No desire to fix the crisis

via No desire to fix the crisis The Zimbabwean 13 January 2015

Zimbabwe’s problems could be solved within six months if there is sufficient willpower among those who rule us.

My heart bleeds every time I go out of the country and people, most of them well meaning, ask me what really is wrong with Zimbabwe. I tell them it’s the politics and hardly much else. It is lame to try to tether the buck at the doorstep of so-called sanctions. Our politicians, particularly from the long ruling Zanu (PF), just need to put their priorities straight and all our woes would be gone like the Zimdollar.

Today, as throughout the last 15 years, people are dying because they don’t have the money to pay for medical services. Doctors and nurses are either on strike or have left the country. Poorly qualified personnel are on duty and there just isn’t the money to buy drugs and essential equipment.

Close to 90 percent of our employable citizens are out of work or scraping through in the informal sector because there is no meaningful investment in industry and commerce and companies are disappearing like ice cream vendors in winter. There is no money to pay school fees for our children, no-one is collecting the garbage and there are now more potholes than cars. Demonstrably, no-one seems to care. There is no desire to fix the crisis.

When President Robert Mugabe is not out in Singapore or some other Far East country getting his tired body mended or holidaying with the unladylike Grace, he is busy hunting for witches in his own party or snoozing at the blue-roofed mansion in Borrowdale. If that is not happening, he will be couched at State House managing a beeline of rumour mongers and plotters who jostle to advise him on how best to die in office or making a noise nuisance on the roads with his mile-long motorcade. For him, staying in power is the end game. For more than four decades, he has known nothing but power and he seems convinced that all else is secondary and trivial.

If the hawks in Zanu (PF) had reserved their energy, “innovativeness” and relentlessness in the run-up to the congress last year and used it to fix the economy and getting the politics on track, imagine where we would be now. They burnt the midnight candle and spent millions of dollars in a skewed process to derail Mujuru and bolster their own power bases.

This has always been the blight on Zanu (PF) politics. I completely agree with George Charamba when early last year, in a rare show of brilliance, he acknowledged that Zanu (PF) politics since independence in 1980 had been preoccupied with protecting the power turf instead of sustainable governance.

When Mugabe and his Zanu (PF) came back from the tents in Mozambique to take over the reins from the Rhodesian Front and the shortlived 1979 Muzorewa regime, his immediate focus was on getting rid of the rival nationalist movement led by Joshua Nkomo, hence almost a decade of civil strife in the form of Gukurahundi.

After the 1987 merger with (PF) Zapu, his attention went to the remaining whites. Subsequently, he also turned on the growing number of dissenting former colleagues who had come to realise that Mugabe was not the saviour they thought he was in the early days of the anti-colonial struggle.

The post-Unity Accord period came with an increased zest to fortify state arms that tend to play a central role in the power game, namely the security sector comprising the army, police and “national” intelligence. Sensitive posts were reserved for Mugabe loyalists, mostly from the war veterans’ movement. Critical public service positions went—and are still going—to those appointed on partisan, nepotistic and favouritist rather than professional and technocratic basis. The period also coincided with growing political paranoia on the part of Mugabe and his hangers-on.

Bona fide willpower to settle the long-drawn crisis is the major victim of this preoccupation with Machiavellian power. Consequently, there is now a deep-seated culture of ineptitude, corruption and mediocrity in the civil service. Who would care about filling up the potholes, refurbishing the drug stores and rebuilding the infrastructure when all that matters is power which feeds off corruption, favouritism and a persisting spirit of retribution and persecution?

Our fortunes will only turn for the better once the rulers shed this tendency to look at political power as the only and final destination. There are informative anecdotes, albeit too few, to testify to this. For instance, just over a year ago, the passport offices were a banana department. All sorts of rot happened there. Touts ruled the roost, you could get a passport or any other form of constitutionally required documentation without paying a bribe and you had to wait for years to get what you wanted. There is a sea-change at the offices now.

You walk in, hardly any queues and you walk out with what you came for, no conditions set. The members of staff are helpful. Someone must have realised that things are supposed to be done that way. That is what I call willpower, the type of desire we need to get Zimbabwe working again. – To comment on this article, please contact majonitt@gmail.com