Save Zimbabwe: What needs to be done.

I am always talking about what others are NOT doing right in running Zimbabwe. Well that is what we armchair critics do - criticize from the comfort of our armchairs. We see all the wrong things but never really do anything ourselves.

What would I do if I were ever to run Zimbabwe.

1. Reduce the size of the gravy train by
• Reducing the number of executive posts. A maximum of sixteen ministers and no deputies. Upgrade the perm secs so that they can act as deputies if necessary.
• One minister one car policy. This habit of ministers having a spare car to take the poodle to the vet while Zimbabweans take each other to hospital in wheelbarrows and scotchcarts must stop.
• No luxuries at taxpayer's expense. This habit of ministers trying to outspend Bill Gates, Philip Chiyangwa, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffet and all the other billionaires combined, but using taxpayers money must stop. For example the one car above should be a locally assembled reasonable car like a Mazda 3 or Mazda 6 at most, not an umpteen cylinder Barabus. This policy would apply to every public or public linked post including mayors and parastatal managers.
• Have two strong anti-corruption units. One should be independent and directly linked to the judiciary and the other should be supervised by the president. The first should be to prosecute offenders and the second should be to gather intelligence on corrupt activities.
2. Zimbabwe first
• Look inside. The idea of feeding your chickens to mongooses in order to spite eagles means you still loose your chickens. Haupi hukwana kuhovo nekuti wasvotwa negondo. In my books any policy that says look elsewhere is not right. You must look inside Zimbabwe first. If we really have to look elsewhere then our neighbours must have first priority. They are the ones who take much of the strain in times of our troubles. During the liberation war Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana took most of the refugees from the then Rhodesia. They even suffered direct military attacks on their soil but they stood by us. Right now in a time of economic mismanagement largely of our own making, it is South Africa which is even facing threats of civil unrest by its own citizens because of our large numbers there.
• We should not be using taxpayers money to fund expensive lifestyles and foreign education for public officials' children. Taxpayers money should go torwards funding and improving infrastructure in Zimbabwe. Sending the children of officials to get foreign education is not even necessary. They only do it for bragging rights and status symbol power ('Wangu mwana ari kuLondon. Akatomboona Queen vachipfuura' as if seeing the queen passing is anything special). We have the best education ethos in the world. Some of us are 100% Zimbabwean educated and are among the best at what we do. There is no reason why the children of officials should not get a good education in Zimbabwe if they are bright.
3. Pay public workers well
• This is necessary to stop corruption and improve efficiency. I am not saying we should make civil servants millionaires. However every civil servant should be able to pay off a car over six years, pay off a house over 20 years while sending three children to good public schools. Civil servants should not have to supplement their salaries by selling peanuts at work. In the past it was automatic that teachers, nurses and police officers would be well to do. Now vegetable vendors are doing better. That should never be the case.
4. Reduce taxes and educate people on why they need to pay taxes.
• Right now everybody thinks that you pay taxes in order to make ministers rich (which is practically true in the current corrupt environment) or that government money is inexhaustible. Government money comes from taxpayers pockets and every person whose pocket ever runs out of money should know that the same applies to government. If taxpayers don't have money the government won't have money. Taxes are levied to fund common services such as roads, schools, hospitals and justice delivery. They are not levied to enrich ministers.
• Secondly it is better to collect low taxes from more people than to collect very high taxes from those few that you can catch which is what is happening in Zimbabwe now.
5. Close off opportunities for corruption by ensuring efficient service delivery
• People pay bribes because they are faced with inefficient opaque service delivery. If you want a passport and you do not know when it will be delivered chances are that you will even offer the bribe to get it in a reasonable time frame. However if you know that my passport will come after 4 weeks without fail you can wait.
• One of the reasons why service delivery is so inefficient is that supervision ranges from weak to non-existent, or the managers themselves are corrupt.
• The other is plain laziness. Therefore you need practical methods to monitor and evaluate service delivery. You need indicators that can be reliably measured and monitored. In these days of computer technology it is very easy to attach a bar code to a form and monitor its progress in great detail.
6. Educate stakeholders on their rights and duties
• The only way institutions can function correctly is if the people (not just the media who are usually just as corrupt, or more so, as the other institutions) can effectively police them as well as make correctly informed choices when filling up those institutions.
• Zimbabwe needs a subject called Democracy and Development Studies as part of the school curriculum. This will educate and sensitize people from a young age on how to evaluate the development needs of their communities as well as how to select key implementors of the development plans.
• Hopefully this will minimize instances of the electorate being taken for a ride by empty or impractical promises from politicians.

