Whose fruit is it anyway?
Growing up, an interesting predicament always befell my family. We lived next door to a family, highly prolific in gardening; and to show for their obvious passion, they had a yard abundant in flowers in kaleidoscope bloom, as well as all kinds of fruit and vegetable that could whet every visitor and passer by’s appetite, guaranteed.
One of their most productive exploits was the tall mango tree that grew in the backyard. Every year, the family was assured a harvest of juicy red-yellow fruit from it, heralding the arrival of summer.
And this is where the predicament came in.
Because the tree literally hunched over the low Durawall that separated our properties, a fair share of the harvest often fell into our yard.
Now it’s not that our neighbours didn’t try to avoid this happening. Often, I could spot the gardener on a stepladder doing his damndest to fish the fruit hanging in our territory with some form of hook or walking cane. But inevitably, a few mangoes were always missed and when their time came, they would fall daintily onto our patch of the world.
Each time that this happened, we were never sure what to do.
Should we get a bowl and gather that sweet juicy windfall, or return it to its ‘owner’?
Who was the owner anyway – the person who’d planted and nurtured the tree, or the one who benefited from its yield?
That is a scenario we can ponder for several minutes, hours even.
And the only reason I use it is because it perfectly mirrors a question posed by a few fellow Zimbabweans as we recently tried to rationalise the sad state of affairs in our nation.
We are all new ‘Diasporans’ – that term used to define Zimbabweans living and working out of the motherland – and were pondering the irony of our situation.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, completely educated in-country, we are all now externalising the collective wealth of our knowledge to live and work in South Africa.
I believe that this is the saddest of all fates of the political and economic meltdown of our nation. We can bemoan the fact that all of our valuable natural resources, like gold and platinum and granite are being externalised to ‘friends’ in the East. But nothing is as precious to a nation as its pool of skilled persons.
Nothing shows more evidence of a robust social system (that includes positive socialisation at familial and educational level) than a capable, committed and diversified workforce.
And to prove the quality of Zimbabwe’s workforce, let me offer an example. Many of the young professionals Zimbabwe has recently produced have been trained under a plethora of trying circumstances which include a crippled economy that has led to endless academic strikes (by university and college lecturers, and teachers alike) and therefore limited learning; as well as hardships among scholars trying to raise fees for their education
The fact that even with all these factors working horrendously against them, Zimbabweans can compete with professionals trained at far more renowned institutions than the few semi-reputable (at least for now) institutions that the nation has is a testament to the great resource that is Zimbabwe’s people.
But boasting aside, there is a predicament in this scenario; much like the one I set out at the beginning of this piece.
Just like the neighbour who receives a windfall from a tree that he hasn’t planted, so do foreign nations who harvest the fruit of the Zimbabwean crop. This isn’t to say that this is a bad thing, but with the current state of socio-economic affairs in Zimbabwe, it is an unfortunate thing.
Zimbabwe’s soils are fertile for nurturing capable intellectuals and professionals – but not for retaining them. Instead, they are often forced to seek greener pastures elsewhere.
So the question remains, the question that we few Zimbabweans found ourselves asking ourselves that day.
Who owns our output – the nation that has nurtured us, or the one that benefits from our yield? Who ought we plead allegiance to?
And as with the mango tree and its fruit, this is a scenario we can ponder for several minutes, hours even.