Success requires hard work

Success requires hard work.

I can show you a piece of land and call it yours. If you then proceed to fall asleep, you might grow a beard longer than Rip Van Winkle's but you won't have any tall crops on that land.

Possession of assets, does not amount to economic success. You need people with the correct knowledge, skills and work ethic to produce from the assets. You might think that you can always employ people with skills, but believe me the politics of the workplace very quickly militate against the personal motivation the skilled people might have.

You end up paying high salaries for little output. As the initial success of the biggest technology companies shows (Microsoft and Apple for example) it is always worthwhile for the main owner to be an expert in the field of endeavour.

For business highly technical business to be successful the owners also need to have excellent technical knowledge. Owners with little knowledge are often no more than sources of harmful interference, and wasteful expense.

Government policies of the post independence era have firmly shifted ownership of assets into our hands, and a good knowledge base into our heads. It is up to us individual Zimbabweans to polish this rough product into its final lustrous glory. It is up to us to be honest, diligent and humble as we work for the success of our country.

We need to remember that the success we seek is not for purposes of showing off, but for uplifting our communities as well. There is no use in you having ten expensive cars in your garage when the road to your real home, not the fake one in town, is rendered unusable by gullies. Zimbabweans, we need to uplift our communities.

For an economy to be successful it also needs a market. For any country the biggest internal market is the state. If the state is taking its custom and purchasing power and exporting it like we have been doing for a number of years, local ownership of resources is entirely meaningless.

We used to have Dahmer employing locals. Now we don't because we decided to export our purchasing power for buses. We used to have Quest Motors and Willowvale Motor Industries. Now they are stuttering because we have exported our purchasing power for vehicles. The government was first to that with importation of luxury vehicles. The public soon followed with their ravenous appetite for Japanese throwaway rubbish.

Indeed during Gideon Gono's time at came to a point where we were printing money to finance foreign purchases for things as basic as chains and scotch-carts. That is what led to hyperinflation.

Yes sanctions are there and they took a bite of our industrial capacity, but sanctions are not what leads to hyperinflation. Otherwise the Cuban and Iranian currencies, also under Western sanctions, would have tanked a long time ago.

At the end of the day we should not be surprised at the low employment levels in our economy and the high success rate of the economies we are importing from. We are giving them work to do even where we could be doing the work ourselves.

One can only but marvel at how one of the smallest towns in South Africa, Musina,  has boomed because of the purchasing power of Zimbabweans. I have watched the town grow threefold in half a decade with my own eyes.

The governance culture needs to be one of serving the people not one of exercising authority over the people. We need to minimize red-tape at every possible opportunity to allow commerce to flow faster and the country better yields. There is nothing to be gained from making people wait for long times, doing nothing. Rather serve them quickly so that they can use their time for other productive ventures.

For the human resources and skills to run these enterprises we need to strengthen our local education institutions. However our local students have been having to prostitute themselves for sustenance while money is disproportionately poured into the foreign education of the children of high ranking officials and the well connected.

Yet all that counts for little because the proudly one hundred percent Zimbabwean educated people like me, still outperform most foreign educated people even in the countries where they were educated. Suffice to say the foreign education is not about quality but about prestige and bragging rights.

If quality was the main issue, it is right here on home soil. We are the ones destroying what we have through neglect. We are like a man watering another man's livestock neglecting his own.

We need to focus on our country and that should start in the highest echelons of government.