Every great party has a party-pooper

07 Mar, 2021 - 00:03 0 Views
Every great party has a party-pooper

The Sunday Mail

THE hallmark of good leadership is taking people where they ought to be instead of where they want to be. Sometimes what people need is more important than what they want.

However, giving people what they need — and not what they want — can be thoroughly unpopular.

Ironically, while political capital comes from popularity, political effectiveness is often shaped by unpopular decisions.

It is precisely this conundrum that makes many politicians fail.

It, therefore, takes incredible boldness and steely resolve to lead.

Incredible boldness

In December 1994, China embarked on perhaps the biggest project it had ever undertaken since construction of the Great Wall of China — the Three Gorges Dam.

You see, at the time, China, which was now growing at breakneck speed after more than a decade of Deng Xiaoping-inspired reforms, needed power to support its burgeoning economic activities.

It wanted to tame the roaring Yangtze River — the third longest after the Nile and the Amazon — and protect downstream riparian communities from the ever-present spectre of flooding.

A painful lesson had been learnt 40 years earlier (in 1954) when floods claimed more than 30 000 lives.

So it was only logical that damming the river would naturally control the flow of water and insulate vulnerable communities from unwanted deluges.

In both scope and magnitude, the project was as ambitious as it was extraordinary.

At 181 metres tall and spanning over 2 335 metres (2,3 kilometres) across the river, the dam was not only a remarkable engineering feat but a figurative and literal source and symbol of China’s growing power and influence.

By 2008 when the monster dam was completed, it pumped more than 18 300 megawatts (MW) to the grid.

Additional hydro units were added in 2012, which made it possible for the plant to produce 22 500MW.

Not surprisingly, it is currently the largest hydroelectric power project in the world.

Just for perspective, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) being constructed by Ethiopia along the Nile River — which has become the source of a raging feud between Addis Ababa and Cairo (Egypt) — will only be able to generate about 6 000MW.

The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) claims that the Three Gorges Dam is one of the few man-made structures that it is so enormous that it is visible to the naked eye from space.

Incredible!

This, however, does not mean the project was incident-free.

As is always the norm, every great party always has a party-pooper.

Bishop Lazarus remembers these characters all too well.

In the village, they came in the form of restless chaps who often got so sloshed at communal fund-raising beer-drinking gatherings (ndari) that they had this inexplicable streak of tipping over beer calabashes, particularly just at the very moment when the gathering became merrily animated.

Somehow these mishaps or freak accidents happened when the alcohol-tranced and jelly-kneed drunkards tried to execute dance routines to accompany the imaginary music playing in their head. Kikikiki

Oftentimes, the misguided and truant leg would land — bulls-eye — in the calabash, attracting murmurs of disapproval and disgust from fellow imbibers.

After performing this unspectacular and unamusing stunt, the perpetrators, who would also invariably clumsily fall over, always played possum to escape withering condemnation from their peers.

Naturally, a project as grand and consequential as the Three Gorges Dam attracted countless party-poopers who were hell-bent on throwing spanners in the works by whipping up emotions stirred by the immense social upheaval it caused.

More that 1,9 million people from about 1 400 rural towns and villages were displaced, while close to 1 600 factories were also affected by the project.

Activists smelled an opportunity and sprouted overnight.

In no time, there were activists who were agitating for species such as the Chinese river dolphin; there were activists who stood for the preservation of historical and archaeological sites; there were activists who advocated for the environment; there were activists who purported to be protecting Chinese productive farmlands; and there was also a phalanx of activists ostensibly representing the interests of affected families.

In fact, activists of every shape and hue crawled from every nook and cranny.

A Canadian environmental group, Probe International, was notably critical of the project by claiming that inundating communities and factories with the envisaged reservoir would result in a near-apocalypse from chemicals and other similar pollutants.

International financiers such as the World Bank decided not to fund the project, and so did the US Export-Import Bank.

Determined Chinese authorities, however, managed to bankroll it from resources generated from special taxes on consumption, including revenues from the first phase of the project.

Suffice to say that a decade after the completion of the dam, none of the fears raised by critics ever came to pass.

Instead, China has since catapulted itself to become the world’s second-largest economy and managed to lift more than 900 million of its 1,3 billion citizens out of poverty.

None of this could have been possible if the Chinese didn’t know how to balance personal and national interests.

Bishop Lazi was particularly touched by an article on the Three Gorges Dam written by US journalist Aurthur Zich (who sadly died in 2012) for the National Geographic’s September 1997 issue.

During his odyssey to China to get an appreciation of the project, he came across and interviewed Zheng Xinnian, who was one of the multitudes who had been affected by the displacements.

Zheng famously remarked: “I will forever miss the place we have lived for generations. But we must sacrifice personal interest for the good of the country.”

But it would be disingenuous to say all those who were affected by the project were thrilled by it. You see, sometimes angst and anxiety make people fretful.

Opportunists

This seems to be the same upheaval that has visited the Chilonga community of Chiredzi, where a sprawling lucerne grass project, which is meant to feed the country’s dairy sector as well as generate exports, is set to begin.

Some families will definitely have to make way for the huge undertaking, which will straddle over 12 000 hectares. Unbeknown to the activists who are now seek to whip up emotions to besmirch the initiative, encouraging engagements between the Government, the community and the investor have been ongoing for more than a year now.

A significant capital outlay for their resettlement — not eviction — has already been set aside. What these activists need to consider the next time they walk into a supermarket to buy milk is that the bulk of it — about 60 million litres — is being imported from other countries, as local farmers can only produce 70 million of the 130 million litres demanded locally.

Through the envisaged investment, lucerne grass, which is proven to be a “magic ingredient” that improves the health of dairy cows and boosts milk production, will supply feed for dairy farmers and communities, including export markets.

It also has the potential of improving the material well-being of Chilonga through outgrower schemes. For the Bishop, such kind of social upheavals are a sign of development-induced displacement, which is a key indicator that sustainable economic development is beginning to take root.

Just recently, the Government released close to $3 million to relocate families that had been affected by the construction of Causeway Dam in Marondera, whose commissioning is now imminent. As the Government continues to plough ahead with its development agenda, such disruptions will not be uncommon — which is a good thing.

Sometimes, it is important to take time to understand situations before hastily coming up with misleading conclusions.

Proverbs 14:19 says, “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.”

Proverbs 4:6-9 adds: “Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding. Cherish her, and she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honour you.

“She will give you a garland to grace your head and present you with a glorious crown.”

The disinformation campaign of the Chilonga project by MDC-A ragtag shock-troopers, who thought they could use another hashtag for cheap political point-scoring, was quite fascinating.

However, it was not unexpected.

For a party that no longer has a building to call home, their members now have no option but to loiter on social media platforms looking for the smallest of details that they could possibly use to contrive public outrage.

When will they learn that hashtags are just ephemeral?

Like morning dew, they dissipate with the rising sun.

Bishop out!

 

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