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Reason Wafawarova On Thursday
American environmentalist David Brower once said that the earth is not something we inherited from our ancestors, as many people always want to say. Rather the land we live on is something borrowed from our children, borrowed from generations to come. To these we owe the debt of continuity. Our leaders today seem not to have this sense of responsibility, and not many of them believe we owe a debt to future generations. We often pride ourselves in the historical fact that we are heirs of what our ancestors left us, that we are entitled to our land because of who our ancestors were. But ought we not think more about our children than we do about our ancestors?

We cannot intoxicate our collective conscience with the glories of history at the expense of the present and the future.

Our history is all good in as far as entitlement is concerned, but legacy is not passed on to ancestors, but to future generations.

Let me start with myself in my own very small way. I am a writer and a columnist, and I have never been keen on having my presence felt. I write with the sole aim of making my absence felt after my departure. I write for a cause, not for applause; to express and not to impress. Knowing for a fact that I will die one day, my desire is to create something that will live forever, if I can.

There is no escape — the next generation will have to pay for our violence and intolerance. It will have to pay a heavy price for our selfishness. We continue to carry ourselves as if the land we live in belongs only to our lifespans, and we avoid the futuristic look into the huge debt that we owe to generations to come.

Our leaders are so entangled in power politics that they will do anything possible to achieve another day in power, be it state-power, or the power commanded in leadership at partisan levels.

The greatest voter any of our politicians can ever impress is that unborn member of the future generation, not the one registered in today’s voters roll. We owe Zimbabwe to the country’s future generations, not to our departed liberation war heroes, nor to our ancestors who first set foot on the land we call home today.

The price that Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi paid for our generation was the land we call Zimbabwe today. Ideologically they left a legacy of excellence, morally they left a legacy of encouragement, socio-economically they left us a legacy of purpose, spiritually they left us a legacy of love, and politically they left for us the collective unity that drew our freedom fighters to fight as one.

This is what sacrificial leadership entails, and it is what we expect our leaders to emulate, not this unbridled ludicrousness we see in our parliament today, or the nauseating whimsicality we see from some of our airheaded leaders in Cabinet.

Legacy by functional definition is an attempt to have impact after death, and if we are to create good legacy, we must always understand that relationships are more important than expediency.

Even ideology plays second fiddle to relationships, and that is why the respect for one another as a people must supersede political affiliation. The ultimate happiness of Zimbabweans is the only measure we can have for our political success, and we need to share with our people the joy of life, not to expose them to breathtaking poverty, while our leadership is cushioned in ill-gotten luxuries.

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.

We need a leadership that is aware of the demanding fact that a leader’s lasting value is only measured by success. Power for its own sake is the tool of tyranny, but a good leader will always cherish the success of those he leads.

Change in Zimbabwe is no longer the aimless mantra of power-starved opposition leaders, but something every patriotic citizen wants to see, especially from the viewpoint of our economy.

But change is only possible with a leadership that knows the legacy it wants to leave. It is hard to believe there is a shared commitment in our leadership for the attainment of a good legacy. If there was, we would not have the telling corruption we have today, and the patronage lines in our power corridors would not be as invincible as they seem to be at the moment.

If one is a good leader, that person has an obligation to live the legacy they want to leave, and that means a leader who lives what they say and believe.

Some Zanu-PF politicians are excellent rhetoricians, and what they say they believe is most of the time convincingly impressive. The party has this fluent articulation of such noble concepts like patriotism, sovereignty, empowerment, and even justice.

The party generally speaks truth to imperial power, and its ideology naturally resonates with the plight of the poor. But Zanu-PF must resonate with the masses on solutions for poverty — the party must live what it preaches, because it is impossible to leave a legacy you did not live.

It is important that some day someone will carry the legacy of President Mugabe, and this is a practical reality. Legacy lives on in people, not in things. Succession is one of the key responsibilities of leadership, but the successor must embrace the legacy of the predecessor if continuity is to be achieved, more so for success.

When leadership puts its energies into organisations, buildings, systems, or in any other lifeless objects, a legacy cannot survive.

There are important things that must always be observed when choosing who will carry over one’s legacy. There must be achievement because not too many people would be keen on caring over a legacy of non-achievement.

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 a leader have become.

Thirdly there must be significance, or the relevance for developing great leaders in the mould of the 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 often have these laissez faire leaders in government that will never show us any form of initiative, and it is hard to imagine any one of them ever doing something that can be described as great, or comparable to the feats of the top leader.

Many Zimbabweans across the divide will agree that President Mugabe has set the leadership bar high both at party level and as a statesman, but it is not easy to see any would-be emulators.

A legacy with no inspiring emulators faces the danger of discontinuity, and that must be worrisome for the future of the country.

In leadership timing is everything. Leadership is about knowing when to make a move, when best to act before danger strikes. Are there any moves our leadership needed to make before the danger of economic sanctions struck our economy down?

If there are, were such moves ever made, and if they were, why is it that we still languish under the ruin of this danger we sought to vanquish?

Why did we have resistance from some of our own people when we embarked on the land reform programme? Could it have been that we carried out the right action at the wrong time?

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 supersedes one’s ego. Once the motive is wrong, timing will be off. That is why our opposition campaigned for the NO vote in 2000, leaving the country stuck with the post-war peace agreement we called a constitution for more than three decades.

Right now some in the opposition have decided not to contest Zanu-PF in by elections, allowing Zanu-PF to consolidate its presence on the electorate without any form of hindrance or challenge. Without maturity timing will always be off.

The mere fact that the opposition has suddenly rescinded its boycott policy weeks after some of the elections have been held does not speak well of the character in the opposition leadership.

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 anymore.

Of course leadership is about experience, and that is why leaders with no experience need to get wisdom from those with experience.

There are other intangibles like momentum and morality that are also very important in leadership. For people to trust the government, Zanu-PF politicians must show momentum, and there is no substitute for that.

The part 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. Our media must be showcasing this preparedness, not polluting our heads with the nauseating news of bickering politicians.

We have also taken the wrong action at the right time in some cases, like with our alluvial diamonds in Marange. That was the right time to fund our critically ailing service delivery system; even to bust the effect of Western imposed sanctions, but we blew the opportunity into thin air.

Today we look back, and we have no idea what happened, except for a few that woke up with windfall wealth.

The right time for economic empowerment is now, but do we have the right ideas on how best to go about it? Good leadership is about ensuring the right action at the right time, and only this formula works out for success to happen. Goals must not only be achievable, but must be achieved. Rewards must not be a matter of impressive promises. They must be reaped.

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

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia