We didn’t
hear much about liberation war credentials in 1996 when some of us were waiting
to see whether Margaret Dongo would stand as a candidate for President. Suppose
she had done so and, to prove her liberation war credentials, had proposed
that, instead of a face-to-face debate between the candidates on television,
there should be a televised contest to find which of them could most quickly
and efficiently dismantle an AK47, oil and grease it and reassemble it?
That is a
fascinating thought. It is still relevant. By that I don’t mean we should ask
Margaret Dongo to revive her political career. There are people with the
capacity to pass this test in every serious political party in this country and
they may not even be most numerous in Zanu (PF), despite the ailing party’s
efforts to privatise our history and national symbols. In fact, if we were to
choose our leaders only on the criterion of “liberation war credentials”, we
would still have such a large field of candidates that we would be forced to
acknowledge that some other criteria must be considered as well. Even Zanu should
realise that now, 33 years on, some of those other criteria are more important
than whether a candidate carried a gun in 1978 or even what party card they
carried then. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a few more aspiring leaders who
could unite people instead of dividing them? And uniting people against some
individual or party is a strange and unreliable kind of unity.
Wouldn’t it
be even better to have a few leaders who are experts at distributing wealth
rather than grabbing it all for themselves? I’m not asking our richest citizen
to give every man, woman and child in Zimbabwe $100, which he could probably do
without any noticeable change in his own lifestyle. That wouldn’t solve all our
problems; most of us could probably spend it on necessities for this week and
be as poor as ever next month. We need people who can think about who controls
the means of production; our factories, farms and mines. Really controlling
those things means influencing how they are used, for whose benefit they are
developed and whether that development makes lasting changes for all or just a
short-term profit for a few. Our self-appointed leaders over the past decades
don’t seem to see beyond sitting in the boss’s chair or his office. Once they
were there, they didn’t know what to do.
So our
industry ran down; now the big farms have run down and they want to get at the
mines and banks. We aren’t, as Ian Smith and his friends said, incompetent
people. We had plenty of competent engineers, skilled scientists and
administrators, but where are they now? The way our “liberators” ran the
country frustrated them and they have gone where their work is appreciated and
well rewarded. We still have educated people; professors of robotics with no
robots to work with, teachers we can’t pay and some people who make a lot of
money out of their skills. The trouble is that too many of them are like the
ear specialist who cleaned wax out of my ears; he first tested my hearing then,
after the wax was removed, he tried to sell me a hearing aid because my hearing
had been poor when my ears were full of wax. There are surgeons specialised in
more vital areas who walk out on a patient ready for an operation because they
can’t be paid their exorbitant fees before they operate.
We aren’t
short of people who have developed their brains, but how many of them use their
skills to help the people who need help? We need people, leaders or service
providers who have hearts that have been trained to feel for people and serve
their real needs.
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