Hopewell Chin’ono: Zimbabwe learning nothing from past tragic and tainted government appointments

By Hopewell Chin’ono

Some of the responses, interventions and comments on the Acie Lumumba Ministry of Finance appointment on a Facebook thread that I posted just made me realize how unambitious some of our people can be.

I would like those who had not heard of the Africa Leadership Institute to follow the link here:
https://alinstitute.org/our-programmes/archbishop-tutu-fellowship-programme

It is a group of Africa’s young leadership elite who are groomed for tomorrow’s leadership tasks on the African continent.

They are chosen when they are below 40 years of age and groomed through the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.

Included in that group of below 40s are plenty of Zimbabwean high achievers who are leading lights in their chosen professions.

These are the young people who should be looked at and groomed to be tomorrow’s leaders because they have achieved something through hard work, intellect and loads of integrity.

I have mentored a lot of very young people who are sharp, hard working and have gone around the world making their names and changing the world.

We have young Zimbabweans who are Rhodes Scholars, Cambridge Alumni, Ivy League graduates and from many other great universities working across the global financial sectors who ended up leaving the country out of frustration.

Do you seriously think that you can motivate and attract such bright young sparks back home by appointing folks like Ginimbi and Lumumba into government and its agencies?

Anyone who fails to understand something so basic should not be allowed anywhere near power or decision-making processes.

A country is like a business, you attract the best talent to lead in its all facets of the economy and the government bureaucracy commonly known as the civil service.

The futility of not understanding that aspect of life is what led to the total destruction of this country.
We are currently a basket case just in case you didn’t know, our youth have terrible, soiled and crooked role models. They admire thieves, fraudsters and criminals like Wicknell Chivayo for the loot that they stripped from the taxpayer.

They now call corruption hard work and are not even embarrassed to defend such criminality, they have been part of normalizing the abnormal.

It is the same syndrome that glorified thieves, crooks, fraudsters and undesirables who steal from the tax payer and as a result lives the poor grandmothers dying on hospital floors. Ask any doctor or nurse and they will tell you these stories chapter and verse.

We are a basket case because our people die from cholera, suffer from untreated mental illness disorders, have no money to pay for medicines, have NO running water and 95 percent can’t ge a job if they tried.

All this industrial mess and yet some compatriots think that someone like Lumumba or Ginimbi would make a good face for our country to the rest of the world?!

These appointments, which are disastrous, reflect the past that we thought we had disengaged from and not a new dispensation.

Who will take Zimbabwe and these appointees seriously when they are representing us around the continent and beyond?

Our country badly needs credibility especially at a time when our country’s economy is in flames.

We all thought that with Robert Mugabe gone, things would improve but now it seems like someone went to a sandpit at some playground and picked up some reprobates that they want to put into government!

I just don’t understand how any sane person would say it is ok for someone who has publicly declared that he stole or participated in corruption in government departments to be made part of the Ministry of Finance or anything to remotely do with it!

The comments I read on facebook made me realize that a lot of people don’t know what communication means, they are totally in the dark!

Ignorance is bliss some say but it can come with tragic consequences when it is allowed to interfere with national institutions!

Communication is about being believed, honesty and is rooted in clarity not dark arts of propaganda.

This country has suffered because of two decades of crude propaganda which neither benefited its creators or US the victims.

This country must move away from the broken past, it can’t do that if we allow the government bureaucracy to be packed with self-confessed corrupt kingpins.

If Mthuli Ncube needs a good communicator, Thoko Moyo is the dean of communications at Harvard University and there are many like her across the world and at home.

This country will never change if its citizenry is so daft and tone deaf to what should be done to get us out of the mud!

This is not about a western standard or dictates as some would deceitfully try to spin it, it is about our own standard that we should set for ourselves in order to thrive once more and not be a basket case that we have been since the late 90s!

Good women and men of this country should rise up and defend the good values that are needed to underpin our future and to take us forward.

We should not allow the very vocal minority that supports daft ideas to subsume us with its mediocrity, and to destroy the very little chances we have to rebuild today for our future in order to carry on with their terrible ways!

They don’t have the interests of this country at heart, they are selfish and have NO understanding of what this will mean for our children and grand kids!

They would like the government to get it wrong as has happened in the past, they want to use such mistakes as fertile ground for their corrupt ways.

That should be resisted and that resistance can only come when all the good men and women stand up for what is right.

There is a “kid” called Rutendo who came to my Harare home with her family when she was 18 years old in 2012.
Her uncle is a good friend of mine oft went two years from our London days at university.

Today Rutendo has a degree from University of Pennsylvania and two post-graduate degrees from the University of Oxford and she now works for the biggest hedge fund in the world.

Those are the brilliant minds that our government should be chasing after and hiring into service.

Great and brilliant talent attracts greater talent, there is NO government that will succeed with the type of mediocrity that ran Robert Mugabe’s governments.

Chose if you want to sink or swim, some of us have swam regardless of the national circumstances.

We won’t allow what we have achieved against all odds to be swept away by a pathological negative desire to celebrate mediocrity.

There was a stupid campaign this afternoon trying to silence those who are opposed to this corrupt mediocrity by calling them jealousy!

Don’t be intimidated, many people who called and inboxed me are CEOs, lawyers, doctors and even some government ministers who are appalled by this tragic lack of judgment and are worried by its implications.

As Walter Lippman said in 1920, it is altogether unthinkable that a society like ours should remain forever dependent on untrained accidental witnesses.

The better course is to send out into public service a generation of citizens who will, by sheer superiority, drive the incompetents out of the business.

What did SB Moyo say when he announced the military intervention on ZBC last year in November?

Why should we be taken back there again where a network of new criminals is allowed to take hostage of the state?

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker. He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow and a CNN African Journalist of the year.

He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa leadership Institute.
Hopewell has a new documentary film looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind, which was launched to critical acclaim.

State of Mind has been nominated for a top award in Kenya. You can watch the documentary trailer below. Hopewell can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter @daddyhope