Zimbabwe in 2025

via Zimbabwe in 2025 The Zimbabwean 13 January 2015

After recently reading the book “A traveller’s guide to our next 10 years” put together by Frans Cronje, the CEO of The South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR), on probable future scenarios for South Africa, I could not resist imagining what kind of Zimbabwe we want in 2025.

We are indeed a lost society, a generation with no particular direction. We are a country flying blind and hoping to land safely, somewhere or anywhere, sometime in the future.

This is so because our so called leaders are focused on maintaining political power at all costs and it has been difficult for them to imagine beyond themselves. This has demeaned who we truly are, our potential and what Zimbabwe, our country can become.

It is time we changed how we think about ourselves and what kind of country we can create beyond our lifetime.

We need to expand the dialogue about the future amongst all sectors of our population so that we liberate our politics from the responsibility of creating our future on our behalf. They seem unable to think beyond their stomachs, are opportunistic and only focused on the short term. It is therefore dangerous for us to keep expecting more from them.

The interesting thing about scenarios, as mentioned by Frans, is that they at least create several probable different paths for the future, thus allowing us to make choices and change our policies, strategies and actions today to increase the probability of creating that which we desire.

Of course there is no certainty because there are many unanticipated events, local and international, that we cannot imagine now which will have a profound impact on what we become as a country. However, a nation without a vision or an imagined future becomes a failed state. Look at us now.

Our inability to plan and anticipate probable futures has been evident for the last 35 years and because of that, we have wasted so much valuable time and resources without achieving much.

The idea of having five year economic blue prints is not working. This tends to create the impression that there is only one possible future scenario. That is foolish and dangerous. At the end of it all, these blueprints become irrelevant gathering dust on our archives because they are soon overtaken by events that we have not anticipated.

A typical example has been our land reform and indigenisation policies which lacked any informed foresight. Both these policies have not achieved their intended objectives at all and have caused so much damage to our economy because we assumed one future outcome.

Up to this day, we are still chopping and changing them. We did not sit and consider the potential scenarios that could arise out of our actions before we implemented them.

However, that is typical of this government which has a myriad of conflicting and inconsistent policies that continue to have a negative impact on the economy.

Another typical example was the surprise by our opposition parties on the outcomes of the 2013 elections. In my opinion, opposition politicians failed to anticipate and think of the various probable scenarios and prepare for them accordingly. Their lack of planning and anticipating probable outcomes has cost us dearly. We cannot live on hope alone.

Another simple example that always amuses me is our national budget process. The Minister of Finance gives us one scenario of the future which always doesn’t ever happen.

What a waste of time and resources. We must have several national budget scenarios because this prepares us for probable outcomes.

In my opinion, as things stand now in Zimbabwe, I would argue that our country does have a range of futures and it is important that we contemplate about these now so that we can at least create the momentum necessary to avoid the worst.

Again this would not mean we are 100% right, but it would assist us in creating a new narrative that is significantly different from the past.

It would certainly assist us in identifying the futures which we don’t want and ensure that we do the necessary now to reduce their probability of emerging.

Of course this also applies to business. In 2004 if we had told some of our companies that were doing well then that they would be closed by 2014, they would have laughed it off and yet that is exactly what has happened.

In my opinion, leadership is really about thinking and planning about the future. We need leaders that spend time thinking and planning for the future as opposed to the haphazard way of implementing policy that we have witnessed since 1980.

That is what we mean when we say we need a new narrative. We need a new breed of Zimbabwean leaders to create the Zimbabwe that we want. We need people who have the ability to think, anticipate and plan before acting.

That is not asking for much is it? – Vince Musewe is an economist and author based in Harare. You may contact him on vtmusewe@gmail.com