Zimbabwe a nation of misplaced priorities

Opinion by Moses Chamboko

Driving around the city of Harare presents an image that may bring the weak close to tears especially if you have been outside the country for a while. In addition to dangerous potholes, heaps of garbage and crumpling buildings, one is confronted with faces of ordinary citizens punctuated with despondency and surrender.

Ironically, the number of imported vehicles, some of them top of the range, continue to flood the streets. We have graduated from satellite dishes to cars! At the same time, the quality of life continues to plummet. Have we become a nation of misplaced priorities?

The employment rate is comparable to the unemployment rate for most of the world’s functional economies. Like Cuba and other so-called socialist countries, government is now the primary employer followed closely by retail and transport, to an extent, hospitality. Major industrial areas still have the silence of the grave. This is not hyperbolic.

If you bother to visit or drive past the place popularly known as kuMbudzi just outside Harare towards Masvingo, you will be shocked to see multitudes of Zimbabweans flagging down motorists. If you stop to ask where they are going, “kuBridge” is the most frequent response meaning “to Beitbridge”.

You are left wondering why “kuBridge”. Indeed, it is about survival. Zimbabweans seem to be getting more resourceful each day. Cross-border travellers who jump onto a luxury coach and pay for the full trip to Johannesburg will have their “papers” in order i.e passport and other travel documents therefore don’t present a risk to transport operators. Those who shout “kuBridge”, often will be travelling all the way to Johannesburg or even as far as Cape Town or Durban.

Prompting further why this is the case, you will discover the real reasons. Beitbridge is where they meet cartels that make a living out of facilitating border jumping. Some of these will be immigration and police officers on both sides of the border.

Once they are across the border, they will then find ways of getting to their ultimate destinations, at times paying along the way to be allowed to proceed. Some become South Africans once they are on the other side of the border, using a mix of genuine and fake identity documents.

One is then forced to reflect on what our brothers and sisters from Mozambique went through at the height of the civil war in their country. They would cross illegally into Zimbabwe and settle for anything once they were in the country. Anything was better than being in Mozambique at the time. For the first time, we saw young men and boys working as “maids” for countless families.

Given the abundance of education, skills, mineral resources and rich farmlands that Zimbabwe is enviously endowed with, what has led this nation with such great potential to sink so low? The answer lies in misgovernance. Clearly, we cannot continue on this untenable path for much longer lest we wake up one day to a massive implosion if not explosion.

To extricate ourselves from this conundrum, we must redefine our destiny through change of government. For nearly 33 years, recycled ZANU PF governments’ greatest achievement was rearing the ugly head of corruption to the extent that it became an acceptable sub-culture. On the other hand, the four-year-old GNU has had its fair share of limitations and challenges.

MDC-T, as the substantive future government (given free and fair elections), must now work round the clock in preparing for the onerous eventuality. Part of that preparation starts with primary elections. When selecting candidates for the next election, there has to be emphasis on quality, quality and quality.

The politics of populism and sloganeering is gone and gone for good. Zimbabweans are now a lot more enlightened politically than they were a decade ago. Every candidate will be thoroughly scrutinised. Those who have been caught in a web of corruption, self-aggrandisement or poor performance including councillors must not be given another chance. There is no shortage of quality candidates in the movement.

The party must also formulate a clear strategy to eradicate/transform all forms of retrogressive forces that were systematically planted and embedded across every sector of the economy over the years. A timely combination of retraining and reaching out to the Diaspora might produce positive results. Zimbabwe must change.

Moses Chamboko writes in his personal capacity. He can be contacted at [email protected]