Zimbabwe’s Future

Newspaper column by Peter Godwin in an Australian newspaper:

“Did you know that Zimbabweans have the highest IQ in the world?” she says. Hmm, that seems a little over-patriotic. “Yes,” she continues, “I queue for sugar, I queue for salt, I queue for fuel, I queue for cooking oil.” And she bursts into peals of laughter at her joke.

(…)

It’s estimated that nearly 75 per cent of Zimbabweans between the ages of 18 and 65 have now left the country. That’s getting up to Irish Potato Famine ratios. It’s a veritable exodus. Imagine any city – imagine Adelaide – suddenly losing that proportion of its population. That’s how bad things have become in my homeland.

Godwin’s proposal: Set up an international conference and plan for the time after Mugabe.

This is a way to unlock our imagination on how reconstruction could start. The amounts pledged would help harness greed to good effect, signalling to the local Zimbabwean elite (who are wondering when to dismount the current horse) how well everyone can do under a new dispensation.

Such a conference, with its resultant document, can also begin the debate on how to fund specific reconstruction areas: agriculture (and different models of resuscitating commercial agriculture), education, health, currency stabilisation, energy, infrastructure, and so on. It also gets us away from a hectoring, negative binary on Zimbabwe to one where we lay out upon a heaving table the glittering goodies that will be available as soon as the venal autocrat is gone.

I think that this would help establish a profound paradigm shift, and change our attitude from one that is purely reactive to Mugabe’s latest felonies, to one that sees beyond him, by writing the tyrant out of the script for Zimbabwe’s future.

Peter Godwin is the author of Mukiwa and When the Crocodile eats the Sun, 2 books I enjoyed reading.

I don’t want to comment. I’d just like to encourage you to read the article (or the books for that matter), whatever your political background is…