“If not now, then when?” Echoes from a plaintive Tracy Chapman song, if my memory serves me right. But the mind is numbed by a vicious summer flu (as well as age, I guess), so I can’t be certain. But that line finds resonance as deadlocks continue, Troikas defer crucial meetings- all because there was an apparent hide and seek shenanigan with travel documents…If a small country like Zimbabwe can’t make agreements work, what more the grand dreams of SADC, AU and Pan Africanism?
The foul stench of burnt flesh in the raging flames of Xenophobic still waft in the canyons of memory from beyond the Limpopo…
“I see no solution for African peoples, any place in this world, short of Pan Africanism. Wherever we are on the face of this earth we are an African people. We have got to understand that any problem faced by Africans is the collective problem of all African people in the world, and not just the problem of the Africans who live in one part of the world, “Dr John Henrik Clarke, an African- American scholar, once declared.
But how is the gap between the grandness of the vision and the bleakness of the reality to be bridged? When will our politicians put their money where their mouths are? Translate ideas into action? As long as they continue to haggle over positions of power and how to wield that power, maybe not any time soon. The tragedy of failing to transcend the limitations of partisan and parochial political interests is our bane. In the meantime, the reality on the ground for the ordinary Zimbabwean is that prices continue to soar, while the bank withdrawal limit remains ludicrous. Another week of uncertainty means seven days of berserk prices and rates.
“Once we put all of our skills together, and realise… that the African man has been sleeping…We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we ready for the 21st century?’ Do we go into the 21st century, begging and pleading or insisting and demanding? We have to ask and answer that question and we have to decide if we are going to be the rearguard for somebody else’s way of life, or do we rebuild our own way of life, or will be the vanguard to rebuild our own nation?” the same Dr Clarke went on to say.
Years ago now, when he asked those pertinent questions. Tragically, Zimbabwe, in particular, and Africa, in general, has been found wanting. The lips might speak of brotherly love, but the hands are clenched in blood- drenched fists. A crisis of leadership and governance creates a yawning chasm between the promise and that which is actually delivered. Thus we find ourselves in the 21st century but living the bleak reality of a 1960s- 70s banana republic.
Dr John Henrik Clarke concluded, his presentation, many years ago, by saying: “We have to say to ourselves when we look at our history, the great Nile Valley civilisation, the kind of civilisations we built on the other rivers, the Niger, the Limpopo, the Zambezi, the kind of civilisations that gave life to the world…We need to say ourselves, with the conviction, that, ‘If I did it once, I will do it again.’”
And again, I ask, if not now, then when?
A better history and a more hopeful future can only be realised when plunder ceases to masquerade as patriotic, divine, reign. When politicians stop signalling left and then turn right. One day, hopefully soon, the propensity for destruction shall be replaced by a penchant for nation building. I see a time when on the ruins of scorched earth policies, a fertile new beginning shall be born and citadels of achievement shall be raised to the very heavens themselves. None but ourselves….But if not now, then when?