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Where Singapore succeeded is that they managed to align their policy to practice and one of the things that made the city-state achieve a lot was its sense of urgency

Nick Mangwana View from the Diaspora
Mark Twain said that, “The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.” It is with this realisation in mind that this columnist bought and read, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lew Kuan Lew. This icon was the first Prime Minister of Singapore who transformed it into the economic powerhouse it is today. He was a very close friend of Dr Julius Nyerere whom he records as a “very intelligent man.” In this book you learn that there is nothing which Zimbabwe is experiencing which has not been experienced elsewhere. The only question is whether we as a country are prepared to learn from our own mistakes and chart our own solutions or from the mistakes of others and the way they resolved their own challenges. Why continue to make mistakes when we can learn from those of others? Some are even asking why we are the country whose mistakes everyone else has to learn to avoid.

Now, this is not to say that national challenges around the globe would mirror each other. They will never and their solutions likewise would be equally unique, but in both cases the principles would be the same. So the solutions or the way forward needs to be adapted accordingly to suit the social and political context in question.

There is so much that Zimbabwe can learn from the Singapore story. In fact, at the beginning, our two nations mirrored each other in their approach to education. Like Zimbabwe wanted to make education the centrepiece of human capital therefore a key driver of economic development. Both countries managed to achieve near excellent literacy rates. But while the literacy in Singapore and their education system became the main feature that has driven it to prosperity, in Zimbabwe it has become one of the main features driving corporate South Africa, but not Zimbabwe.

Where Singapore succeeded and where they have failed is that they managed to align their policy to practice. And this is our bane. Instead of focussing on this element of our educational system, some of our ministers seem to come up with one eccentric idea after another. Our thrust should be on linking our skill supply to demand. But no, we are talking about whether or not we should deliver STEM in vernacular! When we have not even translated our Constitution into our 14 official languages? How does that work?

We just don’t seem able to concentrate on continuous improvement. Instead we announce anything that grabs a headline or two. But headlines are ephemeral. Development is a continuous quest for improvement. Singapore managed this aspect and is an undoubted success story which has transformed itself from a Third world country to a so-called First world country in one generation.

One of the things that made Singapore achieve a lot was its sense of urgency.

It is this recognition that the country needed to do a lot fast that made this small country an education and economic hub.

And to think this was just a port city with hardly any resources and no assets at independence makes their success story surreal.

They developed and made good use of human capital based on merit. That’s a lesson for us.

We need to be super-efficient and base all our recruitment and deployment of personnel on meritocracy. As obvious as this sounds we have to note that the most effective solutions are the ones that are easy.

Some things don’t need very sophisticated algorithms, high sounding words and the like.

Many a time, a back to basics, is all it needs. It just takes a consistent application of the fundamentals.

There are some who think that Zimbabwe can only achieve its developmental milestones if it rotates ruling political parties.

There is no evidence to support such a notion because Singapore has had the same party in power since 1965 and is still a very prosperous country made of disparate immigrants of diverse origin. Maybe our own challenges stem from a lack of meritocracy, and a destructive spirit of entitlement.

In 1980, we had an approach quite similar to Singapore in that we embarked on rapid building of schools, which saw the opening of Zintec Colleges as well as recruiting expatriate teachers from Mauritius and other partner countries to bring about the literacy rate good for our education.

This produced the education we all are proud of today. The only problem is that the poor employment rate is blighting the boast.

The moment one says Zimbabweans are very educated etc, the retort is about what they have to show for their knowledge. Maybe knowledge should be evidenced by material gains. Maybe knowledge has to be shown by a combination of both a decent living and wisdom is the evidence that is acceptable.

If we accept that our education is the building block to our economic development, we are delayed in making that link. Those who have visited Singapore and spoken to its people soon notice that the alignment of policy formulation to implementation is not just rhetoric. It is the be all and end all. It is their focus, and the future is their obsession. Unfortunately in our case, power is our obsession and the self is our pre-occupation. This is critical for economic development because many a time good initiatives fizzle out because of lack of impetus. We like the pageantry that accompanies the announcement of big initiatives, but lack the driving force to see them through. Whether this is because the hard work involved is not related to the glory or not is another thing.

If we don’t have the means to implement a policy, we should not bother drafting and announcing it unless it is for academic purposes. But let’s leave academia to the specialists and focus on making the country work again. Every time we announce a policy, we should also announce the timeframe of implementing it. We should also announce the means of implanting it as well as the capacity to do same. We have had a perennial gap between policy and delivery. With Zim-Asset we brought in Management by Result. It is still quite functional, but the gap still has not closed much. This is the kind of thing that brings cynicism in the populace.

One of the fundamental issues is that it will take a commitment to reward hard work, creativity and merit and not the rewarding of mediocrity to mould these building blocks. We have seen how important it is to set goals and work hard for their accomplishment.

We have a peaceful country, but we sadly have all sorts of rivalry and contestations impeding national development. Where it should be Zimbabwe First, Second and third, we have some who are happy for this beautiful land between Zambezi and Limpopo to be collateral damage to their nefarious efforts to destroy Zanu-PF. This includes efforts to paint a grim picture of it, as a way of deterring investment, as well as direct efforts with audible calls for an economic embargo on the country. Within Zanu-PF we also have some who are happy to sacrifice the country on the altar of an evil political ambition or megalomania. But hear you all, there are serious correlations between political and economic imperatives.

We have to do right by our people. This column has said way too many times that it is not right to try to convince people that their lives are good, when they don’t feel it. We can’t say everything is good when they are not experiencing it. But when the people have health, shelter, employment education and other basic necessities that give them dignity, they will know that their lives are good. If one cannot feel it, it’s not there.

Those who have studied Singapore’s success story will tell you that it came from three important words; meritocracy, pragmatism and honesty. Learning from this means that we have to deploy our best citizens for the correct jobs. And our best citizens are not only based in Zimbabwe. Our best citizens are now all over this global village we call our earth. This idea of filling offices up with relatives like Donald Trump does not work in our context.

If we look at pragmatism, one would realise that we are growing a reputation for saying we want to defy “bookish economics”. We try to invent the wheel when all we need to do is buy one and fit it on our vehicle. Everything that we are experiencing as a country, somebody somewhere has experienced it. Let us use our much vaunted education to learn lessons there from.

But it is on honesty where we face our ruin. There is a fundamental gulf between our rhetoric and our actions. We can easily excel if we go back to the fundamental principles again. You commit the crime, you should do the time. This is so clichéd yet so effective. But we find a reason to try to re-invent the wheel. Well, Zimbabwe is not a laboratory and its people are not guinea pigs.