Doing a Singapore on Zimbabwe

EDITORIAL COMMENT
For Zimbabwe, this would be a good time to reflect on a big, little story out of South Korea in 1998.

South Korea’s story of 1998 actually starts in July 1997 with the collapse of Thailand’s baht, which triggers the Asian financial crisis.

That crisis spread from Thailand to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and — to an extent — Brunei, China, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam.

BBC News, a year after the crisis started, reported that: “South Korea has exported the first shipment of 300kg of gold collected in a public campaign to help the country out of its economic crisis.

“The nationwide campaign began on January 5, and involved ordinary Koreans donating personal gold treasures, which have been melted down into ingots ready for sale on the international markets …

“It’s an extraordinary sight: South Koreans queuing for hours to donate their best-loved treasures in a gesture of support for their beleaguered economy. Housewives gave up their wedding rings; athletes donated medals and trophies; many gave away gold ‘luck’ keys, a traditional present on the opening of a new business or a 60th birthday.

“The campaign has exceeded the organisers’ expectations, with people from all walks of life rallying around in a spirit of self-sacrifice. According to the organisers, ten tonnes of gold were collected in the first two days of the campaign. But perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the campaign is not the sums involved, but the willingness of the Korean people to make personal sacrifices to help save their economy.”

Last week, in an interview with Bloomberg TV in New York where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly and engaged in various meetings to advance Zimbabwe’s development agenda, President Emmerson Mnangagwa hinted at the tough decisions that are coming ahead.

He said, “We have to be very sober. It is true that our fiscal balance is bad and we must be honest to our people as to what we want to achieve and to do.

“So there is need for us to apply fundamentals that may be harsh to our people, but are necessary for us to cross the bridge.”

The reality is that austerity is coming. Austerity is needed. There are no two ways about it. While the nation may not be asked to willingly give up its gold like the people of South Korea did when faced with crisis, there certainly is need for belt-tightening and girding of loins.

We must learn now to sacrifice for the sake of our collective future. This goes for all Zimbabweans — Government, private enterprises and individuals. This also speaks to the need for discipline from Government and from all the people of Zimbabwe.

Discipline, after all, is one of the key ingredients of statal development, without which the collective aspiration for an advanced nation can never be realised.

A look at any society that has developed in the past 100 years will bear testimony to the centrality of sacrifice and discipline to national development.

Writing for the Washington Post sometime in 2015 (“Lee Kuan Yew’s culture of discipline”), Richard Cohen spoke about how Singapore’s founding father dragged a nation from underdevelopment into modern times.

Yes, some people grumbled at the beginning about Lee Kuan Yew’s methods, but after taking even a cursory glance at Singapore today, no one can argue with the results.

Cohen writes: “Lee was a disciplinarian. He ran Singapore like a severe private school. He brooked no dissent, bad manners, corruption, recreational drugs, sloth, laziness or rambunctious teenagers. He was famous for using the cane to punish vandals and the death penalty for drug dealers.

“He knew his city-state had only one natural resource and that was the industriousness and discipline of its people. They were his students and he was the headmaster…”

President Mnangagwa, as we have as The Sunday Mail, has oft spoken of the need for honest, hard work. We hope Government institutes systems to ensure its public officials deliver on what they ought to, without need for recourse to caning and the death penalty!

In all things, a rigorous meritocracy must come shining through, with public office being held on the basis of ability rather than bloodlines, tribalism or any other such developmentally stultifying considerations.

Further, Zimbabwe — like Singapore — has a wonderful human resource base.

Add to it the stupendous natural resource endowment and there is no way we cannot “do a Singapore”, so to speak.

Cohen, for the Washington Post, continued: “The suppression of dissent is not praiseworthy. The application of the death penalty is abhorrent. The lack of political opposition and Press freedom is not to be admired, and one-man rule — Lee was in major office for about 52 years — it is hardly admirable. Lee ran a one-man State and he ran it, on occasion, repressively.

“But his administrative brilliance and his economic success are what earned him such adulation … Lee, as they once said of Mussolini, made the trains run on time. America’s trains too often don’t run at all.”

So in driving the nation forward, President Mnangagwa need not succumb to the allure of heavy-handedness, and indeed he has more than enough times shown that he is a true democrat at heart.

But at the same time, he need not, as Cohen concludes in his piece on Lee Kuan Yew, “suffer from an excess of democracy” in the quest to build the Zimbabwe we all want.