By Wilbert Mukori- Once upon a time, 40 years ago but it might as well be 400 years ago for we have regressed so quickly we are now back in the dark ages, Zimbabwe used to produce enough food to not only feed all her people but had plenty left over to be the breadbasket of the region. Today the nation is starving.

The World Food Programme (WFP) is frantically trying to raise US$ 200 million to feed 8 million Zimbabweans who are facing starvation. To blame the food shortage on drought alone is to miss the point. 

Ever since 2000 when Mugabe undertook his chaotic and violent seizure of white owned farms to give to his Zanu PF cronies mostly, the country has lost its breadbasket laurel as agricultural production collapsed and with it the nation’s economy. So when the recent drought and Cyclone Idai struck the region, not only Zimbabwe, it hit us the hardest because we had no grain in the solo and were so impoverished we had to rely on food aid!

Unemployment has soared to 90% as the country’s economic meltdown has got worse and worse. 90% of our people are classified as poor with 34% of them living in extreme poverty, according to a recent World Bank report. 

Who is to blame for Zimbabwe’s economic rapid descend into this economic hell-on-earth? Have to blame the corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship, the regime that has ruled the country with an iron fist for all the last 40 years. But when all is said, it is us the people of Zimbabwe who are ultimately to blame for letting the corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF destroyed the country’s once upon a time prosperous economy and, with it, our hopes and dreams!

For the last 40 years we, Zimbabweans, have buried our heads in the sand so we pretended not to see or hear the corruption and tyranny of the Zanu PF dictatorship and so we said and did nothing to stop it. It is shocking that even today with the nation dragged to the very edge of the precipitous abyss some people still continue to bury their heads in the sand!

“A few days ago I was talking to my neighbour – who is a teacher – on the collective job action proposed by the two main teachers’ unions in the country – who have called upon their members not to turn up for work when schools open for the first term of the year, as long as the government (their employer) persists with its arrogant and stubborn refusal to honour its contractual obligation to pay its employees their United States Dollar-pegged salaries in local currency at the prevailing interbank exchange rate.” wrote Tendai Ruben Mbofana.

How is it possible that there can still be one single Zimbabwean out there who is not aware that Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and murderous tyrants. And that as long as the country remains a pariah state, there will be no hope of any meaningful economic recovery. None! 

So all these teachers, nurses, doctors, etc. who are demanding a living wage are the ones who are being arrogant, stubborn and, most important of all, down right stupid. The Zimbabwe economic has all but totally collapsed; where do they expect government to get the money to pay them? You do not harvest mangoes from a thorn tree! 

Mbofana accepted the economic reality that the teachers, etc. were not going to get a living wage from the government and proffered a solution!

“It is, therefore, without any doubt that the only way teachers, and other civil servants, can successfully break themselves from these shackles of enslavement by their employer, would be for genuine economic empowerment – such that, not only would they have other ready alternatives for sustaining a livelihood, but prove an indispensable asset, which the government would not be able to kick in the teeth whenever it felt like,” he suggested.

“Teachers, and all other civil servants, now need to sharpen their skills in so many other trades that they may have a passion for, or are gifted at.

“Such magnificent and essential skills need to be further meticulously sharpened in the teacher – coupled by business management training – so that they go beyond the boundaries of the classroom, but translate into meaningful, productive, and income-generating ventures that would catapult him or her out of the dungeons of poverty, and vile enslavement by their employer.

“Armed with these skills, there would be nothing to hold them back. There would be nothing standing in their way to a dignified livelihood that is worthy of a creation wonderfully and fearfully made, just below the angels of the heavens, by our loving God – as no human being was ever meant to be a slave of another.”

This is sentimental nonsense at its worst!

Mbofana failed to name even one profession which the teachers can retrain in and afterward find a job that will pay them a living wage. He did not name one such profession because there is not one profession in Zimbabwe where there are no hundreds of thousands qualified and experiences professionals on the Mount Everest unemployment mountain already!

Zimbabwe is not going to get out of the economic and political mess the country is stuck in without addressing the problem of bad governance. 

Zimbabwe is not a healthy and functioning democratic nation in which normal market forces such as collective bargaining, economic laws of supply and demand, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. count. Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by corrupt and murderous thugs in which chaos, voodoo economic and the criminal waste of human and material resources to feed the insatiable appetites for power and wealth are the norm. 

It is therefore shocking that even after 40 years of the Zanu PF dictatorship, with the national economy in the gutter, millions living in abject poverty and despair, etc.; that anyone would still fail to see Zimbabwe for what she is – a dysfunctional banana republic. When you live in a banana republic you do not expect to be paid a living wage! 

When Mnangagwa rigged the July 2018 elections, there was a deafening silence from many Zimbabweans; they did not see or hear what happened and, as usual, they said and did nothing to stop him getting into power. He rigged the elections and has since discovered he cannot rig the economy to pay Zimbabweans a living wage. 

It is not for a living wage Zimbabweans should be demanding but an end to the curse of rigged elections and of pariah state! 

“Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added unto you,” said Ghana’s first President Kwame Nkrumah. He was right and we, in Zimbabwe, have ignored the advice these last 40 years and have paid dearly for it!