Jayprog

As Zimbabweans awaited the announcement of the 2007 Monetary Policy by the Reserve Bank governor Dr. G Gono, the country was filled with an aura of expectations in the air.

I glued my eyes to the TV screen for two solid hours also hoping that something new would be said, but nothing worth the solution to the current crises arose from this rather press conference that the governor addressed.

It was rather an economics history lecture in jargon and semantics to avoid the real problems facing this Southern African Country that is suffering from more than a decade of recession. I certainly knew that the devaluation of the dollar was not going to be much of an issue as many Zimbabweans expected.

The devaluation of the dollar is taboo as far as the Zimbabwe economics is concerned because anyone who attempts to devalue the dollar is an enemy of the ‘’state’’

I believe the main reasons why devaluation will not de addressed publicly is because;

1. The President made his views way before and no one can challenge that.
2. Responsible people who are said to be in charge of the economics of this country are afraid of losing their jobs because they have a case study of Simba Makoni who lost his job for the same reason of trying to steer the hornet’s nest.
3. Devaluing the Zimbabwe dollar is like killing the cash cow. Most ministers and senior government officials get the hard currency at paltry rates to finance their lavish lifestyles. An ordinary Zimbabwean would need Z$4 million to access US$1000 whereas a senior government official would only need Z$250 000 to get the same amount. From this simple calculation it then makes sense to protect the exchange rate at a fixed rate to support the politicians’ lives.

The Reserve bank governor has been reduced to a Semantics Technician based at the Reserve bank. It really took Dr. Gono a cool two hours to tell the nation that the Zimbabwe dollar is not going to be devalued something that he could have done through the local press at very minimum cost.

Dodging the truth is what is killing this economy and a real time approach has to be taken. Suppliers are using the parallel market rates and it has been proven that the government has it’s hands tied as far as price control is concerned and this is not helping the nation.

For the governor to say ‘’something’’ has to be done about smugglers and the little fines they pay is really short of saying that the government has failed. Personally I think the admission of guilty fine of $250 is justified because people have no money and above all it is the law gazetted fine.

The use of the word ‘something’ in a crisis is not good enough because everyone is looking for a definite strategy that revolves around specific parameters. It has become a norm in government addresses to say that corruption is rampant but the real corrupt people still roam the streets and it looks like no one wants to expose them, or is it that exposing them has become useless since they can easily find their way back home.

If this government is serious about tackling corruption, there are questions that have to be addressed first. The issue of too many expensive imported cars on the streets of Zimbabwe when there is an acute shortage of foreign exchange spell something is wrong. Where are these people getting the money when the nation is staving and the government is failing to pay reasonable salaries to doctors and nurses?

The culture of stubbornness and non-caring by some senior government officials should be dealt with first before any meaningful development can be realized in Zimbabwe. There are a bunch of politicians with selfish interests and misplaced priorities leading this country into turmoil. Things are crumpling and some people just chose to ignore the situation. There is a water crisis in Harare and one wonders, the health delivery system is crumpling simply because some individuals cannot come to sense and realize that a doctor and a nurse are critical in health service delivery.

True leaders should learn to be criticized and pluck a leaf from the wisdom of the poor villagers that elected them to power. Some Zimbabwean politicians have reached a stage where they are so confused that they think the people are meant to serve them whereas the opposite is the truth.

