A plate of peanuts

Reconciliation means listening to the other person and listening opens a breach in the defences with which our ruling party guards the strong room where it stores its power and wealth. There will be no solution in Zimbabwe until those defences are down and people are able to plan the way forward together.

A man in government commented recently on their way of allocating funds. There is just one plate of peanuts and after the strong have taken their share the rest take the leftovers. It is true; there have been marked improvements this year since the introduction of the US dollar as our currency and the efforts of one party in the inclusive government to raise funds internationally.

Water, for instance, is available again in some of the urban areas that have been without it for months, even years. Electricity too is much more reliable than it was a year ago.

But there is resistance to going further. Twenty, even 40 years ago, gifted children could pursue their education up to university level. In those days we were far from full employment but there were opportunities for the enterprising. While health services did not cover the country, where they were they worked.

Today many young people and their families spend their entire energy on securing the means for just keeping going. And the gaps are just too big for individuals to fill. I met a young man not so long ago asking for help with school fees. I had to tell him I had nothing to give him. He burst into tears and asked, why is life so hard?

I had a ready answer but there was no point in giving it to him then. All I could do was listen and somehow share his suffering. But the ready answer is that something has gone terribly wrong in our society. The great yearning for freedom in the sixties which led to war in the seventies finally bore fruit in the eighties: we became a free independent state.

It was honeymoon time and our rulers wished the honeymoon would last forever. But as is the way with honeymoons they dont last, and the challenge of the nineties was to transform our society so as to establish the services we normally associate with a decent and dignified life. This was something they were not prepared to accept. Let the good times roll and dont distract me with knocks on the door.

Well, as we know, the knocks became persistent and our rulers had a choice. Either listen to them and open the door or bolt it tighter and pretend there is no one knocking. They chose the latter and sent the police to chase away the knockers. So here we are at the end on our third decade of independence right back, economically and socially, where we were not just at the time of independence but well before.

We are now in the midst of the nail bighting tension associated with the final moments of a soccer tournament, though with far more at stake: on the one side are those who want to open up the system, attract investment, welcome back the migrs, unfetter the media, untrammel the courts and generally get a normal society on the road. On the other are those who feel they have a hereditary (from their part in the war) right to rule and enjoy the fruits and refuse to make any move that would threaten their hold on power.

No one wants this to deteriorate into violence but everyone fears that it could happen if some reason does not soon enter into the scene.