The Sunday News
Richard Mahomva
Hawu bakithi!
Is it that President Mnangagwa has genuinely failed or there were exaggerated expectations to his inaugural 100 days in office?
I think many selectively grasped the coming of employment prospect pronouncements. However, many missed the point on job creation possibilities and how we must render dedication and commitment to building our economy besides waiting for someone else to do that for us.
Therefore, can that be achieved in 100 days only? Is it the mandate of Government alone to ensure that the economy is revived? Our problem is expecting someone else to come and “do it” for us.
After it all we then pride ourselves for being mere labour traders. As long as someone comes from somewhere with their few millions to make us their workers and loot our natural resources in exchange for wages then we applaud Government. The erasure of the crisis of unemployment is not the only major solution to what we need.
We have been socialised to sustain institutions that preserve colonial capitalism all in the best interests of dealing with bread and butter issues. To some a wage is enough to demonstrate that the economy is functioning. This substantiates that the mindset we have towards economic determinism is centred on priding in exploitation and being labourers to neo-colonial capital.
We seem to have not got our lesson from the Rhodesian classroom. It is against the very founding virtues to self-determination to just aspire to be workers again. Moreover, it is against the same values of independently defining our destiny outside the benchmarks of serving remnants of coloniality.
The clamour for jobs set a retrogressive precedent since the ugly unfold of the 400 years slavery, the more than 100 years of colonial looting. The more than a jubilee to neo-colonialism — not to forget the structural adjustments blood blister of our externally fragile political-economies.
In our case, the creation of the Northern and Southern Rhodesian federation still serves as a mark of our systematic configuration to be an outlet of exploitation, but most importantly the 37 years of aborted optimism to nation growth.
Over and above, this has sanitised a vice which has blatantly dignified the sub-humanity of Africans as a race of workers — a people with no capacity to control the means of production; with no command of their destiny, but are mere labour vendors. Therefore, when we are promised jobs we think of going back to the factories to surrender labour and not build sustainable paths to recover our lost economic gravitas.
Misinformed by this irrationality, President Mnangagwa’s 100 days in office have been misread by many, particularly in the opposition circles.
However, the starting point to conceptualising that so called failure — as has been missed by many is critical introspection of what each one of us has also contributed towards that fictional “failure”. The starting point to attributing failure to Government must also cascade to self-enquiry; what have I contributed to making the 100 days a success?
The second question must be, if I did nothing, whom did I expect to rise to the occasion and build a better Zimbabwe for me? It is crucial that we ask ourselves these very important questions.
This is because the key task of the Government is to create a favourable policy environment for promoting national development. With an equal footing our labour must be determination to complement Government. As such, issues of national development must be approached from a point of convergence than they are approached isolating the integral involvement of everyone and everything in achieving national goals.
On his appointment as Head of Government, President Mnangagwa was involuntary tasked to ameliorate the country’s close to four decades-long socio-economic crisis. His other inaugural mandate execution has been that of depolarising Zimbabwe beyond the whims of divided national belonging.
The noble illustration of embracing dissident was substantiated by President Mnangagwa’s moral and emotion support to the deceased family of the late opposition leader. This has set in a new template to acknowledging and celebrating that we may differ in ideas, but we are all people of this land.
Whatever the split ideological leanings, we are unified by our birthright to this country.
This step substantiates Zimbabwe’s graduation into a new political culture beyond political intolerance, hate and rigid essentialism. It is also my hope that the forthcoming 2018 election will be the defining point of the pronounced steps towards healing our wounded democracy.
With that backdrop, this calls for an evaluation of President Mnangagwa particularly in terms of the structural and politico-environmental transformation impetus he has set for Zimbabwe’s development.
This position comes against a wide spectrum of demands for rapid and massive transformation of the economy. This proposition is ignorant of the principal reforms and attitudes which must be effected to facilitate the needed growth; particularly in the economic sector.
