Zimpapers Logo

Gibson Nyikadzino Correspondent

There are a lot of misconceptions still sparkling in the minds of many Zimbabwean and African people who have failed to radically decolonise their mentality as seen by their continued entertainment of the remnants of colonialism and advocates of neo-colonialism.

Western preferences of implementing development models around European universalist liberalism to solve problems are yet to signal that they are a correct and desired antidote to the challenges that are being faced by Africa, and Zimbabwe to be specific.

No wonder the Europeans, Asians or Latin Americans will never solve their problems using African solutions.

They have constructed knowledge bodies that are specific to their challenges and needs.

Where the hindrances are huge, they modify and modernise their understanding of the solutions they implement for their problems.

Our civilisations are different and the phases of their evolution have also been different. While times have changed, the urge to try and solve African challenges with Asian or European solutions should be replaced with the call for “African solutions to African problems”.

To understand the illusion that Western solutions can solve African problems, for example, one has to look at the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and aid sectors.

For example, since 1971 to 2014, statistics indicate that Africa received financial aid from the West worth about US$4 trillion, but the levels of African poverty by 2014 were seven times more than they were before the aid business in 1970.

This is a key indication that despite over four decades of pouring aid in Africa, instead of ameliorating the poverty situation, aid has in fact created a huge crater that has increased poverty levels through dependency.

It is a sign that solutions to Africa’s problems are never cured by prescriptions from Western countries.

Dividing the world

There is always an attempt by the West to divide the world based on civilisational development. There is a way to analyse the world that has also been adopted by scholars, a way that is not bridging the differences, but widening the gaps of the existing differences.

It is the language of the West to always have a binary view of analysing the world using the frameworks of the “us” and “them”, “North” and “South”, “centre” and “periphery”, “zones of peace” and “zones of turmoil” and the “orient” and “occident”.

As such, development should move from the centre, which is the West, going to the periphery, which are non-Western areas.

Such frameworks, according to the West, place Africa in the periphery and a continent under the zones of turmoil.

In view of this, it is therefore unimaginable to think that because of civilisational differences, Africa’s problems are eradicated by Western development models.

Africa’s rich democratic institutions

Often times the issue of development, also known as good or positive change, has been problematic when spoken in the terms of moving from the centre to the periphery.

The centre-periphery model is a wrong model for Zimbabwe, specifically, and Africa in general.

By acknowledging that development is moving from the centre, it means acknowledgement of the dominance of the tainted models from London, New York, Berlin and Paris among other capitals.

The Western models have proven wrong for Africa because their elements are prescribed by a few people who do not have the correct prevailing reality of what is obtaining on the ground.

It is incorrect to have a belief that the prescriptive Western liberal democracy is a perfect or near fit for Zimbabwe, nor are economic solutions in New York be entirely useful to Zimbabwe.

In the African context, Western liberal democracy should be viewed as a political arrangement that guarantees and serves the interests of the imperial capitalist order without signs of empathy on the formerly exploited millions under colonialism.

It is a model that will not work in Africa politically, economically, socially and developmentally.

Advocacy for such a system that guarantees white privilege and racially skewed in favour of Caucasians is nothing, but a perversion of various aspects of Africa’s life including all its systems.

African democratic models of governance can never be complete without mentioning the role of the traditional leaders and contributions of the spirit mediums, in the case of Zimbabwe.

Democracy, in the African and Zimbabwean context, is a phenomenon whose success is drawn and rooted from the knowledge of the first people to resist the colonial advances through the wisdom of the traditional leaders.

The democracy that has been ushered in Africa by the chiefs is one that is collaborative, co-operative and harmonious to the needs of the citizens without acts of individualism.

Those who desire for the replacement the role of traditional chief are somehow misinformed because they are the custodians of values, morals and societal expectations in all facets.

Making devolution a revolution agenda

A few years before the turn of the millennium, a lot of services such as health, technology and innovation where pursued by people as they went to the US and London once highly regarded as centres of modernity.

But the emergence of countries like China and India as new “centres” of development provide new insights on how non-western countries, categorised as the periphery, can re-define how development is spread.

China is now the world’s second biggest economy, while on Tuesday India replaced Britain as the world’s fifth biggest economy after the US, China, Japan and Germany.

This shows that development can mover positively from the periphery to the core because the US and Britain have acknowledged that China’s societal advances are beneficial to their economies.

Likewise, at a local level, Zimbabwe’s development can also be spread from the periphery or rural areas, coming towards the urban areas.

Since President Mnangagwa’s 2017 ascension, on many occasions he has been highly commending the people for embracing the administrative goals of the devolution agenda and the decentralisation of development.

Devolution, among other things, involves the decentralisation of some of the administrative roles of the central government to the country’s provinces.

It is also important to revolutionise this development thrust by identifying how those in the local “periphery” can be accessories to national development as they move towards the centre or urban areas.

Development should be revolutionised by acknowledging that it has to move from the periphery.

If Zimbabwe only focuses on the trajectory of development by looking at the centre, some of our national goals will never be achieved as the template being used will be Euro-centric, because of its exclusionary nature.

The centre should only be used to acquire skills that should be used to develop the periphery.

For those in the capitals of Zimbabwe and those outside its borders, the knowledge and skills so far acquired should be invested into the development of the country’s peripheries because everyone has a village they came from.

Living in the “centre” is an unhealthy alternative. Development should be done from the periphery and be appreciated as happening with the wonder of China.

Zimbabweans, remember we are one!