African problems require African solutions

November 1, 2008

By Sibangani Sibanda

TUCKED away at the end of an alleyway behind an industrial complex in the heavy industrial sites in Harare are the offices of a small, barely known milling company, whose main business is to mill maize into mealie-meal which makes sadza, the staple food for probably 99 percent of Zimbabweans.

To say this company is barely known is probably not quite accurate because over the past two weeks, the proprietors have been turning away customers, ranging from ordinary mothers desperately seeking mealie-meal to feed their families, to members of the Zimbabwe uniformed services looking to place bulkier orders for both their canteens and their homes.

For the last two weeks or so, this apparently nondescript company has had to tell the customers that they are waiting for their government allocated supplies to be delivered – their trucks are parked at the Government-owned Grain Marketing Board (GMB) depot, but are not being loaded.

So bad is the situation that even the employees of this company – whose major “peck” is that they get allocations of mealie meal for their homes and for their canteen at work – have run out. They too now have to ask their employer every day when the next truckload of maize is due to arrive.

On the day that I visited the premises of this company, also looking for this once-abundant commodity, a headline in The Herald (a newspaper that, daily, makes me glad that I am not a journalist – because being a journalist would mean that I would be bracketed in the same profession as the people responsible for this rather sad excuse for a national newspaper) catches my attention. Apparently, the Minister of Agriculture believes that Non-Governmental Organizations (who, among other things, spend a lot of time in remote areas and have intimate knowledge of the food situation in the country) are misrepresenting the food situation in the country.

It is not as bad as they are making it out to be. Is the man blind or just plain stupid? If anything, the endless talks about the so-called Government of National Unity (GNU) have shifted people’s focus and the calamity that Zimbabwe is faced with is actually being understated.

The front page of the same newspaper has another interesting headline. South Africa, having promised to supply Zimbabwe with farming inputs, had sent a team into the country to assess the situation. I found this interesting because it immediately suggested (to my, admittedly, rather fertile imagination) a possible reason why the trucks were not coming out of the GMB depot. Our government wants to show the South Africans that there is some food in store. By not distributing food for a couple of weeks, the stock levels will look better than they actually are when the South Africans come calling! How callous and unfeeling can a government get? To starve its own people so that they look good to the outside world!

A few days earlier, on a South African television program, someone suggested that Zimbabwe was facing a famine of Ethiopian proportions. Those who remember that famine in the 1980’s (the one made famous by Bob Geldoff et al), will recall that the Ethiopian government then had tried to hide the enormity of their problem from the world. The result of this was that help came too late for far too many Ethiopians, and the image of Ethiopia as a country is etched in most people’s minds as the country with the walking skeletons!

Ironically, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the leader of that Ethiopian government is enjoying hunger-free exile in Zimbabwe as we speak. Could he possibly be advising the Zimbabwe government on how to handle such situations?

Of course the other story that is not being told is how woefully short Zimbabwe is of the inputs required for farmers to produce this coming season, which is now on top of us.

The scene at the small milling company is being replicated at various places throughout the country, as farmers are looking to source fertilizer and seed (which are now being sold in American dollars), fuel and spares for their tractors, mealie meal for their labour and so on. I find myself constantly asking the question, “Do African politicians ever admit failure?” Come to think of it, do politicians anywhere in the world ever admit failure? It seems to me that politicians always have to be dragged away kicking and screaming (literally in some countries and figuratively in others) before they give up what they seem to believe is their right to ruin everyone else’s lives.

This may explain why the illustrious men that lead the SADC countries are reluctant to admit that the agreement that they witnessed so enthusiastically in August has failed. They would much rather keep flying all over the region to attend meaningless meetings at the expense of some of the poorest tax payers in the world than admit that they witnessed a bad agreement that cannot in any way be implemented.

But having told the rest of the world to butt out because this is an African problem requiring African solutions, what other choice do they have but to soldier on. In time they may get to understand that problems of bad governance are not continent specific. Neither are their solutions.

I for one remain haunted by the memory of the walking skeletons of Ethiopia. I fear that no amount of high-powered talks by not-so-high-powered leaders will save Zimbabwe now. Our fate, as the saying goes, is sealed.

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Comments

2 Responses to “African problems require African solutions”

1

Marx Mukuruwangu says:

November 2, 2008 at 7:07 am

Problems of planning, implementation, performance and assessment are universal. They are to be found everywhere wherever human beings have sought to apply their skills to conquer that environment for their own good, that is sustainability in food, shelter and continuity of the human race. The pursuit of these basics is universal, and is what feeds politics, for the simple reason of the finite nature of those same basics.

Thus, there is no such thing as an African problem, OR the equally absurd notion of an African solution. What seems to be true for most of African leadership however is the general lack of interest OR willingness to tap into the existing knowledge base of how successful economics and political models elsewhere in the world, have managed to successfully build sustainable environments.

It is nothing new ! Just a simple lack of basic leadership credentials.

Once these are fundamentally lacking in the man in the apex of State Office, as obtains now in Zimbabwe, the whole disease and decay cascades down to the lowest rungs of society and with it stagnation and eventual degeneracy.

Is it good national leadership when a head of state goes to New York, USA to scour for underwear and plasma TVs when his nation is reeling in massive grain shortages? Is that an African problem?
2

Don Cox says:

November 4, 2008 at 4:51 am

I was going to say much the same, but Mr Mukuruwangu has put it better than I could. There are no “African solutions” any more than there is “African electricity”.

There are simply bad and less bad solutions to political problems. One of the biggest problems world wide is leaders who will not accept term limits. Nobody should be in power for more than ten years – and then, he (or she) should never be directly succeeded by a relative.