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Why we must get off Mbeki's case
By Silence
Chihuri
FOR the past five years or so our country has been facing some of the
most daunting economic and socio-political problems since independence.
These are the generally falling living standards due to high cost of living, unemployment, a below capacity health delivery service, runaway inflation, a corrupt public service and a wantonly profit driven private sector that has set profitability as a benchmark way ahead of quality service.
One could cap that with general government failure. Indeed for each and every one of these problems, convenient and fitting scapegoats have been found of which the government has quite rightly taken much of the flake for one natural reason: They are the government and they must have most of the solutions to our problems because governments should deliver for their people!!
Of course, nations take more than just their governments to build and maintain as well as navigate them into prosperity, but the torch-bearing role of a government can never be over emphasized.
There are odd examples where a nation’s problems could be entirely the result of government blameworthiness. This might be due to either pure inadequacy or simply skewed policy formulation, other than natural disasters such as droughts or foreign military aggression. Otherwise in a normal situation it should take an entire nation comprising of all the stakeholders such as the political, civic, religious, as well as the social fabric, to grease the state machinery into functionality. These same stakeholders should also put their government to task when it fails.
For some of our current problems, blame has been levelled on one external scapegoat that is not necessarily an integral part of our national equation, and I am personally of the view that such criticism has largely been undue and misplaced. This is the disproportionate blame apportioned on the South African government in general, and President Mbeki in particular. Mbeki is the President of South Africa and surely his energies and pre-occupation should be focused on running that country and I also think he is quite right when he rather strenuously though, states that the problems of Zimbabwe are for Zimbabweans to tackle. It is the responsibility of every nation through its own government, with the support or criticism of the various stakeholders to put the country on an efficient and sustainable footing. Some of the reasons advanced for ‘an Mbeki’ to be done on Zimbabwe have been given as the economic and political clout of our southern neighbours and hence their capability to knuckle our government down to serious stately business. Issues of governance may not be that clear cut at times.
One thing about people in dire straits is that they tend to forget very easily and this is what has befallen most of our countrymen some of whom have turned the South Africans into arch enemies “for letting us down”. What a shame. We are a nation of grown- ups with a government of grown up men and women in charge, and their incapability to restore our country to its former glory is neither because of South Africa nor by Thabo Mbeki. People must remember that the South Africans have for years looked up to us for support in so many respects. They have followed our example in several respects and fortunately or unfortunately, they have tended to outclass us in virtually every aspect which they actually followed on us. They now see us more as competitors than compatriots because they are simply after occupying the frontal space that we have for quite long occupied in Southern Africa. Remember what the South Africans did in Mozambique after we sacrificed our armed forces to help maintain stability in that country? They simply overran the Mozambican business space and they repeated the same feat recently in the DRC where we also did the donkey work. Surely if we really need a solution it may never wholly or actually come from South Africa but from among ourselves probably with limited outside help. Mbeki has a very clear foreign policy on Africa that he applies equally on all African countries, and this entails leaving his counterparts to run their own countries and if they mess up it must surely not be blamed on him.
Our country was very instrumental in fighting apartheid in colonial South Africa, and thousands of South Africans sought refuge in Zimbabwe. I remember in the late eighties and early nineties when there were blocks of flats in the Avenues area of Harare such as Pinehurst Court along Fife Avenue that were virtually occupied by South Africans. On a typical evening shopping errand one could be forgiven to mistake the Avenues Shopping Centre for a Gaunteng or Mpumalanga neighbourhood in South Africa. The same could be said of some parts of Bulawayo. It is only such a shame when we hear these sad stories of our siblings dying or suffering in South Africa when we actually looked after the South Africans without any qualms because those were our days of plenty and prosperity. Such could be where Mbeki’s problem starts because South Africans have always known us as extremely adequate people and a shoulder to cry on, of which they have always looked up to us rather than vice versa.
At independence South Africa followed the Zimbabwean example of national reconciliation between the whites and blacks so as to ensure harmonious community and racial relations. Mandela literally following Mugabe’s example but he (Mandela) went further by ensuring that such a policy would be sustainable through follow up economic and social policies that would not necessarily substitute one economically powerful section of the population with another, but ensured equality and relevancy of all citizens. The ANC approach to governance ensured prosperity for all and even the white South Africans tried to hold on to their superiority but in great vein, because the black South Africans had been empowered to such an extent that their white colleagues simply had to engage them as equal partners in enterprise. The ANC has over the years delivered on economic empowerment and continues to do so this day. On the other hand, our government that was the architect of reconciliation did not have the mechanism to bring on board the largely economically marginalized blacks. There was to be created an economic black hole in the population whereby the blacks largely remained workers while the whites were visibly and predominantly the entrepreneurs. Surely problems must have been foreseeable.
Even in this latest phase of the so-called War of Land the modus operandi is still largely flawed because yet again, those blacks who have been given the land have not been properly equipped for their newly found role of bread winners of the nation. Such equipment should not merely mean the dolling out of fertilizers and chemicals which has been very scant by any measure anyway, but must involve extensive education and training to acquaint these “new farmers” with the mental make up that goes with the task at hand.
Without such education the briefcase farmers most of whom have simply acquired these farms for prestige and to make political statements will not measure up to their challenge of feeding the nation. As an agrarian nation with an agro-based economic Zimbabwe will continue to languish in poverty even if Mbeki was to swap Union Buildings in Pretoria for Munhumutapa Buildings in Harare. People tend to show so-much obsession with Mbeki that they are missing the bigger picture and this is why on several times the government has virtually escaped scot-free without due criticism for its short comings just because all eyes were on Mbeki to see what is his next move on Zimbabwe would be.
I sometimes think that even if Mugabe was to leave political office today, as long we remain hapless towards national issues, our problems will never follow Mugabe just like that. Instead there will be more insurmountable problems and less scapegoats.
Silence Chihuri
is the chairman of MDC UK and lives in Scotland. He can be contacted
at: silencechihuri@hotmail.com
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