FOR some of us who matured in poor working class suburbs like Sakubva in Mutare back in the 1980s, we considered ourselves back then passionately communists.

Whenever we looked around our poverty-stricken communities, we could not figure out an exit strategy from this misery except through a group socialist agenda. We naively believed the political leaders of the day when they espoused this philosophy until we realised that they were just using this system to get the levers of power to build their own nests.

Our romantic flirtations with socialism were pulled from under our feet when the USSR, one of the original authors of this system, under the leadership of Gorbachev questioned its efficacy and dismantled it.

I visited family in Chikuku and Bambazonke in Marange, and Chitora in Zimunya communal lands of Manicaland this week. The villagers I met proudly showed me what they were receiving from the international community and even proclaimed that “their donors” were going to bring in more cooking oil. I have always disliked the term ‘poverty alleviation’ as used by the international community. I prefer the corollary, wealth creation. Alleviating poverty is minimalistic; it implies just having enough to survive while wealth creation sets you on a mindset of more than enough.

I sat down in Mutare this week going through a bucket full of wild mazhanje fruit, contemplating and trying to understand why the cycle of poverty perpetuate in our communities here 30 years after independence. We may have had our hearts in the right place with our socialist zealotry back then, but our reasoning was certainly misplaced.

The donor community is just perpetuating the dependency syndrome that the politicians created at independence. There are local communities who have received aid for all our 30 years of independence. They are now permanently aid addicts. If you are addicted to mbanje, and your neighbour always provides you with a fix, they surely cannot be your friend if this is leading to a deterioration of your health and social condition.

There is something beautiful and enduring about educating each other through the principle of ‘seed time and harvest’. If you do not plant, surely you should not expect a harvest. When the rain season comes, a genuine sower requires seed not food. Unfortunately, our diaspora communities, like the government and donors before them, have also become mainly merchants of cooking oil and mealie-meal. The recipients bear no responsibility except to consume the received food. It is irresponsible to give an able bodied person food for free.

The cost of giving these communities seed and fertilizer is actually cheaper than perpetually providing them with imported processed food products. Even when the poor receive donated seed and fertilizer, they need to understand that there is no free lunch on this earth. One way this can be achieved is to make them contribute a proportionate amount of their harvest to a grain bank that caters for the sick, orphans and the elderly who do not have the capacity to support themselves. This can become their own seed which converts them from mere recipients to also givers and sowers.

Entitlement is not just limited to socialist systems. There are lots of people who still foolishly think that their governments will solve their problems in Europe and the USA. If one listens to the shrieking going on in the UK and other places about budget cuts, then you can fully appreciate the problem.

Expecting a system to solve the problem of the human condition apparently absolves us of doing anything about our situation. Instead of going out there and finding seed to plant, we toyi-toyi and vent our anger on an unresponsive system. One of the beauties of living in another country rather than your own is that you generally do not really expect your host government to really do something for you as you are not their responsibility. If they do, it’s really a bonus.  You learn to take full responsibility for your own state of affairs.

If you live in a concrete jungle like most of us, then money becomes the seed in this circumstance. It is not just the amount of seed that determines the harvest but how you treat the seed which comes your way. If you consistently plant it on good ground with adequate nutrients, it will surely bring forth a harvest. Your employer is not responsible for your harvest; they are just a means of providing seed to you.

One acquaintance of mine proudly pronounced that money was not important in his life. When I examine his life, I noticed that he disliked his job where he spends eight hours of each working day. He hated his employer with a passion yet every working day he grudgingly spends three hours in traffic commuting to and fro to work for money.

For him, money is so important to do something miserable just to secure a small portion of it. It is fine if someone is doing it just for a season of say five years to secure medium term objectives. The ultimate objective for every person should be to blur the division between work and play. When we start to do what we really love to do working becomes a real fulfillment and earning money becomes just one of the by-products of this process.

Whether we are in the city or in the country, we should always be seeking for opportunities to sow and generate a harvest. If we do it persistently and consistently, then we erase the P-word from our vocabulary. When we do this at individual level, then we build a community of sowers. If we are so busy sowing then we do not have time to continually blame history, colonialism and where we were born for our current condition.

Tafirenyika L. Makunike is the managing partner of Napachem cc (www.nepachem.co.za), an enterprise development and consulting company