Better under Smith?

They demonstrate that one thing was better; the teaching of history – in mission schools.

So here is a lesson in history for those who were only taught “Heritage”.

Smith did not build our railways. They were built when the BSA Company ran the country, before 1905, for their own commercial purposes.

Smith did not build the infrastructure of roads, schools, hospitals, electricity and water supply and sewage disposal. The credit for the state of those at Independence belongs to earlier settler regimes or their friends in big business.

The main infrastructure of roads, railways, water and electricity supply and health services were built before 1965 and designed to serve industry and the white areas. The high point for African hopes was the Prime Ministership of Garfield Todd, from 1953 to 1958, but reactionaries in his party ditched him in favour of Edgar Whitehead. The extreme racist whites soon tired of him because, like the US Democrats in their recent election, he wasn’t racist enough. Winston Field, who replaced him, was not racist enough for his own party, the Rhodesia Front. Smith replaced him, declared UDI and had his final collision with history in 1980

Smith did build some roads; most notably around the north-east border, to help the army move faster in that area.

In 1980, we all hoped for something better. The first decade of ZANU-PF government did show some improvements. The biggest success was in health policy, emphasising prevention rather than cure and especially decentralising better care of mothers and babies. We owe this, not to ZANU-PF but to a group of doctors who were sympathetic with what they thought was ZANU ideology. And, at just the right moment, a couple of researchers at the Blair health laboratory unveiled the toilet which made our health services the envy of the world. ZANU did build a lot of schools, but they only paid lip-service to the idea of Education with Production, which brought Botswana from mass illiteracy to a highly educated country. They did build some tarred roads, helped to integrate the former African rural areas into the economy. Some, but only a few, of the small centres linked by these roads became real centres of growth. Without any reference to records, Gokwe, Murambinda and Magunje immediately spring to my mind.

After the Wilowgate scandal and Mugabe’s declaration that he was changing the party ideology to something that gave more to the IMF and World Bank and their members. No protest within the party; he might have only been changing his jacket.

People-oriented development ground to a halt. So did road building and rural electrification. A good symbol was the Gokwe-Sengwa road, tarred up to its junction with the new Karoi-Binga road, which was complete except for the top layer of tar. The tar ran out just west of Magunje and the people of Sengwa and those who would have benefited from linking it by tarred road to Karoi and Binga have long stopped waiting for the tar.

Blame who you like on the land issue, but both ZANU-PF and the majority of white farmers remained intransigent, so the collision that followed was unavoidable. It revealed that ZANU-PF had no plans for land reform, though they had 20 years to work one out. It also aggravated inflation and the unemployment that it brings, so here we are, with potholes and power cuts, sewage in the streets, whole cities relying on hand-pumped borehole water . . . . people have forgotten the good times when we really could hope for something better.