Exorcise your inner apparatchik
Well, it may be a new Zimbabwe, but the cash queues are still with us. I’ve just come from CABS, where even the Gold Class queue was stretching out the door and onto the street. A large silver Pajero pulled up to the kerb, and out lept a young man who opened the car door for Zanu PF National Chairman John Nkomo. People in the queue looked at one another, looked at him, and slowly let him move to the front. It doesn’t matter who governs Zimbabwe next. Whoever it is will treat us exactly as we allow ourselves to be treated. We won’t see anything improve until we start to demand more. Creating the Zimbabwe we want is going to take a lot of hard work, as we learn to break a lot of bad habits – and start holding ourselves and one another accountable to a new standard of behaviour.
Saturday, April 5th 2008 at 9:09 am
This is such a pertinent comment on the kind of psychological disposition that Zimbabweans have. As well as political change on a large scale all these kind of ways of working in daily life, whereby one person assumes rights others don’t have and others are cowed by it and don’t stand for themselves as equals, have to change, slowly. That’s years and years of history, all of our lifetimes, of learning to get rid of, but it has to start somewhere.
Saturday, April 5th 2008 at 12:16 pm
I have been two times in Zimbabwe. The country is beautiful and I recomended to visit it to Spaniards. I would libe to know several thinks:
1.- Does tribal considerations had any influence in the 28 years strugle of oposition to Mugabe ?
2.- There was a Spaniard owner of a restaurant in Bulawayo. I produced the best paellas in Africa. Does him or descent still managed the restaurant?
3.- I knew, from the time of Ian Smith, Lynn Memel, head of Rhodisian Television. Is she still alive?
Thank you for helping me.
best regards,
Enrique
Sunday, April 6th 2008 at 3:42 pm
Yes, we feel very frustrated. I am not sure if what I am going to say now will make you feel better or worse.
In the five years’ that I have spent out of Zimbabwe, I would say that we have a very much stronger commitment to democracy and the equal, even courteous, treatment of people than the people in the countries in which I have lived and worked. And I can assure you that these countries believe themselves to be leading lights of democracy.
That’s not to say we couldn’t improve and that we can’t learn from other countries. I just missed the inevitable witty comment that would be made when somebody abused their position of trust.
If you think of that queue again, I wouldn’t mind betting that you heard a couple of ironic comments??