“The country’s policies on indigenisation will not be there forever, hence the need to grab the chance now and not wait. There is no reason to wait as opportunities might elude you…the challenge I see with most people is that they want to commit to investing home when things are OK, but when things are OK, there would be no opportunities to talk about,” Affirmative Action Group president Supa Mandiwanzira, Business Chronicle, 11 January 2010.

And when Zanu PF critics say the party goons smelt their exit with the advent of a vibrant political opposition and went on looting overdrive, who will argue when Mandiwanzira openly makes such declarations? If all is okey-dokey it means you have a functioning state with checks and balances that make looting criminal, so strike the iron while it’s hot; use bad laws to create wealth; loot as much as you can such that when good men appear on the horizon to take charge, who gives a shit, coz dude, we got it made!  And the rest of the “lumpen proletariat” who continue to wallow in misery? Well, they empathised with the enemy and chose not to heed the call to arms, that’s what Mandiwanzira and his confederates will say when asked by St. Peter to justify how they got so fabulously wealthy and forgot the old Christian stricture “what does it profit a man…?”

I don’t know whether to be angry or what. This seeming ambivalence, mixed emotions or whatever, is based on that this is the beginning of a New Year when the general expectation is to start on a fairly positive life experience outlook, what with that very mortal obsession of making “New Year’s resolutions.”

So it was that the South African government decided to have Zimbabweans regularise their stay in what is considered the biggest economy continent. Come on, you cannot fault these poor Zimbabweans who have been forced to make choices they would otherwise not have made all things being fair. I believe I am one of many, many Zimbabweans who stayed on despite all the crap, and this based on personal reasons. However, all my siblings left and the oldest – “a very sweet girl”- left with her family to “settle” in SA. Well, are they settled? You bet not!

Thus it was that she sent back her 15 year-old to “organise” a passport on 12 December 2010. Naturally she sought an emergency passport as she has to return to school, and believe me she has aced all the “tests” the South Africans can offer at her level. So I’m elated that she’s got a future she can never get in Zim. Having paid USD250 for an “emergency passport” which we had been told would be issued after two days; she is still wallowing here – today on the 6th of January! She might as well have applied for the snail-pace passport that we are told takes forever to be issued and saved the USD250 for lunch on her way back to SA! And she is supposed to be in class on the 11th of January 2011.

Ever wondered why so many people have so much bitterness about the so-called founding fathers [and I'm not talking about the Ndebele!]; how they have messed up the lives of innocent millions; how they still claim relevance with clowns like that Matebele Prof exhibiting traits that border on the fatalistic cocking a snook at the intelligence of the very people they claim to represent? Religious fundamentalist would no doubt say these folks are cursed, yet this is African politics where dead consciences abound.

And then we read about the KGVI fire and the statement from the MDC-T Home Affairs clown-princess that there was nothing suspicious about the pyromaniac work, as if we had suspected a link with the rush for passports by Zimbabweans domiciled in South Africa!

We sure have a long way to go.

Even when the GNU was inked in 2008, progressive, cerebral and visceral analysts – and even pseudo-intellectuals – greeted the marriage of inconvenience with the same cynicism that Zanu PF game planners are considering the outcome of what many see as this rushed election.

Reasonable men and women wondered how Zanu PF- a nationalist and rightwing party – could capitulate to any demands placed on the table by the MDC, and this based on previous pronouncements that they did not see any reason why in their opinion people with no liberation war credentials could be allowed to rule the country. And now we have Khaya Moyo and Chihuri speaking the language of Chinotimba we pretend to be surprised, only because another election is looming despite popular opinion that this will be the death of us as the conditions for a credible elections are palpably absent.

In this newest discourse on the future of the country, the issue then becomes what has to be done to have a consensus that the country can go head and have elections, not to mention the referendum. Based on what we already know about the Zanu PF collective and the congenital and abysmal attitude to democracy and the people’s right too choose a government of their own, it would be safe to say that what has been missing in this crisis is outside leverage to make Mugabe bend.  Yet we also already know Mugabe’s attitude toward outsiders “interfering”  in the internal affairs of “his” country.

What choices then do Zimbabweans have on the face of these apparently intractable contradictions as defined for the whole nation by Mugabe and Zanu PF? You get Jonathan Moyo saying the MDC will never win an election, and you have to ask what informs such careless statements: who is voting, the people of Zimbabwe or Zanu PF? Obviously Zanu PF will never vote for the MDC, and in an election where only Zanu PF elements vote, you can guarantee an MDT thrashing – much like the June presidential run-off farce – but for God’s sake it does not work that way and you somewhat understand why Zanu PF would insist on having these elections, because they figure there wont be any MDC supporters to vote thanks to the patriotic efforts of Jabulani Sibanda and Chinotimba!