As an African I believe Africa needs to come up with her own solutions to the problems that bedevils many of its nations and rid the confusion that the African leadership has cultivated for a period spanning over decades. The core of the matter is to change the mindset of the general populace. Many people in Africa still fear colonialism and still hold on to communism as a savior. The truth of the matter is that all these things have gone and are history. No nation with sane people will attempt to propel colonialism in the 21^st century; it is a barbaric piece of history that no one wants to repeat. The era is gone and rest assured that it would not ever happen that Africans or even any other race would be treated as less human and inferior. We are now global citizens and should as such endeavor to harmonize our way of life. Africa is still a lost continent despite the much-publicised independence. The rise of independence in Africa came with many problems that will need a new revolution to solve them. Africa suffers from the politics of antagonism and self-aggrandizement. Most African leaders lack the basic qualities of a simple leader - Integrity. Some of these leaders have a misconception that people should serve them when in reality the opposite is true in a real democracy. True democracy involves each and every party playing their roles to achieve a common goal. Africa is now haven for dictatorship. I attribute the poor political situation in most African states to lack of clear foreign policy. The political leadership seems not to know what their countries need in a global community. The concept is not to fight democratic principles so that one can stay in power forever because that cannot ever happen. Leaders come and go but nations are here to stay and power shall in this sense therefore be a shared responsibility not a personal right to enrichment. On the other hand the general impoverished populace do not clearly know what it really needs or expect from the people they chose to represent them. In Africa the politics of tribes still play a role; it is a reminiscent of the colonial divide and rule tactic. People identify their leaders as ‘one of ours’ and will vote that person to power even if they clearly know that s/he is not credible. For wrong reasons some people end up being presidents, some after terrorizing the poor villagers and being invited in some peace deals and some after being acquitted of raping poor girls etc. 

 

Liberation struggle political parties in Africa have also become a liability to the continent. Some leaders of these political parties think that they are the only ones qualified to be leaders because they liberated the masses from colonialism when in actual fact every citizen played a role. No one can win a war alone, a battle maybe, but it does not necessarily mean that when you liberate a people they lose their rights to make their own decisions including the one to differ with those one who helped them gain freedom. Continuously holding on to the old school of political thinking has seen many African leaders trying to resuscitate an already dead system of socialism and communism. Communism is a failure and everyone knows that even those who started it have since come to their senses and abandoned it. The once poor communist bloc is now a growing economy. African leaders are good at setting goals and targets they cannot meet and forming many useless organizations in the name of Africanism, a form of brotherhood that is fast destroying the continent. There are some organizations in Africa that are struggling due to lack of funding and I personally do not really know why these organizations exist, e.g. African Union (a mordernised OAU), and the so-called SADC. Amongst such numerous organisations, I am inclined to place the SADC on top of the list of gross uselessness and loss of focus at a time when bad things are happening in the southern part of the continent. Since the infiltration of the OAU by Modern African Communist and its subsequent modernization and renaming to AU, the organization has been reduced to a club where the African elite periodically meet and just pass the paperwork, change helms and leave secretaries to file the paperwork. The AU has failed to solve a problem close to its HQ, the Somalia crisis and African leaders expect the entire world to take them seriously. I give credit to the Americans for driving out the Islamic warlords who had invaded this poor country. There are times when I am tempted to think that conflict is what African leaders love so that they can retain leadership and get bloody deals at the expense of peace. The SADC does not respect basic principles and diplomacy is what they promote at the expense of reality to the point of endorsing undemocratic procedures. There are many cases of human rights abuses in Southern Africa and not any single leader can stand up and publicly declare that this is wrong and something has to be done. Instead these leaders divert people’s attentions and blame the West and the USA in particular for the continent’s ills. I have now come to realize that African leaders are the same. They are a team, a brotherhood of doom. They suffer from the same disease and aim to be the richest citizen in their respective countries. These people are authors of books with black pages written in back ink and only the author can read the book and the listeners cannot verify the facts, its only the author who knows and chooses what the listeners have to hear. Unless African leaders start to come in the open and boldly tell some of their colleagues that they are destroying the continent and reputation of the other leaders, they remain the same. Because one bad egg can spoil the whole basketful there is no need to cover the egg and bear the stench from the bad egg. Considering the fact that it is difficult for a few people to convince a great number, I am finally tempted to conclude that the majority of Africa’s leadership is made up of non credible people otherwise the bad ones would have found it so difficult to survive in a clean environment.