Some pressure groups, activists and certain sections of the opposition have sought relevance from the “obvious” to soil the Mnangagwa administration for failing to address the bread and butter issues, the cash shortages, improving Local Government service delivery concerns, among other issues. The proponents of this rhetoric have selectively ignored that the 100 Days target was principally focused on portfolio delivery by the new cabinet to roll out programmes which will “hit the ground running”:
“I now wish to challenge you to think outside the box and come up with quick-win projects for implementation by each of your ministries in order to achieve the goals of my vision.
In that context, you may wish to consult in your ministries on outstanding strategic programmes that can be quickly implemented within the framework of the vision of this Government. I have availed copies of my acceptance speech for each one of you to guide you in coming up with the priority projects,” declared President Mnangagwa.
Referring to this particular pronouncement, it’s clear that from the outset, the 100 Days target by President Mnangagwa entailed political-economy structural and environmental reconfiguration and social policy transformation.
Based on this perspective, the wide stretch to the 100 Days should be evaluated on the environment that the Government has created for economic growth, political pluralism and social development.
This does not mean that bread and butter issues should be entirely ignored, but there is need for assessing the President Mnangagwa’s success in addressing a broad spectrum of concerns which result in visible national policy transform in areas of education, health, social welfare and other key sectors of human security. Therefore, the colloquial evaluations of success and failure of the 100 days match will not do us any good if we are to move forward and sought genuine national development.
Firstly, President Mnangagwa must be applauded for appointing a lean cabinet and emphasising the need for results-based mandate execution.
This creates a functional system of assessing the functions of the arms of Government in terms of their delivery. At the same time, this restores the role of Government as an institution tasked with the mandate to create a viable environment for business, public service delivery and promotion of a transactional state-citizen relationship towards national development.
President Mnangagwa’s invitation for investment in ideas and national dialogue outside partisan confines speaks to the potential of Zimbabwe’s growth in terms of renewed commitment to development oriented nationalism.
This particular administrative deportment adopted by President Mnangagwa repositions the role of Government as an institution which serves national interests over partisan interests. This stimulates consorted patriotic commitment to national growth outside partisan leanings.
The Head of State’s reach-out initiatives to various political and economic stakeholders as well as his meeting with the youth from across the political divide is telling of shifting ontologies in terms of public offices’ isolation from the country’s populace. Therefore, Cabinet Ministers must take a leaf from the President’s approach and be in contact with the needs and realities of their respective constituencies.
This is key in recasting interactive attitudes between the state, key economic actors and the public at large.
This trails a background of a chasm existing between the Government institutions and the generality of the public. The path towards an “open-door” style of governance led by Cde Mnangagwa must cascade to all public service institutions to trample on corruption, lethargy, nepotism and monopoly.
Sloganeering and preoccupation with partisan business over national interest would only takes us back to the 37 years we are coming from.
This calls for renewed commitment for cabinet to be at the service of national interest. 2018 is here, power must be consolidated, but the ground for structural renewal has been set and President Mnangagwa must be commended for effectively dispensing of what is expected of a national leader in this respect.
While I have my reservations on certain discourses of problematising the 100 days match in some quotas, I also think that the on-going conversations on national growth replace the fatigued attitude with regards to a participatory political culture.
This new development in the area of tackling issues of national interest is key as it is widening the sphere of national dialogue.
As such, the Government and other integral components in the making of public policy must come to the fore and take heed to the ongoing conversations so that policy delivery may work in favour of public interest.
There is no doubt that the new establishment has widened the parameters of political participation and citizen inclusion in the political debate of the day.
For the first time since 1980, citizen participation in politics has achieved far-reaching apex. This has also exposed the extinct function of the pretentious neo-liberal mantra of playing the “sole interlocutor” for democratising Zimbabwe. This is why there is raised social-media hype of a failed 100 days.
The culprits peddling the ill-informed perspectives permeating into the public domain are still the same. It’s the same activist faces and the same anti-Zanu-PF propaganda agents.
Nonetheless, they are exercising their respective democratic rights. However, this automatically invites the need to sieve out misdirected missiles to issues of national interests.
At the end of the day, we are all to blame for the failures of our country and not Zanu-PF alone and the party’s President. Therefore, we need to equally take the blame or the credit which comes with the burden of working in the interests of nation-building.
Vumani madoda!
