By Ben Manyenyeni, former Mayor of Harare City

The Zimbabwean Coat of Arms reads:

• Unity
• Freedom
• Work

I am marking each of these, scoring out of 10:

UNITY – 1/10

Tragic. Even the Head of State is not bothered one bit about how badly we are polarized and toxic.

Here we are completely stuck. The next President of this country must make this a PRIORITY.

FREEDOM – 6/10

Some marked improvement. If you think I am too generous here, take note: some of the stuff we write and say in our brutal politics would have meant anything—including death—just a short 20 years ago.

WORK – 4/10

Despite being over 80% unemployment levels and courtesy of our hard-grinding informal sector. Gross the numbers and you get 11 out of 30.

Not a fancy score this…

Either we fix these or we change our Coat of Arms to be more truthful to our actual realities.