The mistake we made in Zimbabwe was we built our post liberation culture on the colonial blueprint: western values, education, ambitions, desires, materialism, individualism, the desire to be highly paid slaves [employees] who seek quick riches through crony capitalism based on walking over those who are not as connected, in the same way our white masters did.

We also forgot about our cultural values of communism and that simply recreated the crony capitalist system with blacks now becoming the exploiters of other Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean resources to make quick wealth and to live like their colonial masters.

We then went further to find societal role models and symbols in immoral white millionaires like Tiny Roland, overnight black millionaires like Paweni, Chiyangwa, Pamire, Mawere, Kamushinda, Chanakira and Mutasa who built their businesses on patronage, exploitation, nepotism, corruption of government officials and systems.

Instead of frowning on them, we looked up to them for breaking all our cultural values and laws to make money. We watched these people build their empires by transferring wealth from whites and state, while the nation was not growing and we applauded.

The process corrupted future generations, citizens, judges, law enforcers, entrepreneurs and politicians in equal proportion.

Now, this culture has become ingrained, second nature and the way of doing things. In everything we do we seek privilege to get what others don’t have or to get more, even if it means stealing from others and depriving them.

It is in us now, it is the only way we know how to live. To fight this decadence will require transformation or a total social revolution and re-engineering of our society to break this 30 year addiction to wrong values and role models.

This will require us to stop watching DSTV and western media that reinforces the corrosive, exploitative, corrupt and consumptive culture that is dragging down Zimbabwe and the world.

We must expose all those who made their money in this way and denounce them to reset our definitions of role models. From here we need to read, watch and learn new information that builds a culture of communal participation, production, innovation to build common wealth and making people understand that money doesn’t come overnight.

Once people start collectively contributing to a common wealth, those people become possessive custodians of what they have built, which will cause a spontaneous inclination to fight corruption.

The sad part is, I don’t believe Zimbabweans are ready for that, hence people even fight us for fighting sanctions or defending our common wealth and because of that corruption has been catalysed by sanctions.

Corruption and sanctions are like siamese twins. You cant denounce one & uplift the other. It can’t and it won’t. The sad reality is that our people’s hearts are not ready for the total transformation.

I know our people lack the discipline and endurance to undertake this deep process that is going to take a generation or two to cleanse before we can reform ourselves out of corrupt aspirations, desires and behaviors.

Linda Tsungirirai Masarira
LEAD President