Full Text: We Cannot Afford to Keep Postponing The Future - Dr. Noah Manyika

One of my favorite passages of scripture is Ecclesiastes 9:11 which says:

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

I am particularly struck by the last line in this verse (“but time and chance happeneth to them all”) and the clear suggestion that opportunity happens to everyone.

In the context of our country, we are where we are not because of lack of opportunity to change its fortunes, but because of historic gaffes and cruel interventions by our governments and rulers.

We can talk about what Robert Mugabe’s government inherited in 1980 without sounding like apologists for Rhodesian rule. While no self respecting human being would argue that the demand by the black majority for an end to segregation and for full equality under the law was not justified, that does not change the fact that we inherited a sufficiently sound economic and infrastructure base to build during our lifetime one of the most vibrant economies, not just on the African continent, but in the world.

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The advent of our independence in 1980 gave us ample time (two decades) and opportunity (the best infrastructure, a highly educated workforce produced by a sound educational system) to take full advantage of what the approaching 21st Century was bringing. A major missed opportunity was the enormous investment in new technology industries that found their way to countries like India because of our political dysfunction and high country risk. With the right leadership at the helm, ours could have easily been one of the success stories cited by Thomas L. Friedman in his seminal work “The World Is Flat” of developing nations that have become highly competitive in a global market in which historical and geographic divisions are now
largely irrelevant.

While Middle Eastern nations that are mostly desert have used the single natural resource they have (oil) to build powerful economies and to transform the lives of their people, we ‘the resource strong’ that would naturally be expected to win in the battle of life keep postponing the future by tolerating the buffoonery, paranoia, corruption and self-centeredness of our leaders.

We postpone the future by tolerating the utterly dishonest interpretation of scriptures by clergy who are friends, relatives or tribesmen of those in power who convince us that Mugabe’s erstwhile lieutenants never shared his values and are not like him. We forget at our own peril that by his own admission, the current president of Zimbabwe was responsible for one of the most cruel interventions in the history of our country when he made sure that the will of the people would be ignored and Mugabe would continue as president even though he had lost the 2008 election by a landslide.

I am also struck by the parallels between our situation and that of Israel in biblical times. After the death of King Saul whose reign had been rejected by God, the change to David’s rule still took years because the system (“the House of Saul”) led by Abner, the Commander-in-Chief of Saul’s army, was still very much alive. Abner, much like our military did in November 2017, had installed Ishbosheth the son of Saul as King to guarantee the continuance of the corrupt, repressive, paranoid rule of the House of Saul.

It was more preferable to Abner, whose loyalty was to the self-serving system created by Israel’s first king and not to the welfare of the nation’s citizens, for Ishbosheth to rule over a divided kingdom than to accept unifying change. Because Abner was also related to King Saul, running Israel was “chinhu chedu” (our thing), making it imperative for Ishbosheth to rule no matter how ill-prepared for the job he was.

The efforts to retrofit ZanuPF through community clean up initiatives and creating a Presidential Advisory Council (PAC) of eminent persons, or firing the Anti-Corruption Commission do not change the nature and values of the machinery running our country. The utterances of key ruling party leaders justifying illegal military deployments, arbitrary arrests and the brutalization of citizens, threats to NGOs and civic organizations and the internet shutdown have made that abundantly clear.

None of these moves repeal POSA and AIPPA, demilitarize law enforcement and governance, restore property rights and the rule of law, nor guarantee that any new Anti-Corruption Commission will ever have the authority to bring the real criminals that have destroyed our country to justice.

We will keep postponing the future if the politicization of traditional rural leadership structures and Zanufication of land and property ownership keeps impeding the reforms needed to restore productivity in all sectors of the economy. Being a card carrying member of any political party, or being black, white or Asian does not automatically make one a good farmer, astute business person or great administrator.

We will keep postponing the future if we continue the pretense that Mugabe singlehandedly destroyed our country while ignoring the fact that the most paranoid and brutal enforcers of the system he created are running the country today.

In 1945, Winston Churchill whose leadership was key in defeating Hitler during World War II suffered a crushing loss in the British general elections in spite of being a hero credited by most Britons with saving their country. It was more important for the British electorate to vote into office leaders they felt could rebuild the country than to reward Winston for his wartime exploits.

There have been ample opportunities presented to us to similarly divide issues and make the right leadership choices for our nation. By July 2018, ZanuPF leaders had more than proven to us that they were the wrong leaders to restore the fortunes of our country. The failure to prosecute major criminals who have ruined our country is partly because of the difficulty of untangling the complicated web of ZanuPF relationships that keep the system going. What we were presented with in 2018 was an opportunity to have a clean break with the past so we could, by electing 21st Century leaders, stop postponing the future.

Because of how national elections have been run under ZanuPF, the real number of people who voted for the change we need will never be known.
It is possible however that there was a significant number of voters who did vote for ZanuPF out of misguided loyalty, fear, or genuine support for their policies. I have encountered many who now regret their vote particularly after the events of the past two months.

We will however continue to postpone the future if that regret is not enough to change our voting behavior or embolden our actions to bring about the change we desperately need.

We must have the guts and decency to tell our relatives, fellow church members and friends in the security services that it is time to defy orders to kill innocent civilians. Because these actions are unconstitutional, the orders from which they stem are illegal.

And yes, it is legal to disobey an illegal order!

It is virtually guaranteed that as long as “the House of Saul” is in power, the few forward steps we may take will be undone by the system’s reaction the next time people exercise their constitutional right to protest government misdeeds or demand their right to be heard.

They will falsely accuse protestors again of wanting to overthrow the government to justify illegal and arbitrary arrests and detentions.

Soldiers will again shoot demonstrators and brutalize women and girls with impunity.

They will shut down the internet again as they have already promised they will.

We pretend at our peril that leaders who are afraid of the internet and consider being questioned by citizens an act of treason can deliver on the 21st Century promises they make. Besides their hostility to citizens exercising their constitutional rights, most current government leaders, including the three members of the presidium, would, because of ZanuPF’s long history and culture of governing by empty slogans rather than substantive and informed policies, be out of their depth talking about building an economy based on the knowledge industry. Most would not be able to handle a conversation about international finance or how derivatives caused the global financial crush of 2008, even with Mthuli Ncube or Vladimir Putin holding their hands.

As long as they remain at the helm of the Ship of State, incoherent fiscal and monetary habits and policies coupled with 20th century command politics will continue to devastate our economy and ruin lives.

If there is any consolation, it is that change is inevitable. What the system can delay, it cannot altogether stop as Abner and the House of Saul eventually found out. The famous French poet Victor Hugo was right that there is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Change will indeed come. What we must all be concerned with is at what cost to our economy and to the lives of ordinary citizens it will come.

But come it will and must. Is there not a cause?