It’s time to grow up

via It’s time to grow up The Zimbawean 14 January 2015

Independent Zimbabwe is nearly 35 years old, but you wouldn’t believe it from the way many people, in power and on the street, behave or from the way they talk and act.

There are so many mentally disturbed people around that mental hospitals only have room for those who are seriously violent and not politically connected. I have often asked myself what exactly the problem is and might suggest a few answers.

There’s something mad about the idea of tearing a woman’s clothes off because they don’t cover her adequately. When it’s easy to mobilise a mob to do this you know we’re in a madhouse.

But try suggesting in the turmoil of our streets that there are rules which tell us where to drive and when to give way to other road users, or that certain behaviour is not polite and the offender might say “This is Zimbabwe” as if that answered everything. “Independence” becomes an excuse for disregarding every law, rule and common good manners. If independence meant we had to reinvent everything from the rules of the road to how we behave when we sit down to eat together, we’d still be arguing about those details and wouldn’t have started building schools, clinics and roads.

Shouting “Tiri muZimbabwe” begins to sound like the unthinking abuse you hear if you thwart a fractious three-year-old. Anything he says is likely to be out of proportion because he or she has just made the disturbing discovery that the world runs independently of him and it sometimes limits his own independence and his imagined omnipotence. Just watch any baby; they all take for granted that the world is only there to provide for their comfort. Learning to adjust to the inconvenient reality can be painful, which is why some of us never learn that lesson properly.

Teenagers who haven’t learnt it are difficult enough to deal with, and some who shout loudest are probably still in their ‘teens, but those who have grown physically to adulthood without any corresponding mental or spiritual growth are real problems.

If you live along or near Mbirimi Drive you will know what I mean. We haven’t seen any sign that the mysterious people who are building that big complex along Mazorodze Road consulted any town planners. They may have bribed one or two, but what about the prescribed examinations of plans, investigation of possible impact on existing homes or businesses and consultation with neighbours that form part of any normal process of planning how to share space and resources in a limited area? You must live with your neighbours. That is why you need to get a permit from the city council before you build on an empty plot of land or to alter an existing building.

This isn’t a colonial imposition; I haven’t seen any colonialists living on Mbirimi Drive, but there are families who had to face flooding in the recent heavy rain because the storm drains back water up where they should be removing it, and sewers backing up all the stuff we don’t want to see or smell, bringing the risk of typhoid and cholera.

Why do those drains back up? You’d have to ask someone who can investigate that massive building site between you and Mazorodze Road. The answer seems to be that someone feels he can give his neighbours cholera if he makes a profit out of it, because “this is Zimbabwe”, a lawless failed state.

We’re not uniquely corrupt or unique victims of corruption, just as we were never as uniquely clever as we used to think we were. Many newly independent countries went through this “we are free (of all rules)” phase, but it didn’t last long. It is a stage in the adolescence, or maybe the childhood, of a nation. Seeing it in a 35-year-old state tells us there is something very wrong with that country.