Dear President,
Our nation is not only a place, but a society. Past and future generations are part of that society. We who are currently living in Zimbabwe cannot claim exclusive ownership of the nation. We have our own place only before future generations.
Any optimist and true Zimbabwean must be able to believe that, some day in the future, our nation will be peaceful and prosperous. A vision of peaceful co-existence and opportunities for all people is the only vision that fits our country, and future generations must be able to claim it.
But we cannot vainly assume that we can create a prosperous society only through imagination. We need to design the route.
A new Zimbabwe needs foundations
As anyone who has worked on a building site knows, order is important in construction. So too with our society. Building it to overcome present challenges requires social order. Every individual needs to know their role.
Conflict signals that not everyone is happy; but all must come to understand their fundamental differences, and be willing to find a way to resolve conflict. We must identify our common objective and purpose. Staying in conflict for a long time delays progress. Everyone becomes a loser.
In a society of different cultures it may be difficult to relate to the other person. Racial mistrust is one of the sources of Zimbabwes crisis, and causes much suffering, particularly among the poor.
But the future of our country is a multicultural society. Racial issues can only be resolved by changing attitudes, knowing that people of the world belong to one race, the living race.
The land crisis has been at the centre of conflict in Zimbabwe, and is rooted in the history of the country Vivian Pevsner and Alice Gozo explain this. But every Zimbabwean faces a choice: to take the land issue as one which cannot be resolved, or to view it as a high place that allows us to peer ahead, to the different future we are constructing.
In particular, no-one can deny that the fact that many poor people in our country see no future for themselves is a crisis. All parts of our society should take on responsibility for solving it.
Lets build on what were good at
If we organise food production better in Zimbabwe, we will give more value to the land. The productivity surplus will spearhead growth everywhere, if we use it to help us expand our industrial sector. Higher incomes will bring more wealth to the people more people will be able to own saleable houses or land.
We should put more money into what we are good at and this also means identifying what we cannot do best. For example, we produce maize, so why cant we put more money into developing, not just mealie meal, but many high-value maize products? With food outlets demanding diverse maize delicacies, how many jobs could be created?
Market dualism is a great problem for Zimbabwe and many other African nations. We have two speeds: the urban market is more lucrative and consolidated; the rural market is periodic, unconsolidated, low-value.
Rural communities cannot wait for an urban industrialist to make a profit to improve their fortunes. They can grow their own entrepreneurs, become more than consumers at the mercy of urban trends. But unless community institutions are established and strengthened, no programme governmental or NGO will yield real results.
We need local investment programmes, rural market consolidation and diversification to change the fortunes of our rural communities. Closing the gap between rural and urban production may even help us to establish a coherent macroeconomic policy.
From money to industry
Our monetary policy should address individuals savings: how they can be invested profitably in agriculture and real estate. The new government should take decisions on which financial instruments to let loose. It should intervene when markets show signs of possible failure in allocating our scarce resources. The co-operation of government and the private sector is crucial but for strategic interest, not political convenience.
Currency flows should be managed to allow our national pricing to reflect competitiveness on world markets, otherwise our exports and industrial growth will suffer. Monetary policy should help us to increase local demand, while giving us the chance in future to move to external markets.
Maybe we are consuming more than we are saving in investments. Maybe in our businesses we are spending more on ourselves than on training our workers. When the capital in a business moves into the purse of the owner, it moves away from the operations that make up our business. People need jobs, and jobs come only from investment.
Zimbabwean industries cannot be written off. But they need new equipment, modern processing and packaging methods, new markets, and accountable managers. Again, we must be clear-eyed: what are we good at? What can be done in Zimbabwe better than in other nations, near and afar?
Communicate for peace and learning
To build a less tense society in Zimbabwe, communication is essential. Where some people talk and some listen, ideas flow easily from those who think and those who can do. Without communication, ideas escape with people who carry them, as one sees water running out of the tap and going to waste when the plumber has not been told.
A society where individuals are secretive diminishes its collective power. Equally important is how knowledge is collected, stored, and used for the benefit of the people. If African societies have proper systems to discuss our real problems, imagine how we will pour in our energies to find solutions!
Zimbabwe needs investment in education. Investors require skilled individuals to work production lines. Colleges and universities need money from private and public alike, to step up their training activities, to learn from the best around the world. Zimbabwe has to invest in learning and knowledge.
We need new knowledge partnerships between educational institutions, companies, financial institutions and government agencies. It may be costly, but our losses from low productivity make it more costly to ignore.
The public sector should lead in management innovation, rather than waking up late to private sector ideas. Our community institutions have been bypassed and destroyed. But some of the reforms we try at the national level could be more simply done at the community level.
Recognising and strengthening community institutions will empower local Zimbabweans to plan, debate and design their future according to their needs, wisdom and potential. It starts with platforms where communities can have serious dialogues about their failures and successes.
Values for the future
For the Zimbabwean people to move on from our current problems, we have to ask ourselves, What are our core values? What do we do every day as Zimbabweans? What is my role in the building of the country? Values will help us in our times of crisis.
Peace is one of Zimbabwes values. It wasnt easy to establish such a value here. Co-operation is another. But we have to develop more values to shape up our society for the sake of our future values which start in families and communities, and can be promoted by the nation.
We need to be accountable in using our resources, scarce or abundant. We need to make efforts always to talk, to discuss what we want our society to be.
There is something good about a mind that encourages another person to succeed. We have to let the young see it as practical that wealth comes through hard work, to work for a society were every individual is loved and enabled to contribute to national productivity and wealth creation.
Without patience, love and hope, we may move fast in our time, but we cannot claim a place in the vision of a true Zimbabwean society set up in our heritage.
A vision of peace-loving, hard-working builders of Zimbabwean society, where young and aged have a proud claim to national wealth, where we can say, we did it ourselves this vision is more realistic than any crisis of our time.
With hope for the future,
Shoneboy Nembaware.
