Friday, May 30, 2008
By Rejoice Ngwenya
I have been following this food shortage/high prices debate with rather keen boredom. Frankly, it’s such a big yawn. You know, liberation stalwarts like Robert Mugabe, Kenneth Kaunda, Sam Nunjoma, Thabo Mbeki et al are fosilised in a time warp of Marxist-Leninist dogma. We are not going to get trapped in the Big Lie of some conspiracy theory that Zimbabweans are starving because professors from some university at Mars PROVED that fossil fuels, if replaced with bio-energy, will result in me starving to death. In Zimbabwe, to expect a liberation war hero to actually PRODUCE food even with FREE inputs is asking for too much. The 21st Century agricultural new order is beyond their call – they wouldn’t understand, trapped on isolated islands of utopic hallucinations.
What we need is democratic space,real space, to exercise our collective creative genius to produce even without Brettonwoods institutional support. We want more freedom, not hand outs. These so-called revolutionary liberators are suffocating us with their pro-poor crap.
Zimbabweans are poor not because of imperialist phantoms hogging Mugabe’s sleepless nights. Look how long it took Mbeki to shift from his diplomatic stupor to actually ADMIT that primitive South Africans have always blamed us Zimbabweans for their laziness. Doing drugs, high jacking cars, blowing up ATM machines and dancing to Kwaito music twenty-four-seven is not exactly the best way to economic growth. Zimbabweans, Somalis and Nigerians work hard. Employers and women love hard workers. It’s a fact of life. Unfortunately, we have not been able to enjoy the fruits of hand work in our own countries because of political greed on the part of our leaders.
For us Zimbabweans, or at least talking on my behalf, if Mugabe had not kicked professional farmers off their RIGHTFUL properties and dolled it to his cronies, we could be reading about food shortages elsewhere. In any industry – education, health, sport name it – if you give pro administrators the boot, you end up in league ten.
Let’s not blame the World Bank, George Bush and Gordon Brown for every evil that befalls us Africans. Exactly, we are our own experts, but left to their own devices, look at where the ‘revolutionary experts’ took Zimbabwe! Africans, let’s take our share of the blame. The anti-imperialist sing-a-long likes of Mugabe belt out ad nauseum is a lullaby to hell.
Rejoice Ngwenya is a regular columnist for AfricanLiberty.org. He is a Zimbabwean Freemarket Activist and Political Analyst based in Harare. Send him an email at rejoice@earth.co.zw