The Sunday Mail
Prof Dr David Bartosch
What does it take to develop a country successfully and to establish long-term stability?
What does it take to grow a strong nation? It is not just about quantities, numbers and statistics. It’s about qualities as well. To be able to develop in these two respects, the very basic foundations have to be established everywhere.
Confucius once said that at first, it is important to nourish the people.
Having been asked what else could be done, the Master is said to have replied: “Educate them!”
In both respects, science and rationality as well as – on the other hand – creativity and imagination have to be synthesised and balanced to build the foundations and to nourish the people in a material and intellectual sense.
We have a scientific and a poetic eye, the great inventor Nicola Tesla said.
To explore and develop our full potential, we have to use both at the same time.
Zimbabwe will learn more from its partners and friends to develop the visual acuity on science and technology. At the same time, it has to open its age-old poetic eye of African vision and creativity.
In this context, the energy levels of the whole community – that means the energy levels, the possibilities of self-realisation as persons, as well as the psychological balance of all the families, the rural and urban society and the State institutions – have to be raised to higher levels of functionality and stability.
Based on that, further levels of reflection can be developed.
Technological innovation
Talents in technology and science have to be grown, scouted, promoted, and integrated in the process, regardless of their family background et cetera.
Under no circumstance can a State afford brain drain. That is key.
In the case of Zimbabwe, it has been rightly stated that new technologies have to be implemented, especially in the agricultural sector first.
Mechanisation is an obvious keyword here. But in addition to that more obvious aspect, Zimbabwe is also in a special position to be able to experiment in ways that many developed countries cannot.
Besides building the basic structures, Zimbabwe should also try out new and energy-saving as well as environmentally friendly technologies.
Zimbabwe can even try to realise future-laden inventions which are ignored in other countries, because the markets are already fixated, or strong and powerful interests prevent certain respective developments there.
Africa is free to be very creative in this way, and to become an expert in the newest, but unconventional forms of technological solutions.
This can’t and doesn’t have to be expensive. On the contrary, such an explorative attitude can even already be started on the level of high school education.
Let the kids and teachers be creative.
Many very new and alternative ideas and thoughts to be found on the web are easy to realise and to experiment with. Playing with this wholeheartedly will boost the technological creativity of the younger generation.
New energy-saving or otherwise beneficial technologies could be tested in small rural communities and then be spread all over the country, if proven to be successful and applicable. New talents can be raised in this way.
More people would be able to help create an environmentally friendly and working system of needs and communication, which also reflects the idea of community collaboration and social justice.
In addition, educational institutions in terms of university level and professional education in technology could slowly be strengthened, and new ones should be established nation-wide step-by-step. They should also be interlinked with the developments mentioned before.
Start small
It is more rational to think small in the beginning, but it is very important to pay emphasis on quality and personal efforts all the time. The biggest players in world economy and the most important inventions had small and humble beginnings. But quality and efforts have always been a decisive factor.
In the case of a medium-sized country, small institutions of creativity and learning in these fields should be decentralised and integrated in all regions, but they should also form a network at the same time.
They have to be supervised by the State in terms of general quality management. Educational institutions should be managed by the State and a capable civil service, which is recruited from the most capable persons in terms of knowledge and ethics.
Such a civil service can only be built up over time and in the course of the general development. People have to learn to pull in one direction. What is the best vision to provide direction for the development and to raise a common patriotic sentiment? Those aforementioned educational institutions should be independent and combine research, teaching and practical applications for the benefit of the people.
For Zimbabwe, it would be helpful to be inspired by studies on the Humboldtian ideal of university education, as well as the history of professional education and higher education in engineering in 19th century Germany.
The Germans also became successful, because they adopted the best elements of classical teachings of foreign civilisations: ancient Greece and China would be two examples.
Order and Stability
But of course, that’s not all: to raise the interior dynamics of economic growth and cultural refinements and to provide material and mental nourishment for a human community as a whole, an explicit order has to be established which is in accord with the indigenous foundations and habits of Zimbabwean communities. An order which provides orientation and assurance, the elements of stability and protection, like the bones in our bodies or the shell of a mussel.
The more the State enables people to lead a better life in this way, the more their sense for their duty with regard to the State institutions also has to grow.
