Today Zimbabwe reminded me why I think this is such an amazing place to live. I woke at just after five, outside it was crisp, dew on the grass and the birds just waking up with me – a pair of Robins serenading each other from the bottom of the garden. Just enough of a chill in the air to make it invigorating. A deep blue sky being rolled back above me. At midday it was about 25 degrees Celsius – bone dry with green grass and bush stretching to the horizon.
I drove down town to a cafe for breakfast with a few friends and enjoyed a cup of coffee at a place where I was greeted by name by the security guard at the gate and by every waiter. We sat in the garden with shade provided by a collection of trees from all parts of the world.
And it’s not just the physical beauty of the place and the magnificent weather, it is the people. I drove through an intersection where the robots (traffic lights) were not working and a street kid was directing traffic. At an intersection a 30 tonne truck pulled up next to me – the driver gave me a big grin and a wave. A Church put out an appeal for aid for the people caught up in the cyclone in the East and the Police had to direct traffic when the response simply overwhelmed the Church. One elderly women walked 17 kilometres to give her surplus kitchen utensils – carrying them on her head. A local Businessman who saw the picture of her doing so, came up with an offer to buy her a home of her own.
I am not saying this is paradise – but heck there are compensations and I think this is a great place to live in and call home. Here the thing we call the ‘Africa Bug’ is alive and well and often takes visitors hostage.
When Emmerson Mnangagwa launched the exercise in November 2017 to remove Mugabe from power, it was our people who gave the operation legitimacy by a national demonstration of joy and support for the tough soldiers on every street corner. This was not contrived and people across the globe watched as we freed ourselves from a tyranny – many with tears in their eyes as they watched history being made in a small way in an African State that had lost its way after Independence.
And boy, had we lost our way!! We did it big time and as a consequence all our economic and social fundamentals were so far out of kilter that we were no longer able to give a decent standard of living to our people, no longer able to feed ourselves, no longer able to give our children an education that would prepare them to compete in an increasingly complex world.
Millions of our people were now living abroad, at home, life expectancies plummeted and our young people dreamed of moving away to anywhere that might give them a better chance at life. Our rich and wealthy made their money, not by enterprise and hard work but by patronage, stealth and corruption. In the process, creating a country where the disparity between the rich and the poor is as great as anywhere in the world. By and large, Zimbabweans agreed they had been better off before Independence and that our liberators had messed up, big time.
The new Government had a rough start – the first six months a confused mixture of those who felt they deserved power and a ‘chance to eat’ because they had supported the small group who engineered the transition and the old guard who had survived the purge. Then the election and the emergence of a Government without real political roots in our society. Ethnically the centre of power moving from Mashonaland West to the Midlands.
Facing a hostile and sceptical world and the Zimbabwe population, the new leadership struggled to convince people that anything had changed, but it had. The dictatorship of Mugabe who had ruled Zimbabwe with an iron rod for 38 years had been swept from power. The new leadership knew they had to win the support of the people before 2023 or be swept away just like Mugabe. A transition was underway and the new Government needed the help of the both the domestic and the international community to fix the problems they had inherited. Did we really think we could fix all our historical problems without pain? If we did we were mistaken.
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