As soon as the Cabinet was put in place, it now seems to be time to submit expectations and gauge the extent to which the Cabinet will deliver on their promises and expectations.
Develop Me with Tapiwa Gomo
In many cases, this is done in an aura of skepticism. It is scepticism that stems from the past, a dark past which is remembered for nothing much, but pain.
Pain is not easy to forget, so that scepticism is perhaps justified and understandable, but can certainly not be allowed to impair our sight for the future.
After three decades of failed policies, even when the government was riding on the opulent economic left-overs from the pre-independent Zimbabwe, it is incontrovertible to question what else can these men and three women in Cabinet do to change the fortunes of the country.
There is a temptation, or rather a prevalent notion to compare how the future must look like with the past – to suggest that Zimbabwe must get back where it was a decade or so ago. Those years, we had an agro-based economy and we were not a serious diamond-producing country.
Those years are past. It is inevitable that agriculture still has a role to play in our economy, but it is far-fetched to imagine that we will have an agro-based economy again like in the 1990s.
A lot has happened and changed and climate changed has happened as well. There is one thing I have come to realise, life and time alter context, and the past can never be a destination of the future, no matter how our minds wish for a cut and paste of the past onto our present and future.
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What is past is gone and can only reside in the remote schemas of our memories.
In the book of life not all chapters need to be kept open. Close some and open new ones. One can always open old ones for reference purposes.
That is one reason we have not moved over the years, because we are too burdened by historical accounts of liberation struggle in seeking solutions to current problems.
Our dreams are cloudily crowded by the stories of war denying ourselves a chance to imagine and dream a future divorced from the past.
We are too ensnared. One way of doing that, out of the millions of others, is to recognise that most countries that leapt out of poverty did so by acquiring, instead of just selling what they have. Our economic ideas and policies have depended so much on external demand of our resource than local utilisation and consumption.
The gap between the two is characterised by either stupidity or wisdom. Sale of resources to us, is acquisition to others. One who acquires for production and resale of finished products has more power and a better chance of progressing than one who sells for consumption — typical of our case.
Historically, Western economies have been built by acquired free labour during the era of the slave trade and exploitation of natural resources during pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial epochs. In our recent times, China has been fertilised by acquired knowledge, resources and investors.
Countries learnt the simple basic lesson of life that the national economic cake would never be expanded by fallacious indigenisation policies; neither would it be grown by protecting and defending even when nothing exists. A country does not only need inflows of foreign cash to drive the economy, but it needs its people to exploit external opportunities and bring more resources home. Perhaps that is another if, not better, form of indigenisation.
That hunger for knowledge-inspired productive creativity whose domino effect is the economic growth which has now generated the hunger for acquiring more resources to sustain the Chinese industry. Anyone is allowed to take this approach and adapt to current context.
These are just examples that a country cannot develop by depending on hand-to-mouth trading of its raw materials, but it can also empower its citizens to bring home productive resources not in the form of Chinese suits and shirts that flood our markets today.
In my previous installments I have argued that, for example Zimbabwe is surrounded oil producing neighbours such as Angola and Mozambique and may be Zambia and Namibia in the near future.
There is a glaring opportunity to spearhead a Southern African oil purification plant in Harare, because of its centrality in the region. That way, we will be able to control not only our energy requirements, but define and rekindle our economies.
That is how we can expand the economic cake for the benefit of our people and not by shaming the US and the West.
The playing field is open to meet them head- on in their hunting ground for resources including oil. That is where economic empowerment battles are fought.
