Biography
Kennedy Manduna is an examination awaiting PhD Candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, within the Wits School of Governance (WSG) in South Africa. At his PhD, Kennedy focuses on mining capitalism, extractive industry indigenisation and uneven development in Africa but with a special reference to Zimbabwe. His PhD thesis is titled “Overpromising and underdelivering: Zimbabwe’s extractive industry indigenisation and uneven development.” During his PhD (i.e. between January 2016 and February 2021), he served in various capacities as a research fellow, teaching assistant and lecturer (for both Masters and Honours students) within WSG and Wits Business School (WBS). Prior to that, he also served in various capacities as a teaching assistant and researcher in Zimbabwe and Botswana. Further to that, Kennedy presented conference papers at various seminars and conferences during the same period. Currently, he is a research fellow within the WSG while simultaneously an intern in the online internship programme with the University of Mumbai’s Center for African Studies. Within the WSG, Kennedy is researching on social contract, state fragility, violence, social cohesion and peacebuilding.
Abstract
The political economy of the intersections of rural agrarian development and extractive industry indigenisation in Zimbabwe: Experiences from selected community share ownership trusts
Literature on the drivers of critical agrarianism and extractive industry indigenisation is both assorted and stratified. However, while there is extensive literature on both rural agrarian studies and extractive industry indigenisation, there is a scholarly lacuna on the critical issues lying at the intersections of the two. This paper, therefore, is a welcome attempt to filling this yearning intellectual gap. Drawing from my PhD findings on how and why the extractive industry indigenisation processes are shaping, facilitating and driving rural agricultural development in Zimbabwe, this paper answers the following four critical questions of agrarian political economy:
- Who owns and controls what in the agrarian industry following extractive industry indigenisation?;
- Who does what and for who in the agrarian industry following extractive industry indigenisation?;
- Who gets what, when and how in the agrarian industry following extractive industry indigenisation?; and
- What do they do with what they get and for whose benefit in the agrarian industry following extractive industry indigenisatio n?
Thorugh using the theoretical lenses of David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession theory of 2003, this paper is making the following competing explanations of how and why the political economy of extractive industry indigenisation shapes, facilitates and drives rural agricultural processes in the country. First, the established community share ownership trusts (CSOTs) as vehicles and hubs for rural development are significantly promoting rural agrarian development. Second, critics are interpreting the positive agrarian developments extractive industry indigenisation is facilitating, shaping and driving through neo-patrimonial lenses, making them strategies for political expediency and not strategic interventions for rural development.
Affiliation: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa