Hopewell Chin’ono: Country first for Mnangagwa, he won’t succeed if he seeks shortcuts
By Hopewell Chin’ono
I am as desperate as any well meaning Zimbabwean for a lasting solution to our political and economic problems that have devoured our dignity as a people and rendered thousands of university graduates jobless.
Some of these youths and adults have never known what it means to work in their whole life, broken and battered by life’s miseries, they are the human cost to Zimbabwe’s incompetent and corrupt political leadership.
I feel that the many solutions being suggested to unlock this mess and bring a new way of doing things are being driven in a disingenuous manner.
For instance the way the dialogue meetings have been handled is symptomatic of why everything else has failed in this country.
You don’t plan a journey in your home and expect all your cousins that you want to go with on that journey from the village to be waiting for you on the roadside unless you plan that journey together with them.
The President should have send his team to chat to the main political actors and during those talks, they map out what is going to be discussed, how it will be discussed and where and when it will be discussed.
The President is an interested party in this discourse and not an arbiter, he needs to show respect to the other participants if he hopes to yield any results from this proposed dialogue.
As it is at the moment, it seems as if the dialogue show was wheeled out only for a photo opportunity for the world media.
Many political actors are alleging that it is also becoming clearer that there is a team of candidates that knows much more than others, the likes of Lovemore Madhuku, Thokozani Khupe and Elton Mangoma.
That mistrust is not good at all for any meaningful dialogue, this shouldn’t be about jobs, elitist pacts or co-option into the system, it must be about us the ordinary people.
What we need to do, as a country is well known, we need political and economic reforms, the Bretton Woods institutions where the President expects to get funding from have told him this.
Even if Nelson Chamisa and Emmerson Mnangagwa sat on a table and agreed on a deal, that agreement will not mean anything unless we have reformed how we do things in this country.
This is about the people and how they are governed. That is what it is about and not about those who perceive to be representing political parties, parties that have NO followers for that matter.
Here is the thing, Zimbabwe will remain stuck in the mud until someone or a group of people with national interest and a patriotic agenda emerge to lead the country out of the twenty-year-old quagmire.
Currently what we have are sectarian, tribal, partisan and business group interests that are being driven covered by a deceitful veil of patriotism.
There won’t be any shortcut to political and economic legitimacy and no amount of smoke screening will delude those that have long pockets in the investment and international financing world.
There are two options for the government because what we really have is a government that has been cornered by local and international circumstances, we either do the right thing for Zimbabwe, or Zimbabwe will remain in its pariah status until someone with the country at heart emerges.
We can have hundreds of dialogue meetings and the President can appoint as many advisors as his heart wishes, but until those advisors point him to what everyone else knows to be the key to Zimbabwe’s success, we will remain the failed economy that we have been for over a decade.
This is clearly not Robert Mugabe causing this mess anymore as we constantly said for years, he is gone and not a factor to the decisions being made, but the problems remain and persists and they have actually been accentuated.
The scapegoating is now a thing of the past, it is President Emmerson Mnangagwa who should take credit, criticism and responsibility for everything that has happened since he came into office in November of 2017.
He had and still has an opportunity to do the right thing, if he chooses not to take the patriotic route over group interests, he too will have no other legacy except the one that defines his boss today.
Let us pray that he will take the correct route, the one that underpins national interests over group self enrichment plans and schemes.
Any political solution will require Mnangagwa and Chamisa’s signatures to it in order to carry any semblance of credibility, those two are the main political ingredients.
A dialogue with civil society, churches, traditional leaders, students and the key political players guaranteed by a neutral convener will succeed.
Anything else will be a stitch up that won’t yield anything or deceive anyone both home and abroad.
Why do we need a dialogue after all? The President could simply reform the state and the local and international partners will come on board and support his government.
The reason why he is not implementing his promises is the reason why everyone else is quietly skeptical and dismissing the dialogue calls, lead from the front sir and lead with the country at heart.
Leadership is about taking tough and unpalatable decisions for the good of the country and future generations, that is what defines Nelson Mandela, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara and many great leaders.
They did not live for themselves and only for the day, they put their country first that is why we still love them to this day.
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.
The recently departed music superstar Oliver Mtukudzi wrote the sound track for State of Mind.
It was recently nominated for a big award at the Festival International du Film Pan-Africain de Cannes in France. You can watch the documentary trailer below.
