“And if it is a despot you should dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.” Kahlil Gibran-The Prophet The time has come for us to rise and destroy any thrones we may have created within our hearts for President Robert Mugabe and his coterie of thieves. We must create a new Zimbabwe and this needs us to re-imagine and re-invent Zimbabwe at a scale never done before.
Vince Musewe
This is not the time for patience because we have been very patient for far too long and are tired of the empty promises by Mugabe that things are getting better while they loot our resources. It’s been a long time coming, but change must come now. It is clear that Mugabe and Zanu PF have no new ideas or the wherewithal to create the future we want.
In his book titled The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes: “A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. ‘Spare some change?’ mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. ‘I have nothing to give you,’ said the stranger. Then he asked: ‘What’s that you are sitting on?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied the beggar. ‘Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.’ ‘Ever looked inside?’ asked the stranger. ‘No,’ said the beggar. ‘What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.’ ‘Have a look inside,’ insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. ”
That’s Zimbabwe for you, where we are sitting on prodigious wealth and yet Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa must be sent by Mugabe to go and beg from the West and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As young progressive Zimbabweans, we are saying no. Mugabe has failed to lead the country and to unlock all this wealth and continues to play the victim of sanctions. He is the beggar mentioned above and it’s time he went simply because his mentality will get us nowhere.
We must all now focus on creating a new leadership for the future and what we can become as a great nation. We only 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 caught my imagination is the self-taught “social scientist” EV Mubaiwa, who based in the United States. 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.
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“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 the lead to structuring the massive African market bloc with 600 million people (estimated to be double by 2030),” he says.
What 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 billions to kickstart Zimbabwe and Southern Africa infrastructure and small-scale agriculture to fast-track job creation.”
It is true that we Africans have condescended ourselves to the idea that we cannot tap capacity from the international free market and must be continual beggars. The Westerners also believe that Africans are not yet ready to create the kind of culture of success that can attract massive capital, hence, they have designed an eternal parental partnership with United Nations agencies, who run our socio-economic lives in a way they do not do in the developed countries. This “colonial welfare“ approach must now come to an end.
“Our reliance on the UN, IMF 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 and we will be the greatest’.” Mubaiwa writes and I agree with him. We have been our own worst enemies and that must stop now.
In coming to that mindset, we need a massive transformation of our minds, which has now begun and cannot be stopped by abductions, violence and arrest on superfluous charges. We must start a revolution, which creates a new culture that is not dependent on political rhetoric.
We must now believe 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 and act outside the boundaries of the liberation struggle mentality, our past or the moribund Zanu PF paradigm, which seeks to control and limit who and what we can become as a nation.
“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 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,” says Mubaiwa.
In my opinion, the time to have new conversations is now. The time to create the future in our minds is now. Zimbabwe has risen and is faced with fantastic opportunities ahead and we must unlock them ourselves.
“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” Mubaiwa continues.
For me that is what #ThisFlag and Sesijikile/Tajamuka are all about. The sudden realisation that we are far better and far greater than what Mugabe and Zanu PF have led us to believe. That we do not have to accept poverty, abuse, corruption and misuse of public funds and the looting of our resources by a few as normal. We must now take back our country from the despot.
Zimbabweans have risen!
lVince Musewe is an economist and author based in Harare. You may contact him on [email protected]
