Zimbabweans can't audit

ONE key attribute the lack of which stands us out as a weak people, a weak nation, is being able to sum up each stage in, and of, our lives. The absence of that attribute makes us both an unconscious and goal-less people, bringing us uncomfortably closer to beasts of the wild. We are creatures of instinct and habit, unconscious players. 
Unconscious because we seem unable to encompass, digest and summarise the journey we have travelled so far, the time we have lived to here and now. Goal-less because if it had been otherwise, our set goals would in turn have tested and even benchmarked how we have fared so far, how we hope to fare and what promises our present circumstances hold for us as we pursue future ventures. In that incapacity we are both unique and puzzling, the more so when measured against our much vaunted literacy.
The case of IndiaI am expecting no more from us than is mundanely done by other societies, other peoples, other nations. As I write this piece, I have before me a small book titled "An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions". Written by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, this 2013 publication comes under a year before India's general elections which are upon us. India's general elections have repeatedly showed India as the most workable democracy under the sun. India is populous, well in excess of a billion souls. That makes it the largest democracy, and even the noisiest in other people's decibel reckoning. But its history, geography, demography, religion, caste and class system arguably also make it the most fraction-prone nation, leaving one supremely amazed at how it has held together for so long, and in spite of itself. Of course to say this is not to romanticise India, to gloss over its faults or warts. Its history has had violent moments, very bloody chapters many of which were triggered by assassination of its leaders, starting with the ill-fated Gandhi family. But all this is to wonder off the point.
Turning to own luminaries"Uncertain Glory" is a product of two top minds, one from outside India,  another from within India itself, even though engaged in the diaspora. The team represents India's search for balance. As some of my readers may know, Amartya Sen is an Indian-born, Harvard professor of Economics who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for the same discipline.
He coined the notion of "entitlement" in the field of development economics and administration. It turned out to be a handy analytical concept, one which has influenced Third World scholarship in a marked way. To him India turned for a summary of the road it has travelled since 1947 when it gained Independence, and mostly lately when it has joined the Asian Tigers as an economic miracle. "Uncertain Glory" sums up India's existential moment, even passing a verdict on it.
Hallmark of a great peopleOf course from afar, we "see" India's fame undiminished, her glory flourishing. But from within, introspective India sees worries and anxieties belied which that world-wide fame belies. India is wistful. Her growth is slowing down. Social tensions are beginning to register, last year's sensational, fatal rape of a young Indian girl being but a blotting dot on the map of her dark auguries, of her uncertain future. It is, in my view, that ability to discern points of weakness amidst flourishing glory, albeit residual, which marks great nations. Or the obverse: the ability to see incipient rise amidst enveloping gloom. Both suggest a people taking periodic stock, a people able to encompass its circumstances, able to read itself ahead of shaping or gathering reality. It means a people able to fill its national space in all its spheres, grasp it in total and, on that basis, able to forge a preferred destiny.
A nation that counts itselfSo, the two economists were invited to assess India's moment, amidst pointers to waning growth, possibly threatened glory. The actual book (penguin) has a mere 287 pages, quite small for so populous a country, one predictably facing so populous a set of issues. Here is the amazing aspect of the book. It has a statistical appendix from pages 287 to 336. These statistics are drawn minimally from world sources, maximally from national sources. The Central Statistical Office, the Reserve Bank of India, the Ministry of Finance, the National Sample Survey, the National Family Health Surveys, the Sample Registration Survey and the Indian Human Development Survey. India counts its actions, records its activities, right across the whole gamut of its endeavours. Nothing is left to conjecture. At the time of writing the book, India's statistical data took one to 2011, a mere year short of the time of the research, a mere two years to its publication date. For me how accurate, how complete, how current, a nation's statistics are, determines whether that nation makes history or dumbly lives through it. I shudder to imagine how my country Zimbabwe fares by this measure. History's eminent zombie!

The vice of patienceThe book itself recognises no sacred cows, turning India upside down absolutely, and with no restraint of demanded reverence. And its last chapter is titled "The need for Impatience".  A section in this closing chapter is worth recording here. Quoting from Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary", the writers assert that "patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as virtue". India, they add, must shun "adaptive submission" and begin to challenge and agitate for a further forward march, well away from its caste-ridden status quo.

Nothing must be acceptable, taken for granted, or be allowed to beat back national curiosity, national questioning, national experiment and progress. Nothing must be frozen. This sounds agitative, subversive even. Here is a nation which is not afraid of disequilibria, itself a trait of a people who are conscious actors on the national and world stage. That way, India has reversed its Raj-time cruel verdict as an unthinking, unquestioning fatalistic nation. It has turned itself into an "empire of opinion", shunning the languid, lazy state of phlegm or gobble. Shunning the opposite, which is gratuitous but thoughtless anger never ever grounded in grasped reality. Such as we got this week from the perennially bitter Musewe who thinks everything in Zimbabwe needs overhauling. Except of course himself and his bald thinking that societies ever overhaul from ignorance!
"The trouble with Nigeria"I hear a defensive response: we are not India; we are not Indians. Of course we aren't. Here is the case of Nigeria. One key publication to come out of Nigeria - a Nigeria from its prostrate days of routine mis-governance by generals - was Achebe's "The Trouble with Nigeria". It is a booklet, very small, but one packed with dynamite, one delivering sturdy volumes both by content and style. Through it, Achebe projected anger, bitter disappointment with his country, his people, his nation. He put Nigeria's "trouble" fully and squarely on its leadership, a leadership whose manifold failures had created spectacularly pervasive national indiscipline and disorder, cumbersome inertia that robbed it of a future.
One week of orderHe even hungered after Muartala Mohammed, another soldier in power, but short-lived. In one week of tough leadership, he had restored national discipline, showing the missing ingredient was a disciplined leadership. Here was a devastating indictment, one which I am sure sickened even the author as he penned each page, face showing vinegar-sourness. But it did the trick. It triggered a national and even continental debate which enabled Nigeria to encompass its moment, warts and all. That began Nigeria's painful, protracted renewal, until that African country got to today when it surpasses South Africa as Africa's foremost economy. Of course Nigeria might very well be well-served by heeding the authors of Uncertain Glory who urge for a fearless tackling of glaring inequities, the ending of national unevenness.  But give it to the Nigerians: to "re-base" your economy as they have just done, one needs to be a conscious actor. We are not.
"It is believed" mantraComing to Zimbabwe, one nearly despairs. Economically we don't know our worth. I have written about this before, and will continue to do so in future. We don't know our subsoil assets. We excuse ourselves by cosily telling each other what lies beneath is unknown, unknowable, belongs to God above! That is our mind:  primitive, uncurious.
Okay, let's grant that excuse. What of that which happens on the surface of national being, our national economic activity which is not subterranean but unfolds right before our eyes? Do we know it? The national economic activity, can we know it, sum it? Of course not, and the English have given us a handy phrase: "it is believed . . ." It is believed that Zimbabwe is a 7 billion-dollar, 14 billion-dollar economy. Of this, $5 billion, $6 billion, $8 billion is believed to be circulating outside the banking sector. It is believed that Zimbabwe is losing $4 billion in revenue through smuggling.
It is believed that the 13 tonnes of gold sold through official channels represent the value of gold also smuggled. It is believed that Zimbabwe lost half of her diamonds to shady deals. It is believed that Zimbabwe will get 1,2 million tonnes of maize this year. It is believed we are about 13 million Zimbabweans, with half of us believed to be in the diaspora. It is believed that sanctions cost us well over $50 billion. It is believed . . . It is believed . . . It is believed . . . Gees! A nation of staggering imprecision, one hiding behind belief in this scientific age? Just when will we stop believing and start knowing? Is running our own affairs a matter of belief, of faith? How does this it-is-believed mantra help us mark our territory, help tell us where we began, help us tell where we are, where we can be, where we wish to be? Tell us where we stand in the unfolding history, humanity's ceaseless history? By modern standards, we are prelapsarian!
We won't digitaliseMeanwhile our daily lives are not that far behind technologically. Our whole lives, behaviours, now revolve around information technologies, penetrating even our rural side. Internet and mobile penetration is among the continent's highest. And that transition has come with automatic digital generation of national data, most of it lamentably un-captured. Or captured by narrow commercial interests. None of it integrated for a full national picture, for more informed samples or extrapolations. There is the paradox. Information explodes, produces itself effortlessly in our production and execution of daily chores.
But there is no central mind, no centrally felt need, for we are Zimbabweans who live in history, without ever aspiring to shape it, or interpret it even! The only time we took stock was towards 1980 when as a liberation movement, we assembled a group of Zimbabwean scholars, mostly in exile, to produce a comprehensive, stock-taking study. The result was the authoritative Zimbabwe: Towards a New Social Order. Much later, Mandaza edited another effort on the transitional economy. After that zero. Zero!
Development's agnosticsWhen did you ever see Zimbabwe's Statistical Yearbook? Rhodesian one yes. Not a Zimbabwean one. We are happy and contented to "believe", we, development's foremost agnostics. The land reform program has no current statistics; the agrarian reforms have no dependable statistics. The economy has no statistics even though enterprises might have. Key activities either go unrecorded or captured imperfectly on a manual system. Deeds Office, geological survey offices, mining claims records, etc, etc. Did Karl Marx not tell us that the foundation of all societies lies in "property relations". We cannot inventory that primary cell in human affairs! How do we hope to intervene?  Our stubborn reluctance to encompass our moment, to become conscious actors find refuge in wilful technological backwardness. How do we plan? Take stock? Why have we not digitalized  basic, foundational records?
Why?And criminals have found everlasting hiding nooks in our heavily manualised systems. Nothing moves. Try Deeds Office if you think I am kidding. That is us, a literate, numerate nation which can't audit itself.
Icho!
-----------------Nathaniel Manheru can be contacted at nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw