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Reason Wafawarova on Monday
We often make the mistake that the land we live in is an inheritance from our ancestors, and it is from this logic that we have not taken kindly to colonial conquest. While our ancestry truly gives us entitlement to the land of Zimbabwe, the truth about the land is that we have borrowed it from posterity, from generations yet to be born. We do not owe the debt of continuity to our ancestors, but to the unborn generations.

This is the sense of responsibility lacking in most of us today. Not many of us are cognisant of the need to ensure that future generations are paid the debt of leadership responsibility. It is tempting to pride ourselves in historical facts, including the fact that we are entitled to our land because of who our ancestors were.

Our ancestors owed this land to us, and equally we should be thinking more about our children, and their children’s children. We have intoxicated our collective conscience with the glories of the past, and many times we have done this at the expense of the time and effort we need to be investing into the present and the future.

There is this bitterness in our young generation of today that every single member of the older generation must be ashamed of. Shepherd, a nephew of mine, and a reader of this column, asks me hard questions that I fail to answer sometimes. He wants to know if the opportunities availed to us (me and his father, who is my cousin) as teenagers and young adults were any worse than the ones our society is availing to the teenager and young adult of today.

He naturally imagines the opportunities could only have been worse, because to him that must be the natural order of inheritance — better opportunities for each coming generation. Each generation carries with it the responsibility to create better life opportunities for the coming generation, it is presumed.

Legacy is not something we get buried with; it is not something we just entitle onto ourselves or dedicate to our departed ancestors. Legacy is for future generations, and it is important that we all understand that the choices we make for ourselves today have a direct bearing on the future of the country we will live behind us.

Starting with myself as a writer, I have asked myself if the keenness to have my presence felt is the right motivation to carry out the art of political writing, or is it the science of it? When I started writing, I did so with the sole aim of making my absence felt after my inevitable departure. It was just attention seeking, selfish to a good extent.

I have now come to realise how vacuous that kind of selfishness is, and I believe I have retraced my priorities significantly.

I now understand that I write for a cause, not for applause, to express not to impress, to benefit, not to deprive, to inform, not to mislead. Knowing for a fact that I will die one of these approaching days, the desire burning in my heart is to create through my writing something that will not only last for posterity, but something that will give an unending benefit to future generations.

This imperative calls on all of us. It calls on those presiding over our politics, it calls on those presiding over matters of religion and faith, it calls on those of us appointed or anointed to make governance decisions, and it calls on each and every one of us carrying the title of a parent.

We must understand that there is just no escape — the next generation will have to pay for our violence and our intolerance. Our children and our children’s children will pay a heavy price for our selfishness and our recklessness.

For how long are we going to act like the land we live in was only created for our lifespan? We can no longer perpetuate this behaviour of avoiding the futuristic look into the huge debt that we owe to generations to come.

We have obsessed ourselves with power politics, and our children must not be witnessing a departing generation whose sole preoccupation is power. This is the narrative in our politics across the political divide today.

The greatest election we can ever win is for the vote of the unborn child. Today we preoccupy ourselves with the vote of the voter registered in the voters’ roll. I read with a sense of worry the raging debate on Nathaniel Manheru’s column two weeks ago. The debate made me feel like we are now stuck in power politics, and even power for the sake of it.

We do not owe Zimbabwe to ourselves, and we do not owe it to our departed gallant heroes of the liberation struggle either. What we owe to these heroes is a sense of responsibility to create for the unborn child a better Zimbabwe, and that is what they themselves did for us, hoping that they were doing it for many more generations to come. Our ancestors who first set foot in today’s Zimbabwe had a vision. They wanted a better future for all of us.

We know the crown for the death of Nehanda and Kaguvi is our land. These are the heroic ancestors who left us an ideological legacy of excellence, a legacy of justice, a legacy of economic hope, a legacy of political unity, and a legacy of spiritual strength. Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi taught us through their death what sacrificial leadership entails.

Leaders worth the name are legacy oriented, and they want to make an impact after death, hopefully a good one. A good legacy is only possible when we understand that relationships are more important than expediency, even in politics.

Even ideology plays second fiddle to relationships, and that is why the respect for one another as a people must supersede political affiliation. No one can ever become a lesser being because of political preference, or because of political opinion. The ultimate happiness of Zimbabweans is the only measure we can have for our political success.

Before one leaves a legacy, they have to live that legacy. Nothing beats honest living in life, and for a leader honesty must always be a mandatory requisite. A good leader will always cherish the success of those he leads.

It is incompetent for a writer like myself to imagine there is a shared commitment in our leadership for the attainment of collective happiness for all Zimbabweans. The corruption crippling our national fabric and the patronage in our power corridors do not speak of a leadership that cares about the word commitment.

Good leadership comes with an obligation to live the talk. We have no shortage of eloquent rhetoricians in our politics, and most of the time these people impress us with convincing articulation of issues. How sweet it is when we listen to the inspiring voice of the politician over matters of patriotism, sovereignty, empowerment, and even justice.

Succession is a key responsibility of leadership. But there is a difference between succession and power fights. Succession is about continuity, and power fights are about leadership roles, not responsibility.

Every leader leaves his or her own legacy, and we are never going to get another Robert Mugabe again, regardless of, however, much we may want to do so. But of course the Mugabe legacy can be carried on. There have to be grounds for a legacy to be perpetuated; otherwise it has to be abandoned.

Firstly, only a legacy of achievement is worthy maintaining, and we are aware of the ground-breaking achievements the country has made since breaking from the yoke of colonialism — mass education, infrastructural development, health, and so on. We are obviously not oblivious to the challenges of recent years.

Secondly, there must be success, and this is not success measured by the amount of power in the leader, but by how much empowered the followers of that leader have become. Thirdly, there must be significance, or the relevance for developing great leaders in the mould of the great predecessor. Without such significance, there is no point choosing someone to carry over a legacy of no relevance or significance.

Lastly, there must be a legacy in place for one to be able to place leaders who can do great things without the top leader. We hear so much about succession today, but we have not seen much leadership initiative from the people whose names are thrown around in the succession debate.

Regardless of our many problems, it is generally agreed across the political divide that President Mugabe has set a bar too high for would-be emulators. Obviously a legacy with no inspiring emulators faces the danger of discontinuity, and that must be worrisome.

In leadership timing is everything. Good leadership and good timing will always go hand in hand. It is important that a leader understands the situation at hand before choosing the timing of his actions. It is absolutely vital that maturity supersede one’s ego. Once the motive is wrong, it becomes hard to get the cause right.

Good leadership is about confidence. People follow leaders who know what must be done. The evidently declining fortunes of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai can partly be traced to his perceived lack of confidence, especially at policy level.

The man is simply a serial flip flopper who cannot be taken seriously. Now he has appointed three deputies to himself — all this after the man has over the years derided as top heavy a similar, but slimmer type of leadership in ZANU-PF.

Of course leadership is about experience, and that is why leaders with no experience need to get wisdom from those with experience. For people to trust the Government, ZANU-PF must show momentum, and there is no substitute for that.

The party needs to prove to us all that it has a good sense of preparedness, and preparedness is about creating the right opportunities for the advancement of the country as a whole.

Goals must not only be achievable, but must be achieved. Electoral promises are not made only for the purpose of winning elections, but also to be pursued and fulfilled. Rewards must not be a matter of impressive promises. They must be reaped collectively. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

REASON WAFAWAROVA is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.