In these distressing times we are living in as a country, it may be difficult to see the forest because of the individual trees we contend with on a day-to-day basis. It may be an exercise in futility to try and perceive light at the end of our particularly dark tunnel. But I want to try and encourage the Zimbabwean who is stressed and distressed by the things they have to do in order just to make it through one more day, one more week, one more month.
To Robert Jnr., Bona, and Chatunga Mugabe, I predict that you are going to be adults in a Zimbabwe where you will one day stand in the main square of any City and scream out that “The current President is a blundering idiot!” and you will not be arrested by the on-looking policemen. They will just give a half-smile and attend to more pressing business of making sure thieves are arrested. I predict that you will get some applause from some in the square with you, and that none will threaten you in any way. By this, the country will pass the Natan Sharansky test of democracy.
To the just-returned children of Commissioner Chihuri, I predict that you will live in a Zimbabwe where the Police will show zero tolerance for corruption; where the Commissioner will okay the arrest of some thieving Minister of State. In this way, your late father’s many business interests will be truly protected by the maxim: Nobody is above the law. That Commissioner will never refer to the urban poor as a teeming mass of maggots that need to be cleaned out, but will forever consider it her good fortune to serve and protect God’s people, even the country’s citizenry. She will lead professional, well-paid, healthy officers.
To the just-returned Pride and Passion Gono, I predict that you will live in a Zimbabwe where the Central Bank Governor of that time will make it his sacred task to fight inflation and defend the value of the country’s currency. He will do so chiefly by not printing paper money that is not backed by production, and maintaining healthy gold reserves. This professional governor would fall back in horror at the very thought of using Reserve Bank resources to make scotch carts, ploughs, etc, to enhance the fortunes of the-then ruling party in up-coming crucial, dicey elections where the party’s winning would be far from certain.
To all the just-returned-from-Australia children of chefs, I predict that your children will attend first-class Zimbabwean Universities that have not been destroyed by political interference and sheer malice; where academic freedom is not just a phrase in an academic treatise but a living, breathing reality. Where it again will be a matter of pride to hold a degree awarded by a Zimbabwean university.
To the grand children of Vice-President Joseph Msika, I predict that you will eat traditional Zimbabwean foods such as mutakura, rupiza, and mufushwa not because of politically-induced food shortages, but because you feel like partaking of them. You will be in a Zimbabwe that will have taken its rightful pride of place as the breadbasket of Africa. I predict to the grand children of Joseph Made that you will live to see the day a Zimbabwean Minister of Agriculture is fired for incompetence and for lying to the nation about the state of its food reserves and harvest; you will never have to stand in a queue for food. No, never. Gone forever will be the days of the barrel, bucket, firewood, and bag economy.
I predict to the grand children of Aeneus Chigwedere that they will attend private schools where the parents will be allowed to freely set the level of fees that they themselves will pay, and so determine the standard of education that their children will get, as well as the attendant lifestyle. In those days, the Minister of Education will preside over the renaissance of Zimbabwean education, taking it from glory to glory, surpassing its vaunted 1980 to 1995 era.
I predict to the children of all armed forces generals and brigadiers that you will serve proudly in a professional force where you will never ever fear putting a wrong political foot forward, where you need never prove your political allegiance to a certain political party. As the Zimbabwean Defence Forces top brass, you will be able to fearlessly execute your constitutional mandate without being made a private army of a politician, and your wives and children never need fear whether daddy will come back home from work alive in peacetime.
And to the grand children of Happymore Bonyongwe, the CIO supreme, I predict that should you decide to serve your country within that organisation (under a different name, of course), then you will do so knowing you will never be at the beck and call of any political party. You will then restrict yourself to the constitutional mandate of collecting intelligence on threats to national security, advise the country’s President accordingly, and leave Archbishops (and harmless District Chairmen of opposition parties like me) strictly alone.
Then I also predict of the children of Minister Obert Mpofu that they will operate businesses freely and openly in a stable business environment characterised by Government respect for private property, and the unhindered interplay of market forces determining prices. They will never have to demean themselves by kow-towing to some ignorant state official (ignorant of business, that is. There will never be any ignorant person appointed to a state post in that Zimbabwe) in order to conduct an honest day’s work. Market forces will determine losers and winners in the business arena, with politicians limiting themselves strictly to laying the fair ground rules. The Mpofus will then make it based on their business acumen and ability, and will never sink so low as to steal from a parastatal.
Grandchildren of Minister Chombo will live in a Zimbabwe where they never need fear that their houses will be demolished; where they will be given the requisite three months notice after a concerted publicity campaign before any illegal structures are destroyed; where clean treated water will flow from council taps and sewage will be an unseen thing that will only appear on municipal bills; where they will be led by councils that they themselves will have elected and not some political lackeys appointed by some politically-minded minister. Also, they will buy their own cars using their own money obtained legally.
I predict that children of Minister Parirenyatwa will continue the family tradition of practising medicine. In so doing, they will never see a patient die just because medicine is unavailable just because some politician has taken the forex. They will never see big shefs grab much-needed ARV treatment intended for the poor by using their political clout. They will never see one hundred infants and children of Kadoma city die of diarrhoea because the city water was untreated and there were no antibiotics in the Central hospital. Gone forever will be the days of the textbook case of medical horror of our times.
I predict that the very many grandchildren of Minister Nyambuya will never have to live under a regimen of electricity load-shedding and never lose a single electrical gadget through unscheduled power outages; or if they do ZESA will then replace the damaged gadget or pay for its repair. The grandchildren of Minister Mushohwe will also never suffer the humiliation of being crammed “five-five per seat” in a commuter omnibus that is completely unroadworthy because the underpaid VID officers accepted a bribe. Never will they wait by a roadside for six hours for public transport that will never come, and then have to scramble aboard an extremely dirty lorry that ferries coal from Sengwa in order to travel to Gokwe. They will not suffer the indignities of being stuck in a broken-down passenger train without water for two days. For, in that new Zimbabwe, there will be plenty of spacious, clean, regular, and above all decent, public transport.
The nieces and nephews of Professor Tafataona Mahoso will be able to buy and read the Daily News if they feel like it. The coloured children of Bright Matonga will be interviewed by the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and CNN on the challenges of being former ministers’ children and they will be able to give their views freely without fear of arrest, including casting aspersions on the ability of the-then Minister of Information and Publicity.
Finally, I predict that all the preceding is not a facile phantasmagoria daydream but a tangible, logical and yea, necessary, progression of this, our beloved country. – Makosa is MDC Chairman Kadoma District. ketayi_makosa@yahoo.co.uk
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