The Sunday News
Richard R Mahomva
Last Friday, I had the privilege to moderate one of the keynote sessions of the 2019 Zimbabwe SDGs Youth Summit which was held in Harare.
The event was articulate of the generational mandate which the youth have in navigating the strategic pathways to the global agenda of development. Ideally, the thematic centre of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide the effort mapping for mutual and inclusive globalisation.
The realisation of sustainable development is in itself a highly contested notion mainly emanating from an asymmetrical global order. Therefore, in our context development must be appreciated not only from a modern premise to realising the aspirations of humanity.
Development must be rooted in the faculties of our historical and direct experience since the emergence of the global integration predisposition. In so doing we must be able to re-coin the agenda of development outside the limited scope of its historical inadequacies.
We need to appreciate how varying subjectivities as global development players. Geo-politics situates our conflicting and intermingling propensities to what development means to ourselves and others. Therefore, instead of linearising development, we need to understand what it means to us as Africans in the same manner we need to understand what it means to our other global neighbours.
The historical and conceptual framing of development
As a starting point, we need to historically account for the immoralities of development as defined in the parameters of Western civilisation. As we all know, the Eurocentric notion of development emerged through the opening up of the African continent for untold economic exploitation and the forceful permanent settlement of Europeans on African occupied land.
Development meant the dispossession of Africans, forcing them off the land and transforming them into peasants, workers and domestic servants of European masters.
Development meant the rearrangement of African agrarian systems to make sure they produce the cash crops needed in Europe and America.
This nature of development is established through dominating and taking from others, thus impoverishing them to the establishment and empowerment of the Western world.
In his seminal writing How Europe Under-Developed Africa, Walter Rodney (1972) illustrates the comparative nature of the concept of development by which Africa, Latin America and Asia are only viewed as underdeveloped in comparison to Europe.
The unbalanced pattern of development is created by the fact that Europe as the “exploiter” becomes developed, while the “exploited” become underdeveloped.
The very vocabulary of describing others as developed and others as underdeveloped embraces a discriminatory and racist world-view which is premised on European hegemonic standards.
To this end, we need to be hesitant to the prescriptive margins of developments and advocate for an inclusive approach to development.
Therefore, the United Nations’ concept of “Building a Principle of Leaving No One Behind” inspires our confidence as a nation to define the parameters of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The guiding theme of the UN SDGs framework is telling of the equal role which all nations must play in addressing development’s pitfalls as orchestrated from the genesis of market-related terms to humanity’s interaction.
To us as a country SDGs will not be attained as long as we are under the yoke and impediment of the illegal sanctions.
It is on this premise of advancing equality of all families of the world that we exalt the Sadc Dar es Salaam Summit of 2019 for condemning the Zidera and EU Sanctions and their continued collective call for the immediate and unconditional removal of illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the West.
Our fate should also motivate the rest of the third-world to reposition itself in calling for a type of development which is not arrested by the neo-colonial punitive muscle.
The Sadc Anti-Sanctions Call
It is important to note that Sadc’s solidarity to Zimbabwe comes at a time His Excellency, the President Comrade Emmerson Mnangagwa has reformed the political-economy landscape in our country by calling for the untangling of the structural rigidities which in the past crippled viable prospects for Foreign Direct Investment in Zimbabwe. Therefore, as we declare “Zimbabwe Open for Business” other global actors must complement this trajectory by cutting down their restrictions to making Zimbabwe an optimal destination for capital.
We all know that under the scourge of the illegal economic sanctions Zimbabwe’s competitive pedestal in the market place is threatened. Beyond the comparative economic advantage we are denied by the illegal sanctions, there is a gamut of socio-political inadequacies which have stagnated our national development.
Therefore, as we contemplate the roadmap to achieving the SDGs we must bear in mind the threat that has been posed by highly hegemonic global actors.
As a nation entrapped in the neo-colonial power matrix we must be able to define our stand in ensuring that the notion of SDGs opens our links to harnessing capital and ensuring that we not become a front-line driver for development.
Therefore, it is critical to harness the youth demographic dividend in aiding Zimbabwe and the world at large to secure the full realisation of the cardinal points of global development as espoused in the United Nations’ SDGs.
As it stands Zimbabwe’s current political reform and reconstruction overdrive is telling of a paradigm shift which must re-orient citizen engagement towards true development.
The youth must be highly empowered to form the critical mass for decision-making which will boost the architecture of global policy-making. In so doing, we re-create the space of youth in defining the course of the future. This rests in the inevitable reality of the role of youth as master-builders of the future.
There is a striking timeline coincidence of the SDGs with that of our very own national Vision 2030. This reflects the extent to which Zimbabwe’s domestic policy dovetails with other broader global development frameworks as we are determined to promoting our levers of:
Governance and the Rule of Law; Re-orientation of the country towards Democracy; Upholding Freedoms of Expression and Association; Peace and National Unity; Respect for Human and Property Rights; Attainment of Responsive Public Institutions; Broad based Citizenry Participation in national and socio-economic Development programmes; Political and Economic Re-engagement with the global community; Creation of a Competitive and Friendly Business Environment; Enhanced domestic and foreign investment and an aggressive fight against all forms of Corruption.
These and other values embodied in our Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP) valorise our input to the totality of the SDGs. This offers a solid premise to positioning our interests in all critical facets of development.
Let me conclude by posing this question:
How do Africans make themselves the subjects of development rather than its objects? The simple answer is that:
It is imperative to historicise the African development predicament resulting from a history of European colonization of Africa and the resultant effect of coloniality. Any attempt to de-historicise or pay no attention to the background of the African development predicament can only result in misleading and decontextualised analyses. Africa’s experience of colonialism was not merely an episode, but it was a process which safeguarded the systematic and well-orchestrated exploitation of the African continent and its people by Europeans.
The legacy of colonialism in the post-independence era ushered a mammoth task to the newly established African governments to restore the humanity of the African peoples eroded through colonialism.
Therefore, as we discuss SDGs in this important forum we must remember that the greatest of our task lies in reconstructing a new humanity and breaking the obstacles to the full realisation of equitable development.
