The Sunday Mail
Our circumstances are not perfect but it is difficult to understand why some want to extinguish any and every positive.
“Our only problem is the way we think. The only barrier to our national achievement is our belief in others at our expense.”
The quotation is taken from the inaugural speech by Malawi’s new President Peter Mutharika.
He was urging his countrymen to look beyond the election which he had just won though narrowly amid the usual claims of rigging by the outgoing leader Joyce Banda who was so ungracious about her loss she shunned Mutharika’s installation in the commercial capital of Blantyre.
I don’t know whether small nations make for political narrow-mindedness too.
The moment I read about Banda’s protests of rigging, genuine or not, they sounded familiar, and for that reason alone, a little phoney.
But what caught my interest in Mutharika’s speech were two phrases: “the way we think” and “our belief in others at our expense”.
They caught my attention because that problem has become familiar in Zimbabwe.
In fact it has become the bane of our politics, more specifically, our opposition politics.
That type of politics has turned Zimbabwe into Sadc’s enfant terrible. In that regard, for once I am made to feel that Zimbabwe is better off without the kind of opposition politics we have had in the past 15 years.
Let the MDC destroy itself, perchance in its ashes might emerge something better, something Zimbabwean in body and soul, not body only.
Back to President Mutharika’s statement.
This week there were reports from the suicidal MDC-T’s Tendai Biti mourning about Zimbabwe’s dead economy and Zanu-PF being clueless on how to turn it around.
Given to hyperbole always, in describing the situation in the country, Biti said Zimbabweans were worse off now than they were during the hyperinflationary period in 2008.
He said President Mugabe should step down and that a national transitional council of technocrats should take over the affairs of the state.
It was too long to wait for constitutionally scheduled national elections in 2018.
He claimed that the international community had a chest $4 billion since 2012 which they were ready to inject into the economy.
Probably if his party had won the elections and reversed the land reform and stopped Zanu-PF’s indigenisation and economic empowerment policies!
More of Biti’s worrisome “thinking”. He proposed that Zimbabwe should be placed under a Sadc curatorship as part of an economic recovery plan.
We always have so much “belief in others at our (own) expense”, as President Mutharika said of Malawians.
We brew our own problems at home and expect foreigners to resolve them for us.
When they intervene to help, as South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki did from 2004 to 2008, if we don’t agree with their recommendations, we accuse them of bias or collusion with our rivals, never ourselves for creating the problem in the first place.
There appears to be a childish thinking that if we become nuisance enough, the region will be forced to “help” to minimise the ramifications of our nuisance behaviour on their economies and social fabric.
And let’s not pretend that the “political risk” investors perceive Zimbabwe to be is insurmountable or that it was inevitable.
This was a deliberate creation of the MDC-T after it lost in the harmonised elections last year.
It was within the party leadership to be decent and gracious in loss or to be destructive.
They chose to be churlish, turning their back on the nation with their trademark “tongai tione”.
Yet a decent leadership would acknowledge its mistake and apologise to its supporters for losing but thanking them for the support, promising better fortune next time.
The party would then mobilise its followers to rally around key national policies, pointing out weaknesses and whatever adjustments might need to be made to certain laws. Hasn’t Tsvangirai told us ad nauseam that time is on his side?
But then the MDC party has never betrayed its unsavoury origins, hence its blind opposition to every pro-poor policy although it claims that its biggest support base are the workers, a class which is part of a majority of the poor.
Why would a Zimbabwean political party totally oppose the land reform programme or black economic empowerment policies?
Whose interest is a worker’s party supposed to fight for if not those of the poor, and what is wrong with those poor being given access to the nation’s natural resources than remaining mere employees given the vicissitudes of the capitalist labour market?
The usual excuse about corruption and cronyism in implementation might sound valid, but is not enough justification to oppose policies which benefit the poor.
Policies of such magnitude are bound to face huge challenges and leave loopholes for corruption and opportunism.
These loopholes can be exposed by a useful opposition fighting for the greater welfare of the citizens, not a few white farmers. It was Bob Marley who said “none but ourselves can free our mind”.
In this vein, Biti’s call for a national dialogue would make sense if it were done in good faith. It’s normal that a nation talks to itself.
But in our case that dialogue must begin by acknowledging who legitimately has people’s mandate to run the country.
It’s not about bragging that Zanu-PF doesn’t have $27 billion to fully operationalise its Zim Asset blueprint so it means they are clueless about what needs to be done.
This is a policy blueprint which applies everywhere at all times. Its focus on health and education shows that it can be used as a checklist by any political party for the next 100 years.
While the MDC is committing political suicide through leadership fights, nobody thinks about their poor followers who have been left out of historic national policy programmes because they are being told “no, these are Zanu-PF gimmicks”.
If an election gimmick can give you a farm where you can produce tobacco for yourself and make money out of it, who cares?
If anything, the MDC is proving to be no more than a crisis party. Every economic challenge seems to give them pleasure that there might just be enough angry people to vote for it. It cannot sell programmes to the electorate and the more blunders Zanu-PF makes the more the MDC highlights these as reasons for it to get into power.
However, it’s not all gloom and doom, even on the investment front.
Contrary to the eternal doldrums forecast by Biti and Co, there are people out there who see a silver lining where others see only a dark, barren cloud.
There are people who are ready to invest in Zimbabwe and see a bright future ahead.
One such is South Africa’s Andrew Robinson, described by South Africa’s Business Day newspaper as an entrepreneur and private equity investor. Business Day quotes Robinson as saying he heads a group of private investors who plan to invest $100 million in Zimbabwe this year.
I will quote Robinson at some length to illustrate the kind of “thinking” and “attitude” which is lacking in Zimbabwe and to show that he is not a starry-eyed adventurer.
He acknowledges that there are challenges in the agricultural sector and political uncertainty in the country.
This is what he says: “Downside risks (of investing in Zimbabwe) undoubtedly remain and, in investing as in life, there are no guarantees that things will not work out the way we predict.”
He sees pent-up demand, an educated population, and the need for “pragmatic” policies as presenting “wonderful commercial opportunities” in the country.
Business Day quotes Robinson: “We are taking a long-term view. History has shown that entrepreneurs make their money when everyone is running and we believe that, as investors, now is the time to be getting in. I have visited Zimbabwe more than 44 times in the past 18 months and what I see is different from what the media are communicating. The reality is that the country has all the underlying components of a healthy economy.”
The final endorsement from Robinson: “I, for one, see the country as a slumbering giant about to awaken and I believe that when it does, it will rocket into a new era of prosperity that will fundamentally redefine our region.”
He is not alone.
Entrepreneurs from all over the world are seeing investment opportunities in Zimbabwe while our own opposition politicians can only shout “Horror! Horror!”
When shall we learn to “think” Zimbabwean and nurture “belief in ourselves?”
