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“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” This statement is taken from the inaugural speech of American president John F Kennedy in 1961.

It was an exhortation to fellow Americans to commit themselves to the well-being of their country.
This was also the dark period of the Cold War. But it is also thought Kennedy was worried by the way young Americans seemed to want to depend too much on welfare.

It is a simple enough statement. It is easily applicable to any people or nation concerned about development.
It is as relevant to Zimbabwe as it is to South Africa and Malawi.
It is most relevant to Africa as a whole.

It is a statement worth remembering as we commemorate Africa Day.
It is a statement we would do well to carry along with us every day the same way we memorise and recite biblical verses.
Africa is now largely politically “independent”.

There is majority rule. That is to the extent that a majority of our black people can cast the ballot. We vote routinely. We elect political leaders. A majority of Africans have access to better education, they can traverse the globe.
Africa is said to be endowed with most of the minerals under the sun.

It is therefore not poor. It is rich. The tragic irony is that Africa is home to some of the poorest people.
With the advent of majority rule, greater access to education and natural resources, one would expect the continent to prosper and flourish better than it did under colonial rule and exploitation. Instead, studies seem to suggest that most African nations which achieved their political independence in the 1950-60s have regressed in terms of GDP.

In other words, political freedom, access to resources, better education and health care have not accelerated Africa’s development.
“Ask what you can do for your country.”

There are simplistic explanations for Africa’s situation which sometimes verge on racial arrogance. Everything is often reduced to corruption and incompetence, as if these maladies have something to do with skin pigment. Then there are policy issues, as if foreign domination equates to good policies. Lately the focus has been on lack of democracy, as if the Industrial Revolution was a product of democracy, as if colonising Africa was a democratic act.

Now there is a new craze: the solution must lie in a young leadership.
This is the new experiment on how Africa can possibly move forward.
We are told of how liberation leaders have failed; how the nationalist project has exhausted itself.

How young, techno savvy university graduates know better how to run a modern economy.
The mood in Zimbabwe as Africa Day approached was uninspiring.
It is was too negative. People happily enjoying a good, expensive cold beer said there was nothing to celebrate. Everyone will give a litany of what is not correct. And they immediately have someone to blame. That’s the young generation.

What one notices though is the expectation that somebody must do things for us. That the Government must do everything; how former colonial powers are our only saviour.

There is a huge difference in generational perspective. The generation which fought for independence and those who inherited that independence are different creatures, from a different milieu.

Those nationalists who risked their lives fighting settler regimes seem to have taken the second portion of JF Kennedy’s exhortation: ask what you can do for your country.

We have an educated generation which has all the opportunities taking the first portion: what can my country do for me?
Often there is little, and this is a generation of the globe, swift-footed because of its education and exposure to the glamour of former colonial powers. It is generation which has no time for sacrifice, a generation impatient for consumption, a generation loath to produce but only too ready to flash cash.

There is no doubt that Africa could have done better with its independence. It has not. In part because nationalist leaders who brought political independence sometimes never got a chance to implement their dreams.

There was always the priority of trying to build a nation out of numerous ethnic groups, hence the obsession with the one-party state in newly independent countries. The independence leader soon became ‘indispensable’ to keeping the nation together, until he became a little god.

But, as Nkrumah noted, the new leaders were always under watch by the colonial power. Those who tried an independent path were eliminated. The continent is littered with their graves, from Lumumba to Sankara.

That is to say neo-colonialism is real, and living. Witness how the same colonial powers are not only siphoning resources from the former colonies; they have no conscience about enticing every new graduate of promise to further widen the gap between themselves and the former colony. These are graduates on which a poorly resourced Governments invests millions of dollars every year taken from poorly-paid workers.

This is the trick: the young graduate asks what his country can do for him. The colonial power which has not invested in training its own immediately dangles cash and other luxuries; offers to do what the mother country can’t offer because it has exhausted its coffers on training the graduate.

Africa spends millions of dollars every year training doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists, pharmacists, economists who on graduation are enticed with trinkets to forsake the motherland, hence the perennial deficiencies in skilled manpower, policy formulation and execution. The skills shortages in industry, schools, universities, hospitals and colleges.

The same children of Africa stolen by former colonial powers which can’t train their own turn around to curse the continent. Africa Day becomes an empty epithet.

For the better part of the past 20 years former President Mugabe was trying to implement empowerment policies facing serious resistance or being sabotaged by his own black people.

They were too educated to soil their hands on the land. They wanted white collar jobs and despised the khaki-clad white commercial farmer who made millions of dollars from the soil. They wanted to work in aired-conditioned offices with a white supervise looking over their shoulder.

This is the tragedy of the post-independence generation: the country must do everything for me or I leave to serve the former colonial master.

Today the Zimbabwe’s attention is focused on democracy and human rights, not production.
Everyone is dreaming on how the forthcoming elections will transform everything for them.

There is more cheap money to be made from speeches and championing alien causes than producing for the nation. And the colonial powers have studied well this terminal weakness. They pump in more money to create even greater dependency and to make themselves all the more indispensable. That is where you find our sharpest brains, but ideologically bankrupt. It’s about the 30 pieces of silver.

Meanwhile, as recently confirmed in a report by a committee chaired by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, Africa loses US$50 billion annually in illicit financial flows by Western multinational corporations. But we celebrate like madmen when America beats its chest for giving Zimbabwe aid worth US$1 billion in twenty years. An amount we should be making for ourselves every month from our mineral resources were America to remove its iniquitous Zidera. Which nation ever developed from foreign aid?

Africa Day is a momentous occasion. It pays tribute to those fathers and mothers who rejected colonial servitude to make Africa free. By widening access to education and health care to their people, they hoped the next generation would be as committed as they were to the cause of the blacks and take the torch forward. Instead the education has been used to help Western multinationals better to steal African resources undetected.

That in part explains why Africa is where it is today. Where are its educated sons and daughters in whom so much is invest annually from taxes?

Do we ever take time to ask seriously: what can I do for my country? Political leaders have set a continental roadmap in Vision 2063 whose emphasis is on rapid industrialisation premised on value addition and beneficiation of its natural resources. Where are its educated sons and daughters when the continent needs them the most to give flesh to this dream?