But then it has to be asked for how long Mugabe and Zanu PF are going to ride roughshod over the wishes not only of Zimbabweans but standards set by the international community which has – albeit feebly – tried to steer this country to placid waters? Imagine the progeny of Zanu PF hawks embracing the same militancy half a century after Zimbabwe’s independence and telling us that no one without liberation war credentials is fit to rule! You then understand the belligerency Africa has seen in its many troubled spots where obdurate nationalists and despots are responded to by matching militancy from frustrated opponents who decided the ballot was just but a fart in the wind as far as the nationalist despots were concerned.

Another thing that has brought the rather unnecessary stretching of this crisis, some contend, is the mediation by SADC and how useless the whole exercise has been since the Mbeki years. International relations and diplomacy efforts only work when local parties involved in negotiations see themselves as equals, after all this is what has brought to an end some of the continent’s most atrocious human crises. Zimbabwe however offers an example that negotiations can drag for centuries as long as one party to the negotiations obsesses about entitlement to political power despite the good intentions of mediators to make repair the limping country.

Meanwhile, with this insistence on elections by Zanu PF, we do not have to brace ourselves that the victory Zanu PF is already claiming will be disputed: we already know that the mediators will persuade the MDC to accept a Zanu PF victory while those who voted for change and the international community who question the outcome will be told once again to go to hell. And where does that leave the ordinary man, woman and child? Well, just blame the MDC for not being tough enough on Mugabe and Zanu PF, yet you still have to empathise with those so-called MDC hardliners who were – and still are – against this marriage that has inconvenienced us all when we could be using our brains to understand better things other than how Zanu PF the party Simon Khaya Moyo so much extols lost the bush war plot, how this neo-patrimonialism crap came to make supposedly good man bad.

I saw and wept the other day at the response to Gabon’s run-off election where results were torn in front of television cameras by an official from the party that was sensing sure defeat, and you understand Zanu PF’s thesis that they will never accept an electoral outcome that does not favour them as a culture from the Dark Ages where the rule and the will of the people has no place in their definition of self-rule and self-determination. The question obviously becomes, why hold elections if you are not going to accept the results? Chinotimba answered that already in a Newsday interview:

That’s how we do things in Zanu PF!

The end of the year is usually a time when we reflect on the months behind us and meditate on what was and what could have been. This period of private rumination is not confined to the faithful who claim the risen Christ as their Lord and Saviour in their lives, but even the non-believer will stop and take stock as part of that human appeal that we avoid unnecessary pain and make better our lives in the New Year. The guy who steals and mugs God-fearing mortals looks back and thanks his gods that he escaped gaol and prays that the new year brings with it that Houdinisque streak. Thus it is for many Zimbabweans who stayed in the country – to face the music so to speak – while the fortunate left to seek better lives elsewhere. Some have opined in the past that there is no benefit in mopping about circumstances you cannot change, and as we look back in the year past, Zimbabweans seem to have embraced the very opposite of that counsel. It has indeed become depressing listening to everyone complain about this and that and you tend to wonder how many genuinely sane people walk our streets.

That it is a year that began with a lot promise is a sure thing. It began as the country celebrated in February the first anniversary of a unity government rightly seen by many as the beginning of long delayed economic reconstruction. Full shop shelves became for many the most visible pointer that the country was on the road to recovery as goods that only a few months had been found on the street at exorbitant prices could now be purchased in formal shops. If only the people had the money to buy these goods. Teachers and other government employees continued pressing for salary increases, and one only has to imagine the fate of the unemployed and other vulnerable groups amidst such complaints about poor salaries by certified professionals.

The people have been told that economic reconstruction, job creation, medicines in hospitals, textbooks in schools will not happen overnight – the new birth pangs of the government of national unity. But the impatience of the people here who are demanding a better life is understood within the context that they know where the country is coming from. They know the Zimbabwe inherited in 1980 at independence when men toiling as unskilled workers in different sectors of the then thriving economy could afford to buy their own houses; they know the Zimbabwe where they could send children to school, where teachers saw the profession as indeed a vocation: that is where the bitterness of many here resides, and as we journey into a new year, those expectations linger.

Zimbabweans look back at the year behind them and expect the coming year to bring good tidings, that is the Zimbabwe they want because they know all that misery that happened in the past year -and indeed past years – has largely been authored by man. Many have asked what happened to the men and women of goodwill who promised them health, education and housing for all in 1980? Could the coming year be the year when this and other promises and expectations come true? But then that reads like a naive question. What lies ahead are scheduled national elections which could mean the people’s expectations are further postponed as it is well documented here that elections have always brought with them unnecessary violence. So how do you provide for the people when your primary concern is gaining political power? In our politics that is in itself a contradiction of sorts. You just cannot have it both ways. Elections demand huge resources and political parties will spend arms and legs, while government itself will budget hundreds of millions of American dollars into the exercise. Meanwhile, sad stories can be heard in the cities about families going to bed without any meal, yet but one still hears the occasional comment that “things” are better now because you can virtually get anything you want at the shops but with the caveat – “if you have the money.” So what Zimbabweans expect in the next year? Not much really, perhaps more of the same. But with the expected elections, we can doubly expect to be back in the international news headlines with yet another run of pre-election violence and therefore disputed poll.

