When the cock crowed, euphoria filled the land. Five year plans were brandied about with enthusiasm, gusto and the future seemed bright. We looked beyond our borders and thought, just like the South Africans do now, “Thank God we are not like those countries up north.”
When Mozambiquean refugees sought haven from the RENAMO stoked civil strife in their homeland, we were prone to treat them with contempt, calling them mamoskeni” while we gloated in our own sense of wealth, success, stability and invincibility.
We laughed at our Zambian brothers and their “worthless” Kwacha (back then) and how they needed wheelbarrows to carry enough money to buy a loaf of bread… Little did we know that bearer cheques lurked in the shadows or that a new currency would have the suffer a fate similar to that of the bearer cheques in a short, short period.
Is it true after all, that the only thing that we learn from history is that we do not learn from history? In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon outlined the shortcomings of post- colonial Africa, particularly in the chapter, “The Pitfalls of Nationalism.”
Gaining independence late as we did, long after the independence boom of the late 1950s and the 1960s, we had so many lessons to learn from. But because the promise of the revolution had already been sacrificed on the altar of mercenary tendencies, masked by fiery rhetoric of patriotism, and dressed in the same parochial garb that made us contemptuous of the suffering of our African brothers and sisters, we walked into chasm literally with our eyes open.
Why, when most of the leaders were seemingly highly educated and the nation, too, boasted of a high literacy rate? Someone once cynically, but perhaps truthfully, observed that as far as the leaders are concerned the destruction and plunder is deliberate for it is self- serving and as long as they get fat bellies, bank accounts and lately free hand outs of all kinds out of it, everything is kete as far as they are concerned.
Writing way back in the 1960s the African- American brother Madhabhuti observed: “There are institutions in this country that do nothing but create, study and solve problems. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. These institutions tackle everything from the ‘necessity of nuclear warfare in the 21st century’ to the ‘urbanisation of the rural Negro…These study groups are generally referred to as “think tanks” and work in conjunction with and in many cases exclusively for the… government.”
In 28 years of independence where are Zimbabwe’s “think tanks”? Every time I read in the papers that a high powered committee made up of senior government officials has been set up to look into problems I shudder. Who was on watch when these problems arose, why were they not foreseen in the fist place? How come there are never any contingency measures except for insipid ineffective fire fighting measures? Why these obsessions with repairing the kraal after the prize bull and cow have bolted? When a high powered delegation was set up to look into the efficacy of diesel oozing out of a rock, I threw up my hands to the heavens above! No thinking caps here and definitely no thinking tank!
The only efficiency and swiftness characterized by near superb organization that I have seen has only been galvanized for things like Operation Murambatsvina and the June 29 Reorientation Programmes. Again, a flair for destruction, not creation.
We laughed at the plight of our African brothers and sisters, as we also ignore the plight of our brethren within our own borders today, because our liberation movement and we as a nation never gained a new level of sophistication in the next stage of our struggle for total liberation. We also lacked the prerequisite automatic association among our people in particular and Africans in general- apart from giving lip service to this while our actions on the ground were an antithesis to whole idea.
We inherited institutions created in the image of their creators and which once functioned smoothly. But we failed to instutionalise our own values, ethos, creative vision. Instead, we instead ran down what we had inherited. This is why today an African can argue that there no such things as African values because we live in a global village while those behind the so- called globalization are tightening immigration controls, run on election campaigns that put their values at the centre. A Tony Blair or George Bush does not develop in a vacuum but is a product of the institutions set up by their respective nations and cultures…
In the absence of solid institutions we flounder in the face of adversity. We fail to see the value of hunhu/ubuntu in the way we conceive the world and practice (business, politics, et al) in a way akin the Japanese did as they rebuilt from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or even as the Chinese did – because even they would not be achieving the success they are achieving if they lacked the Chinese essence, – or as the Indians are doing. Instead, even when we look east, we are not grounded and we flounder still…
Despite all the fiery rhetoric of Never ever, we flounder still because we failed to make that necessary transition. We failed to move away from a definition of ourselves in terms of the evil that had been done to us. We failed to define ourselves in terms of the positive. But it’s not too late. We have, to quote Mdhabhuti, to start to “live for the people, not die for the people. Every time we lose a brother or sister we lose a worker, a builder, an energy force for tomorrow. Regulate your life toward life. Be aware of the complicated and sophisticated world we face. Don’t let us in our naiveté and Afrikan emotionalism drive ourselves to the point of no return…Watch your words while improving your actions. It is not how well you say what needs to be done, but how well you do it. “