Young people with good examination results ask: Where can I get a degree to start my career? Who will sponsor me? Where can I earn a top salary?
Guest Column Fr Oskar Wermter SJ
Most of them have written off Zimbabwe. They do not see their future in the country of their birth. They pity classmates who have no “connections” and are forced to seek a place in a local college and eventually employment in our industry or civil service, both presently unattractive for ambitious youngsters.
There is, of course, an alternative. For some of them money, career or a top position are not what they want most.
There is a girl who passionately wants to be a doctor. She has little money, her parents, though well-educated, are unemployed. But she feels a calling to be at the service of the sick and suffering. She would go to the ends of the earth to get a place at a medical faculty.
There is a young man who wants to study history, our own African history, not to be a teacher or a journalist, but a scholar and researcher. He feels very strongly that the history of this country has been distorted for political reasons. He feels it needs a new generation of scholars to find the truth and confront their fellow citizens with the real story. He is deeply convinced that he has it in himself to do this work in the service of his country and Africa as a whole.
When he talks to his friends about his dream, they laugh at him and ask: “And how much do you make as a scholar crawling through dusty archives and libraries?” – “Enough to live on.”
In his heart he knows that the future of his country depends on the truth to come out and on its citizens facing up to their failures and learning from their mistakes.
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An entrepreneur or company director may use his workforce to make money and create great wealth for himself and his family. Obtaining great wealth is his aim, while people are mere means for achieving that aim.
Or he may have a different ambition and ask himself quite a different question: What is it that people want? What do they need?
A building contractor may make a lot of money by building luxury mansions and houses for the well-off. But is that the type of housing that is most needed? Maybe building low-cost housing for ordinary workers and low-income earners would be much more worthwhile, more satisfying, not only for the beneficiaries of such housing, but also for himself as a citizen with a sense of social responsibility.
If you want to produce for the market, you need workers. For quality products, you need skilled workers. To produce attractive clothing and beautiful furniture, you need designers, tailors, seamstresses, carpenters and decorators with good taste, people who enjoy making things that are beautiful and lovely. You have to find them.
As factory manager, you have to attract them by giving them a chance to use their creative talents. Industry is about more than making money. It is about giving talented people with imagination and fantasy a chance to come into their own and use the gifts they were born with.
Neglecting the people and their gifts seems a huge failure, especially if we consider that the workers as human beings are more important and precious than all the other tools and instruments together. It is one of this world’s greatest scandals that so many young people never enter the world of work and spend their days remaining idle.
When I was once in charge of a rural school, I tried to persuade the students to consider agriculture their life’s vocation, but that was not their idea. They wanted to be computer programmers, pilots or engineers, and they would, of course, move into town and become urbanites.
But there are great treasures in the rural areas. There are trees and plants which contain natural colours to be used in textiles, as well as the basic ingredients for certain pharmaceuticals and medicines.
Not only foreign tourists, but urban Zimbabweans, too, need to see the beauty of their country. And they do not have to join the crowds at Victoria Falls or Nyanga. There is beauty in communal lands, in their wildlife and forests.
How can we open up these treasures for urban families to enjoy? You need good roads, first of all, and then holiday cottages and small restaurants. Why can’t villagers become managers of such places?
There are ancient paintings left by the Khoi-san (bushmen) artists we should see and appreciate. Paths for hiking and enjoyable walking should be offered to office workers who need exercise.
Mountains and streams and beautiful scenery are there, but the roads and holiday cottages – that costs money. It needs investors, developers and imaginative entrepeneurs.
Investment is the current magic word. But money and bank loans alone do not create a new Zimbabwe. That needs people who feel responsible for the land of their birth. Where do we get such people? I met some of them recently – in the Diaspora. How do we get them back?
Wars and violence, oppression and cruelty have driven people from their homelands. Desperate and hungry, they cross the Limpopo, elsewhere in Africa they cross the Sahara, and when they reach the Mediterranean Sea, they get on rubber boats to step on foreign shores for a new way of life.
In the Cathedral of Cologne one of these refugee boats is exhibited. By this demonstration, the bishop is urging his people to receive migrants hospitably, and not to forget the others who perished before they could reach the land of their dreams.
But this cannot be the long-term solution that the victims of political barbarism run away to peaceful, reasonably well governed and economically productive countries, while letting their own countries rot and decay.
If you want to stop mass migration, you need good governance, respect for human rights and for the law generally, and you need an economy that has something to offer to the young.
And the young must have the courage to offer their gifts and skills, even under unfavourable conditions, making a success of the country of their birth where their elders have failed, using their technical and intellectual competence, where ideological bias and political ambition have blinded the previous generation.