A certain form of user-friendly discipline – not a discipline of oppression, but the means of personal and social self-discipline – have to be taught and practiced in schools and in villages.
The conscience of one’s duties with regard to the whole of one’s nation and civilisation can only grow out of respect for the particular existing State that we live in. If this respect is based on a real foundation, no threat can disturb the very foundations of the community, at least not with regard to its very foundations. Besides order, flexibility and leeway are needed for successful developments in economy, technology and trade-business. Life is about flexibility, about vivid rhythm – and yes, it is also about beauty and joy.
Life has an aesthetic element. The necessary order of the state should further that inborn limitless imagination, which has led mankind further and further since ancient times. Sub-Saharan African people have to, and will, play a much more important role in world historical co-development of the families of planetary civilisations.
We are connecting to form a planetary whole. Not everything can and should be forgotten, but Africa should try to look ahead. Now it has the opportunity and it should make the best use of it as quickly as possible.
Forgiveness (not forgetfulness) is one of the means to gain more strength, and to be more free to achieve a more content and happy existence for the State as a whole. As many African people have suffered and still suffer from poverty, this, in addition, also implies the strong necessity of early moral education. Besides the abstract property rights of persons and the more objective elements of ethics, the subjective moral conscience is a basis for a thriving social and economic development: Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.
The role of conscience and the role of education in this regard cannot be understated. Under such conditions, a reliable order of the whole is much easier to organise and to stabilise under the hands of wise governance, and the balance of the middle, the middle income and the state of ease and human contentment can arise.
To become rich, you have to become wise first.
But to guarantee that this wealth doesn’t harm others, or even turns into evil, we also have to nurture our moral subjectivity at all times and in all aspects of society.
Order is to be paired with open flexibility and the freedom to develop a true responsibility on the side of the members of society.
Both order and flexibility have to be applied in the right sense. A successful society is a never-ending reflection, and a dance, of the true principles of life.
And of justice; that means complementary and win-win for all sides according to the respective accomplishments.
Prof Dr David Bartosch is a special foreign expert at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He wrote this for The Sunday Mail.
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Therefore, we have to clear the terms and ways we think, and we have to focus on life, the problems of here and now in an eminent way.
What can be derived from China’s successful re-emergence on the world stage since 1978 is that instead of just hoping, responsibility and self-cultivation have to be made the absolute priority of State institutions, including the different aspects and segments of society and the life of all the families.
The more responsible people are in this regard, the more they take care for themselves, their families and their community and planetary life as a whole; and the freer and successful their particular community can act and evolve, the more successful and rational they can react to problems.
One of the pre-conditions to nurture this responsibility is a stability which also arises as something in the subjective mind of the social individual: Therefore, we, last but first, also have to know where we come from!
If we forget who we are and where we come from, we run into danger to become the mere objects of the commercial interests of others.
To develop a country and to grow strong, and to be able to share responsibilities with one’s friends and true partners, is also about cultivating one’s own traditions and to even refine the elements of one’s civilisation, to be culturally confident, being alive in the ancestral traditions of centuries, if not millenia, and yet trying to invent oneself in a new and even futuristic form.
China’s afore-mentioned development also meant and still of course does mean an ongoing and self-amplifying rejuvenation of the indigenous cultural memory – paired with the embedded openness and eagerness to learn from others.
This is something to study and to learn from.
An open nation that wants to create a happy state of existence for its citizens and to be a valuable partner to others has to find and appreciate the characteristics of its own culture, and to nurture especially those basic elements, which are positive and furthering therein (while forgetting those which hinder progress, of course). Therefore, the implementation of infrastructure and businesses should always be paralleled with an evolving reflection on Zimbabwe’s native languages, the creative reinvention of traditional music, literature and the most basic forms of indigenous philosophical wisdoms on life.
It is important to mechanise the agriculture, to foster digitalisation et cetera, but at the same time it is also important to ask: What brings the people together? How can they focus and bundle their interests together, to grow strong as a whole?
How can Zimbabwe with its old civilisation and history of trade with China and other parts of Asia find and reinvent itself in the 21st century, and create a realistically optimistic self-identity in the form of a multipolar and creative as well as economically just society with Zimbabwean characteristics?
How can Zimbabwe become a modern and futuristic society and at the same time revive the strong force of its African cultural memory?
