In the Why Poverty series, a Malian peasant farmer who doesn’t want to sell their land to a multi-national sugar company, despite promises of rapid development for the community, says to himself: “You want to sell me happiness, but I say, NO. You offer it again and I say, NO. You come back a third time. Why not do it where you live? In fact you are offering me something that will make you happy, not me.”
This was the stark choice that Zimbabweans made at the just ended elections when they voted for Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, shocking the West and the Movement for Democratic Change which had been dangling foreign investment and one million jobs in five years.
Mugabe was instead offering them the wealth of the country and urging them to be proud to be Zimbabweans, to know that the soil on which they were walking was theirs, and that even the birds were proud to be Zimbabweans.
While the Western media has been hoping up and down about the success of the land reform programme, Zimbabweans do not have to read about it in the media. They live it. And those who have benefitted from land reform and indigenisation were asking: Why should we wait for jobs-which are not certain- when we can create the jobs ourselves?
The West might actually have shot itself in the foot by refusing to channel aid through the government, when Tendai Biti the man they voted the best Finance Minister in Africa, headed the ministry simply because they said Mugabe might get his hands on it.
The Movement for Democratic Change, which the West backed and continues to back as it challenges the election results, promised the people that billions of dollars would flow into the country once they were in government. Nothing came. Instead, what the people saw were the MDC ministers wallowing in luxury, some earning a monthly salary that most Zimbabweans would earn in five years.
So, during its campaign while the MDC was telling the people to ask Mugabe what he thought he could do in five years that he had failed to do in 33 years, the people were also asking, what was it that the MDC could do in 100 days that it failed to do in 1 630 days. The MDC manifesto promised a lot of things to be implemented in the first 100 days of the party being in government.
One political observer even asked: Why are the people of Zimbabwe so naive that they believe the West can bail them out when they cannot even bail out Greece?
But more importantly Movement for Democratic Change secretary-general Tendai Biti shocked even his benefactors in June when he said the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe was 9 percent not the 85 percent that was being bandied about.
Biti was quoting the Poverty Income Consumption and Expenditure Survey 2011/12 Report by the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency. That report said that at least 3.7 million Zimbabweans are involved in informal sector activities and generated about $1.7 billion a year.
These are the people who would rather have money to expand or formalise their operations rather than be employed.
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