LAST WEDNESDAY I attended a Zimpapers-organised business breakfast meeting in Bulawayo where the Infrastructure and Transport minister Obert Mpofu and Commerce and Industry minister Mike Bimha addressed the Bulawayo business community, journalists and academics.
This article is partly prompted by the deliberations and, more importantly, by the chit chat I had with journalist friends from the public and private media.
I was arguing that there are a number of things, minor and major that have affected Zimbabwe for a long time now that we treat some of them as things that do not matter anymore. It might be because we have gone through a lot as a people that survival is of paramount importance rather than some cosmetics in life.
I shared two experiences I once had to buttress my argument: At one time, while at a restaurant in Bulawayo I was given a knife with a bent front, a testimony that before reaching my table it had taken some detours and was used in opening tins, doors or whatever it was.
The waitress seemed not to have issues with that. The second experience was when I was conducting a Masters class when I told students that I found it strange that they were given table spoons to stir their tea.
One of them said “it could have been worse”. My wife, our nanny and my sisters sometimes laugh about it and call me snobbish, taking after my late grandfather whom we called “British” because of his demand for order in life. He wouldn’t drink from a plastic cup. “I don’t drink from a sandak,” he’d say.
The above scenarios might paint the attitude some people have not only on smaller things but on larger ones in life. Today I am not addressing minor things but something key to the development of Zimbabwe, just like the breakfast meeting I attended.
The main thread weaving through the speeches during the business meeting seemed to encourage people to get Zimbabwe working again. This noble gesture by Zimpapers need not stop there.
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It is critical that in attempting to get Zimbabwe working again, among other things, we must get Zimbabwe talking.
I believe that in an environment covered with secrecy and fear there cannot be any development regardless how many major mega deals we sign with the Chinese and the Russians.
The business meeting in Bulawayo was meant to get Bulawayo and Zimbabwe working again and came in the backdrop of a myriad other challenges too many to rehash.
The closure and relocation of industries is one thorny and could be read with many different lenses including those of economic difficulties born out of our current political dispensation and the attitude of international finance towards the country.
One main problematic area is the issue of centralisation and giving an impression that everything that has to happen in Bulawayo must get its blessings from Harare.
Nothing better illustrates this than when Mpofu told the businesspeople interested in construction to talk to his points-man “before he returns to Harare”.
This sends a very negative message not only to businessmen but anyone old enough to have faced the frustrations of appreciating Harare as bambazonke (a place that holds all the power to determine how the rest of the country survives).
The subtext of some questions raised during the question-and-answer segment pointed to the issues of Matabeleland marginalisation something which the ministers seemed to suggest we must get over and move forward.
This obtains in a context where there is no devolution of powers that the peoples of this side of the country have always clamoured for, where the State behaves like a vulture ready to pounce on citizens to an extent of taxing airtime and where the unaddressed genocide issues still colour our perception of self and Zimbabwe in general.
It becomes fair therefore for us to reconcile ourselves to the lived reality of some people from this region; that they are alienated and second class citizens.
My argument is that it could be unfair to start Zimbabwe working again and end there without starting Zimbabwe talking.
Further, there is need for the current Zimbabwe to grab the opportunity they missed during the 2009 to 2013 Government of National Unity period — that of National Healing and Reconciliation — especially regarding the 5 Brigade perpetrated genocide which left up to 20 000 people dead and whose reverberations still affect the current ethnic relations in Zimbabwe.
It would be folly for anyone to argue that this is an irrelevant matter especially where business and other things are concerned.
“Progressive” forces might again argue that this is a retrogressive argument but it is important to know that sometimes people’s sense of belonging to a certain kind of space influences decisions that they make.
Human beings belonging to any society are burdened by certain memories and buggages they carry especially in a young nation that went through so much in the hands of the colonialists.
It becomes difficult for those people who wish to unload their baggage and those who are supposed and most qualified to do so keep pussy footing around the issue.
The assertion from Mpofu above raises a lot of problems because Harare has many shades to different people.
Harare ceases to be the capital city and seat of the government when you have a situation where a 70-year-old grandmother whose isiNdebele names were misspelt by someone who cannot write the language both on her birth certificate and national ID is told to go to Harare to make that correction so she could get a passport and visit her children in South Africa where she’d experience uninterrupted water and power supplies.
Imagine what that does when there is a medical condition to be attended to. Besides the absurdity of having senior citizens migrating now and then, the whole set-up helps remind her how second-class citizen she is and the images of the 1980s treatment come back to solidify her view of the state of affairs.
Thus, the perceptions and views we have about our policing system in Zimbabwe are not that of law and order if these office’s are only found mounting roadblocks early in the morning delaying people going to work or littering the Bulawayo-Beitbridge Road.
While attempting to make Zimbabwe work there is need to get the people talking as well! Of course in a country that has not only had a political culture of intolerance but with certain sections of our society now mirroring the system, this assessment on my part may be seen as divisive, tribalistic and retrogressive.
But will we get Zimbabwe talking?
The issues therefore is that there is need to work on people’s national affections some of which were born in 1980 and died a few years later when some regions were plunged into unimaginable postcolonial violence.
The project of national healing is in order so that while we get Zimbabwe working we may be talking at the same time so that we give people a sense of belonging, where our peoplehood is recognised and a matter of pride rather than a crime.
Sometime ago Jonathan Moyo prepared a Gukurahundi Memorial Bill which he never tabled in parliament.
That Bill which was prepared while Moyo was in the so-called political wilderness, was an important contribution to Zimbabwe not because it sought to put in place mechanisms of naming and shaming the perpetrators but because it was going to establish institutions and channels of redress so that we sit in the same room, look at each other in the eye and tell our stories.
With progressive people like Moyo I would dare say that it is time a lot of things were addressed. He is a visionary and hard worker par excellence even though he has his own flaws. But its time Zimbabwe recognised his talents and we appealed to him especially on issues at the core of nationhood and peoplehood.
Memories cannot be wished away and any attempt to suppress them is bound to fail as what you build through suppression is an angry society likely explode at some point.
Thus while it is important that the government has certain projects and programmes, there are certain reports that seem to suggest that people from Matabeleland are not interested in anything to do with the government even business loans etc.
But in actual fact, certain modes of governing and doing things seem to suggest to them that they are second-class citizens and some cannot participate in their own humiliation by going through certain processes that their countrymen from the other side do not have to endure to do business in and with the government.
The bambazonke image repels them.
The suggestion here therefore is that even without legislated processes, Zimbabweans could be given an opportunity to talk and work at the same time and find mechanisms and ways of addressing the effects of what some people went through.
A lot of people have questions that need answers.
Some are yearning to apologise for their roles and also forgiveness and without institutions of bringing perpetrator and victim together, we are setting up ourselves for a situation where the genocide memory and anger is passed on from generation to generation fuelling ethnic tensions, senses of alienation and, at some point, explosion.
l Dr Shepherd Mpofu is a media studies and journalism lecturer at NUST. He writes in his personal capacity.
