism.
