Zimbabwe after Mugabe

“And if it is a despot you should dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed,” — Kahlil Gibran-The Prophet.

Source: Zimbabwe after Mugabe – NewsDay Zimbabwe November 10, 2016

guest column: VINCE MUSEWE

The time will come for us to rise. We must create a new Zimbabwe and that needs us to re-imagine Zimbabwe at a scale never done before.

However, Zimbabwe will not emerge from old thinking by us continuing to recycle the same old failed politicians.

We need fresh brains and a new paradigm to politics and especially how we select those who would govern us.

This requires that those who have been watching from the side-lines must get involved.

Our future cannot be created by others; we have to be the change we want to see.

We must seek to create a new narrative and paradigm of an inclusive dynamic society underpinned by participative democracy where everyone matters.

We need to urgently unhook ourselves from a politically-driven nation to one that is driven by the creativity and enterprise of its people, as that is the only way to unleash the potential of our country.

In talking and listening to many Zimbabweans out there, one person who has stood out in the first few minutes of our fellowship, is the self-taught “social scientist” EV Mubaiwa.

From discussions of the content in his pending book, The Recreation of Africa — Reinventing Zimbabwe and Southern and Central Africa, Mubaiwa suggests that Zimbabweans must begin to be comfortable with the idea of Zimbabwe being the genesis of growth of Central and Southern Africa.

“We must believe that our country has the capacity to reinvent and rebrand ourselves and structure a regional ethical investment code; thereby, creating a culture of success with a new Africa mindset. Zimbabwe can take lead to structuring the massive African market bloc with 600 million people (estimated to be double by 2030),” he writes.

That is central to Mubaiwa’s idea of “market value innovation”, as he calls it. “Our consumption is our power!” he says.

“We can become a huge magnet to attract the $120 billion to kick-start Zimbabwe and Southern Africa infrastructure and small-scale agriculture to fast-track job creation. Africans have ceased to think about transformative reform that taps capacity into the future.”

It is true that we, Africans, have condescended ourselves to the idea that we cannot tap capacity from the international free market.

The Westerners believe that Africans are not ready to create the kind of culture of success that can attract massive capital, hence, they designed an eternal parental partnership with the United Nations, which runs our socio-economic affairs in a way it does not do in the developed countries.

Our reliance on the UN, the International Monetary Fund and foreign governments for money must die in order for our thinking to revolve into our own greatness and potential that is greater than any nation on the globe.

The sum total of its national convictions must, therefore, be “Zimbabwe is a great nation that is yet to live to its full potential”.

In coming to that mindset, we need a massive transformation of our minds.

A revolution that creates a new culture not dependent on political rhetoric or politics, but in our self-belief that we have all we need to create the country we desire and it is only us who have limited our potential by focusing on the wrong things and being too scared to imagine outside the boundaries of the liberation struggle and our past.

The past matters, but we must not allow it to shape the future.

In fact, our future must be significantly different from the past.

The houses of the future are different, so are the cars we shall drive, the clothes we shall wear and the work we shall do will also be different.

Because of this, we need to re-engineer ourselves.

“Zimbabweans must realise that unless and until we crush the old and re-entrepreneur, (thinking of the next great possibilities), re-engineer, be creative and rebrand ourselves, we will be stuck with what we do not want.”

It is now not only a divine, but as well as a scientific imperative to reinvent and re-engineer Zimbabwe with audacity and hope understanding that we have gone through the worst and the best is yet to come.

Now, if that is not exciting, then I don’t know what is. In my opinion, the time to have new conversations is now.
The time to create the future in our minds is now. Zimbabwe is faced with fantastic opportunities ahead and we must unlock them ourselves through creativity.

This conversation must be led by citizens simply because our politicians have failed us.

At the heart of re-engineering Zimbabwe must be discontinuous thinking, where we abandon the old political and economic paradigms and their fundamental assumptions and replace them with a fresh and new narrative.

This new narrative must say that Zimbabwe is a great country (Great Zimbabwe!), whose potential remains largely untapped.

It must admit that Zimbabwe has all it needs to rise, whether in human or physical assets.

Henry Ford was asked how he could have built such an enormous enterprise from nothing, and his reply was that he did not start with nothing, that everything we need is already there.

We must dare to reinvent and re-engineer Zimbabwe with audacity and hope understanding that we have gone through the worst and the best is yet to come.

Another Zimbabwe is possible!

Vince Musewe is an economist and author. He is also the secretary for finance and economic affairs for PDP. You may contact him on vtmusewe@gmail.com