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NewsDay

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Govt needs a paradigm shift

Opinion & Analysis
Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa, addressing a Zimbabwe Special Economic Zone workshop in Harare last week, urged Zimbabweans to study and emulate the economic paths taken by countries such as the US, Europe and China.

Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa, addressing a Zimbabwe Special Economic Zone workshop in Harare last week, urged Zimbabweans to study and emulate the economic paths taken by countries such as the United States, Europe and China if the country is to prosper.

Déjà vu by Kamurai Mudzingwa

“If we are to be wealthy as a country we must study and understand the causes of America and Europe’s prosperity and more recently, Chinese prosperity. We must study and understand the policies of those who created that prosperity . . .  this means taking cautious and deliberate steps to steer away from raw materials activities into manufacturing, value addition and beneficiation,” said the comrade minister.

If I did not know Comrade Chinamasa as an intelligent man and a staunch Zanu PF guy, I would have said he had experienced his damascene moment — that he had had a sudden change of mind, or sudden realisation that what his party always held as true (the condemnation of America and the West as the authors of all our problems) was in fact false.

But It is only that the Comrade Minister summoned momentous courage to hint to the nation what everyone else (except those in his party) is speaking about in loud tones — that the government needs a paradigm shift if it is to deal with economic issues bedeviling this country.

The US for instance, that Comrade Chinamasa wants his colleagues to emulate is enjoying the rewards of a paradigm shift. Paradigms, as espoused by Thomas Khun is his great book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, are assumptions or what we may call one’s view of the world.

Paradigms are therefore the windows through which we see the world. The US used to see the world through the traditional paradigm of the monarch system whose emphasis was the false belief in the divinity of kings.

When the US shifted from this traditional paradigm (of the monarch system) this marked the birth of a constitutional democracy whose emphasis was on freedom, liberty and patriotism (genuine) among others.

This unlocked the human potential in everyone and creativity was unleashed. It was their damascene moment when they realised racism, persecution of the opposition and power mongering among others, are anti-development. There may be a few stumps remaining, but these are not enough to upset the cart.

Compared with the US experience you will see that our problems are rooted in the government’s (or Zanu PF’s since they are one and the same) resistance to any form of paradigm shift. We are still deeply embedded in the monarchy system that we pretend is a democracy.

For 34 years one man has been at the helm and more or less the same people formed his government. In such instance we cannot talk of democracy and Comrade Chinamasa is aware of this fault and how difficult it is to get out of the trap for the benefit of the nation.

For three decades we have been forced by Zanu PF to see the world through the lens of a liberation struggle that ended towards the end of the year 1979. Our assumptions about the world are frozen in that archaic form of thinking while the world is speeding by.

Because we are still in the past, we confuse principle with practice so that we concentrate on lies, denials, propaganda, deceptions, vindictive actions and reactions among others, phenomena suitable for guerrilla war tactics. This is at the expense of positives such as long-term planning, strategic thinking, goal setting and evaluation among other things.

And because of our monarch-like paradigm it is criminal or dangerous to be a Socrates who stands up and openly tells the government that might is not right. Hence we see that Comrade Chinamasa had to quickly go back to the official mantra in the same breath that he asks us to emulate the US by referring to the infamous Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (ZimAsset).

Because we are shackled to the liberation tradition and its subsequent worldview that created a monarchy for us, there is no way, in the absence of constitutional democracy, we can unlock the human potential in this country.

Reference to ZimAsset, which in this case is an attempt to mix oil with water, shows how those in power are afraid of shaking the monarchy and how mental conditioning has made us incapable of calling a spade a spade; we would rather call it a gardening tool. To effect a paradigm shift it takes great courage — courage to introspect, courage to admit where we went wrong, courage to admit that we are all equals, courage to admit that without constitutional democracy we are doomed because we remain the primitive nation in a modern world.

Just a reminder to Comrade Chinamasa, the Americans’ Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

How far, Comrades, are we from this?

We are still at war with ourselves and imaginary enemies that have since moved on. China, one of the world’s greatest economies today, and our government’s much touted all weather friend shifted paradigm long back and they are reaping what they sowed. And who is holding us back from changing our perceptions?