Notice that I haven't mentioned any party names or people's name to exclude or include. I haven't said anything along the lines 'VaNhingirikiri chete chete' or 'Only Nhingirikiri has the brandpower to challenge VaNhingirikiri'. I have laid out a set of ideas that any Zimbabwean should be able to take and use to make Zimbabwe right. The only requirement is the the person should be honest, diligent, hardworking, knowledgeable and tough enough to stick to his principles. He should also genuinely care about all the people in the country not just a particular racial or ethnic group.

Believe me there is going to be a lot of noise from the people who will loose the benefit and opportunity to slavish off the taxpayers. Kana uchidzinga bere pambudzi yako yarabata rinotombokuhon'era chete. If you are chasing a hyena away from your goat it will growl at you.

Notice also that I also haven't mentioned transient issues like land reform and indigenisation. I have concentrated in what I consider core principles that need to be diligently pursued forever. That does not mean I do not consider transient issues important. They are issues that can be tackled in a generation and they need to be tackled this generation. If they are tackled properly, they should soon be forgotten as major political issues. This also need to be tackled in conjunction with other core policies. For example it is plain idiocy to give people agricultural land and in the same sweep ban the free trade of agricultural commodities. If you don't want people to freely market their produce what are you giving them land for in the first place!

Also have some selection criteria that recognizes people with appropriate skills. Give preference to people with agricultural qualifications. I do not believe the absolute bullshit that to be good farmer someone has to be a certain race. Whites had well capitalised agricultural operations because of past racial preferential treatment, but we do know that they started off under-capitalised as well, which is why they had to resort to forced labour (chibharo) to kick-start their agricultural operations. It is to be expected that those being given equal opportunity on the land now will start off undercapitalised, but with time their capitalisation levels will also improve. Giving preference to people with agricultural qualification will speed up the process though it does not necessarily eliminate it altogether.

Indeginisation as well should not be about taking over existing operations but spreading opportunities to previously disadvantaged groups. Rather than take over National Foods it is much better for the government to say it will buy say its rations for soldiers from a company with 51 percent black ownership. Right now our government would rather import rice noodles from China and give them to soldiers who grew up eating sadza, just because it wants to 'Look East'.

In mining rather than pushing in a few black individuals into the ownership structures make sure the community from whose land the minerals are being extracted benefits. If a mine is in Chivi district then give a percentage to Chivi District Council a percentage to Masvingo Province and a percentage to national coffers. Methods of making sure the community benefits have to be studied and fine tuned. You could work the benefits into the taxation model but then you would have to deal with tax evasion and plain cheating by operators. You could demand fixed royalties but then you would also run the risk of demanding too much such that operations become unprofitable or too little to make any difference to the status quo. It is a subject that needs further careful thinking and study.

Ownership of mining concessions should also be tallied with short to medium term investment plans on the concession concerned. The aim is to prevent hoarding of concessions as well as create more investment flow. Mining concessions should also be linked to the building of local processing plants. Companies the build refineries and purifiers locally should be given extra benefits and preference to those who export almost unprocessed rock.

We also need to bring an end the culture of entitlement that pervades our leadership. Right now most of our leaders feel that they are entitled to luxury at our expense. Yet they do not seem to be aware that it is us the people who are entitled to service delivery from them. We used to complain about whites travelling with their dogs in the comfort of the cabin while workers and people were dumped in the windswept 'pan'.

The new elite won't even allow people near the car. In many cases the car is not even being driven, it just parked in the garage as a status symbol. 'Manje Benz yangu iri kumba uku inomhanya iyoyo. Kungoti gumbo pfaa mbichana, yabva yabata 240km/h one time.' are typical boring boasts we are frequently subjected to.

It is not even legal to drive at 240km/h yet you find people actually boasting about it.

I could write a book about what needs to be done for Zimbabwe. And I can guarantee you that I can write a thousand page book with mentioning a single party or politician as I have done here. Like I always say, it is not the parties or their leaders who matter, it s the principles.

If something has go large horns, no matter what kind of cloth you look for, you can't wrap it up nicely. Get rid of the horns before looking for the cloth. Get the principles right before talking about a leader.