Vanity, all vanity!

I met a distraught woman this week and my went heart to pieces. This is a fifty something year-old Zimbabwean grandmother who I see each day and pass the usual greetings and that’s where it ends – no personal stories, just the mutual goodwill that comes with African ubuntu. She went on and on about how she had made two long trips to the city’s largest referral hospital on foot and wasn’t looking forward to making another two trips the next day. Who are you visiting there and what are the doctors saying is the problem? I ask. No, the person died last week and the people at the hospital have been giving us all sorts of stories about why they have not been able to perform a post-mortem so that we may be able to begin funeral arrangements, the poor woman says. All this has taken seven days, I exclaim in disbelief. Ah, other people who came after us have had their post-mortem papers and left to bury their relatives and I think the hospital staff wants us to give them money for the post-mortem to be done and the body released to us. There she said it! Let’s be grim and morbid a bit: Imagine a relative rotting in what we know are malfunctioning morgues just because some poorly paid government person wants a bribe? Is that what the hardships here have turned us into? They say all this evil began at the top, but I refuse to be turned into that group of Africans for whom African-ness long departed from their consciousness and conscience. I wish I could go on about the poor woman’s grief but I’m so damn pissed off.

Everyone knows by now that Zimbabwe’s education has deteriorated to levels that will be tough to reverse without any radical policy changes. Other commentators have however opined that until there is a new political dispensation, we cannot expect any real change for the better, which could in effect rather ominously mean these woes will be with us indefinitely – of course with the post-September 2008 political power games being read as pointers to predict the country’s future. Others have pointed at the diamond windfall as just what the doctor ordered to fix the abject education and health services, but inveterate pessimists who know gemstones in the hands of an African politician are not holding their breath.

There still is unabated brains flight in the country’s once awed institutions of higher learning as academics apply for or are offered staff development programmes outside the country but never return to their varsities. And with good reason, some would say. Meanwhile, students who graduate with what have been mocked as unbaked degrees return as teaching assistants, something that would be frowned upon by serious academics. But then this can be found all over the whole education sector here where unqualified teachers are taking children for their O’ and A’ level classes and straight to university!

As we speak, for the umpteenth time the opening of some varsities has been pushed further and some students are already saying they are imagining the academic year may well begin in December when classes should have begun this month. I know a number of National University of Science and Technology students who have left for South Africa as they say they cannot just sit and wait for the unknown. While they have said they will be coming as soon as they are informed that classes have started, such stories have been heard before with many abandoning their studies altogether after having found jobs during their sojourn. All this despite the fact that once upon a time getting an opportunity to study at university was literally embraced with both hands as it was a guarantee that one was set for life. Now students abandon their studies without any second thoughts, after all they are failing to pay their fees, so why pay the exorbitant fees only to have lecturers absent from their posts? It makes sense then to exchange one’s academic cap for hustling in the mean streets of Johannesburg when a degree ought to provide one with a middle class lifestyle – at least in a normal economy.

Zimbabwean students themselves attending university here are witnessing how standards have gone down and one quipped that while some are quitting their studies and complain that they is no learning going on to give weight and meaning to “degree”, she will stick it out as long as in the end she gets that piece of paper that says she went to university and has “qualifications.” But the circumstances of young people who have university education become heart-rending when other countries we always thought viewed our education with awe become “suspicious” of these university degrees and have second thoughts about employing a Zimbabwean graduate.

A young man told a sad story recently about how his “degree” failed to get him a job in South Africa. You see, he got a degree from one of the “state universities” that were once teacher training institutions, but prospective employers in South Africa told him they did not recognise his institution and therefore his degree. He reports he was told the only Zimbabwean degree these people would accept would be from the University of Zimbabwe, but also with reservations. And their reasons? There is no meaningful education going on in Zimbabwe’s universities! How’s that coming from a bunch of people whose education standards is something people here have always mocked?  Now the young man is back in the country clueless about what to do with his future despite having invested four years of his life studying toward his now useless degree. The superiority of Zimbabwean education is no doubt under scrutiny not just among Zimbabweans themselves, but also in the region if not across the globe and the unfortunate part is that young people who enter university and those who acquire other tertiary qualifications have their sights set on regional and overseas job markets as there are no employment opportunities here to match their “qualifications.” So where does that leave them? Skills development is no doubt every nation’s richest investment that overlaps generations but Zimbabwe’s circumstances raise the spectre of diminished returns, after all students are already virtually teaching each other and graduates being produced out of those “interactions.”  The list of top 500 universities in the world was released recently and some watchers did not even bother to check where ours are placed.