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Minister Saviour Kasukuwere has vowed to bring sanity to Zimbabwean cities

Reason Wafawarova On Thursday
The ultimate measure of any nation is its success, and to measure the success of any people, we need to establish where their nation stands in times of challenges and hardships.

For many people who sympathise with the Zimbabwean story of the 21st century, the betraying part of that story are the economic hardships the country has endured in the last 15 years.

It is like looking at a good revolution wearing the crown of failure, and we need as a country to correct that bad image by turning our challenges into success.

The Zimbabwean story mirrors the sad reality of the continent in general. We live on a continent that has 50 percent of the world’s gold, and 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power, millions of acres of under utilised land, and the biggest share of the world’s mineral wealth.

With this natural blessing on our side our people still live in unnecessary frustration, hopelessness, and poverty. Many of our children are born with no other life option, but to face the wrath of early death, mostly caused by the most preventable of diseases.

We have in countries like Zimbabwe, developed the education sector to instill in our people a good measure of academic and professional skills; yet we watch in awe as our skilled people run to the West in order to gain some measure of appreciation. Graduation ceremonies not followed up with an absorbing job market are like ploughed fields with no seeds, or thunder and lightning without rains.

We are a people tormented by HIV and Aids, famines and wars; and lately even religion has been preying on the desperation and vulnerability of the African.

We cannot write about all these ills and evils without talking about the shortcomings of African leadership. All our ills, challenges and troubles are firmly tied to our leadership, and that can hardly be disputed.

We as a continent produce billions of tons of raw materials that we committedly export to Western and Eastern markets year in and year out; and yet there is no such thing on this planet as the African brand. This is the epitome of treachery from our leadership.

Our failure to establish an African brand is quite easy to explain. It is a direct product of the kind of leadership we have allowed since the dawn of independent states some six decades ago.

The top traits of an African politician today include naivety, visionlessness, puppetry, opportunism, as well as being parasitic and compromised.

We have an African public that is not so much aware of its own responsibilities. We have a moral duty and responsibility to hold our leadership accountable. There is none among our leadership who is beyond critique, and that is simply a fact of democratic life.

It is very hard to understand those that say criticism in countries like Zimbabwe is not tolerated when a simple search of the name Robert Mugabe will yield uncountable results of unabated criticism from the country’s local media and other detractors and critics.

But by critique we are talking about something more than a lively piece of comic opinion on social media. We are talking of critique from established institutions of accountability. I was talking to a former Commissioner in the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission a couple of days ago, and she was telling me that she does not believe there is any amount of corruption that can totally bring down a nation, because if there was, then Zimbabwe would not be existing anymore.

I asked her what she meant by that, and she said she does not believe what she saw of Zimbabwe’s politicians and civil servants in terms of corruption has ever happened anywhere else before, or will ever be surpassed by anything in the future. To quote her own words; “It is a miracle that the country still exists.”

The criticism we are talking about must be coming from such accountability institutions like the Anti-Corruption Commission. We have not heard much of such criticism have we?

We cannot afford this sad predicament where we let nostalgia, hero worship, cultism, good public relations, and media charisma override our ability to objectively review our own leadership.

We cannot get anywhere with polarised politics where we all pretend we follow leaders that are incapable of sinning, allowing ourselves to be such slaves of power politics that we end up convinced that politics are all about power for the sake of power in itself. That kind of polarity is not helpful to the principle of accountability, and must be discredited and abandoned.

Gone must be the days of electing entertainers for leaders. We cannot in this day and age be so carried away as to vote for sweet faced teddy bears because we are mesmerised by their looks, or elect vociferous orators and cool cats because they happen to thrill our appetite for impression.

We are where we are as a continent because of our own political choices. At a time we should be addressing ownership of our resources we find ourselves debating the relevance of such meaningless initiatives like the ICC, or bickering over who should, or should not host America’s Africom.

We allow ourselves to be diverted by non-essential world affairs like boxing matches in far-away America, or wailing over how many times Obama has visited Africa, or even making unscholarly analysis over the importance of such a visit. We allow a whole AU summit to be overshadowed by the antics of a few activists pursuing some court dramas in some South African court, and we say to ourselves we have media in Africa that can enhance the reporting of developmental issues. That is a joke.

Instead of empowering our people, our leadership instills in us the aspiration to be excellent workers for foreign investors, and we even advertise that virtuous part of ourselves when canvassing for foreign direct investment. Labour export we call it these days.

As Africans we must be rich citizens of a rich continent, but here we are fast attaining the excellent reputation of consuming Chinese, and we are genuinely proud of our actions.

It is sad that our people continue to suffer and die for no reason other than terrible leadership. We must understand that there is no such thing as a good leader with no capacity to fix the most pressing challenges of a nation. It is like talking about a good General of a losing army, or an excellent coach of perpetually losing team.

We as a people must stop hailing leadership on the basis of abstract terms like “he gives us hope or he loves us.” There have to be concrete benefits derived from good leadership.

These benefits are not difficult to figure out. (Minister) Saviour Kasukuwere gets moved to the Ministry of Local Government and he immediately says half of what needs to be done to bring back sanity into Zimbabwean cities. Everybody knows what a well-functioning city looks like, and that is not the problem.

The major problem we have had in that Ministry for the past 15 or so years has been lack of political will and commitment to the genuine welfare needs of city people, and one hopes Kasukuwere can stomach the sacrifices needed to bring back the glory of Zimbabwean cities, particularly Bulawayo and Harare.

The hurdles ahead include funding challenges, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, political jingoism, and so on.

We are generally a people trapped between bureaucracy and mismanagement, and our political leadership often finds between these two an unabated sanctuary that they believe is beyond the reach of the public.

It is not like we have not seen good things from our leadership before. We have seen excellent achievements in Zimbabwe’s education sector over the years. We have seen the distribution of land to the landless masses. We have seen expansion of our cities, especially from 1980 to the nineties. We have seen HIV and Aids prevalence being tamed to the lowest percentages on the African scene.

We hail these efforts like the patriotic citizens we all believe we are. However, when a leadership does nine things wrong and one thing right, we cannot allow the same leadership to use that one good thing to defend the nine things wrong.

I have a serious problem with silent ministers presiding over silent ministries, just like I have with vocal ones doing nothing concrete on the ground.

But I prefer the vocal one because he at least allows room for some form of feedback and criticism.

When a minister takes pride in dodging Parliamentary accountability we have a problem. That is a person that is convinced he can sidestep the electorate and its national accountability structures with impunity. There is no difference with that infamous character who recently posted a video online taking pride in deriding the authority of traffic police.

We see Uhuru Kenyatta is doing an excellent job promoting transparency in his leadership and one of the major tools he uses is giving constant feedback to his electorate. Kenyatta realises that he has to say something new to the people, and that has kept him on his toes most of the time.

He could be grandstanding for the next vote as his opponents in Kenya often say, but no one can take away the fact that his style of governance is less shrouded in secrecy than we see in most parts of the continent.

Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia