Zimbabwe - An enemy within

The time has come for us all to look at Zimbabwe our country the motherland in a completely new and innovative way. It's time to re-liberate ourselves from old and tired ideas. For decades we have been living in a Zimbabwe filled with deceitfulness, unaccountability and historical blame.

Surely we must now take ownership of the current situation we find ourselves in, for many years under minority rule the people suffered and the blood was shed for the greater cause and we have accepted all the transgressions done against us and the after effects. We have rightly blamed the colonialists, then the dissenting voices (our very own brothers and sisters), then sanctions, then MDCs,-and yet we never laid the blame at the mother of all the causes – ourselves. For years Zimbabweans had pride, we sneered and looked down upon Zambians and Mozambicans and wondered how they got themselves into such mire. Fast forward 34 years later how ironic that we are in worse off position than ever, Mozambicans and Zambians never had a currency that could not fit into a 12 digit calculator.

My alternative view and approach is that; let us now re-evaluate our direction as we need a new paradigm in approaching and resolving our insurmountable challenges facing the nation. As alluded before we seem to lay the blame for all our ills on the Smith regime, real or imagined enemies of the revolution, and yet self introspection has been our greatest failure. From the railways, airline, agro industries and indeed the general industry has been characterised by decline and internal rot. All these major industries have had their major decline under our watch as recent as two week ago Hwange colliery was reported to be facing major capitalisation problems and yet a business led rescue package was declined for a hare brained strategy. This approach to business problems has been the hallmark of this administration; it's a microcosm of how the country has been run.  

Zimbabwe has spent the last 34 years trying to reinvent the wheel and unfortunately we have done a bad job of it. Not that we lack the knowledge and expertise of wheel invention – far from it. We boast, nay, we brag that we have the highest literacy rate in Africa and yet we had the ignominy of the highest inflation on planet earth this side of the great depression. Despite our fabled education we still cannot get it right. We need not invent the wheel but just get the small things right in this age of technology, Zimbabwe needs to leverage its supposedly educated people and human capital and skip some of the stages of the learning curve, and we Do Not need to reinvent the wheel but buy the goddamned wheel!

There are small things in life that we could successfully do and implement without cost or even foreign exchange costs. Essential day to day necessities like basic birth and death registrations, police crime reports, payment for electricity, parking and commodities are all done in a cumbersome and outdated manner. Surely is it too hard for every child registration to be done at clinic and be given a national registration number that follows and identifies you in all your state documents throughout life? At 16/17 your national ID and fingerprints are then recorded and a new document issued. Passports, drivers licence can all flow from these. It's dehumanising that people still queue for hours for any national document. The revival of the old post office could be the starting point for issuance and processing of documents. The embracing of e-government could be first step. There is no need to reinvent anything here all the infrastructure is in place! We can improve from the current system used for birth registration. The police still use old Remington typewriters; these are now museum pieces elsewhere in the normal world. I shudder to think that police records are not in electronic form and the number of paedophiles and other undesirables that are able to cross our borders and yet no electronic record is held!

We need to join the information revolution that is going on all over the world. Technology is the new frontier that needs to be conquered and harnessed, and is the foremost driver of growth the world over and yet we as a nation cannot and will not embrace it. According to the International Telecommunication Union, Africa is the world's last major untapped market for internet access as only 16% of its 1 billion people use the interest. In Zimbabwe is even less than 20 % of the population. Recently Google and Microsoft have been at the forefront of extending internet access to Africa and have projects in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. As usual Zimbabwe was not considered for reasons of our own making. We despise innovation and embrace outdated models. In the region we are the only nation still showing outdated, not very funny or entertaining amateurish television programmes. Why? - We celebrate mediocrity.

We become a laughing stock when senior officials encourage people to ditch condoms and contraceptives on the grounds that their use may cause some cancer and were a "ploy by powerful nations to retard population growth and weaken nations"! His utterances were not challenged. We even had a whole cabinet believing refined diesel could ooze out of a rock. Who needs sanctions, enemies when we are capable of shaming ourselves? These are but a few examples of things we do so wrong.

Time has come for us to stop blaming others for our shortfalls as most of the ills are self made and do not require external aid or ideas. The blame lies at our feet as we have let the leaders of the ruling and opposition parties to continue peddling fake hope that has not produced any fruit for the majority. The majority of people in Zimbabwe still suffer and their lives have not significantly improved over the last 34 years. The impending economic malaise parallels the 2008 "annus horribilis" and hardship continues to stalk the nation a new way of tackling the problems is urgently needed. For many, their lives have spiralled out of control with lack of morality, ambition, social and financial mobility and many basic things. Our aim as a nation now should be to bring about real change not the ZANU-PF and MDCs change but the sort that brings in new ideas to the government and can motivate people to believe once again in what could be.

When we look at the huge changes that have taken place around the world in the last 15 years alone it gives me renewed hope in what Zimbabwe could be in the foreseeable future. We can take courage from the most unlikely of places like India and China albeit they have huge populations but they have completely changed their outlook on their countries. Fifteen years ago they were struggling nations; today they have the fastest growing economies, fuelled by local and foreign investment. They have embraced new ideas technology and created a new base for their nation, some may argue they control the state but in the control there is a huge degree of stability and rationale. That redevelopment has in many ways enabled people to be employed, make a better future for themselves their children and amongst all that there has been change in leadership to allow new brains to come in and disrupt the status-quo.

Tanaka writes in his capacity as a concerned Zimbabwean who loves of all things on Economics/technology