New Zimbabwe.com
By Tafadzwa G. Gidi
24 February 2009
FOR all the rhetoric and promises we hear from our politicians, business leaders and even individuals on the street about how much we need to change the status quo, when it comes down to it, no one really likes change.
Put simply, even when we know change is necessary and probably the only solution, we still would feel better if things could get better without changing anything in our lives. Such is the nature of the creature called homo sapien sapien!
Clearly, change was the overall theme of 2008. Thanks to Barack Obama, the world went change crazy. The new American President managed to articulate his vision for change and the ripple effects shaped the global debate so that all we could talk about was ‘change we can believe in’.
In some ways, his election is as much an embodiment of that change he preached for nearly two years on the campaign trail. However, Obama promised America and indeed the world, a lot more than just the election of the first non-white American president. The question that the next four years will answer for America is whether that change can become reality. The new commander in chief of the free world thinks ‘yes we can’.
In our own small way, the journey we started almost 10 years ago when Morgan Tsvangirai and others founded the Movement for Democratic Change in 1999 has this month gotten closer to completion.
Those few individuals had a vision to change our nation because the old ways had ceased to work and the nation needed a new direction. Today, the man who used to be the face of trade unionism and work boycotts has now become the Prime Minister of our country.
I understand the anxiety that has greeted the news about the formation of a unity government in Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe has given us enough reason to doubt his word even when it is cast in stone and paraded on public forums.
However, everyone agrees that something must be and should be done to move us past this gridlock that has left ordinary Zimbabweans in the grips of poverty. And yet, when our political leaders decide to try something, we are all crying foul.
Obituaries have already been written even before the new power sharing governments gets down to work. Yet any objective onlooker would agree that the only way out of the mess was to at least try this government of national unity.
Basic maths dictates that doing nothing is not an option. If we do nothing, we have a zero percent chance of achieving success. By just agreeing to join the unity government, the opposition turned the odds to a 50-50 chance of success. This should be a cause for optimism rather than pessimism. We just moved from no hope to some hope and I would be damned if I did not at least feel some cheer about this 50% crack at bringing back Zimbabwe to the glory days.
It is easy to print doom and gloom stories all around the newspapers and blogs, but horror stories won’t build our country. Action will! Of course, we need to be pragmatic about the whole situation given our nation’s history. However, the past does not shape the future. What’s already done is done. What we do today, however, is what matters!
Shouldn’t we at least give ourselves a shot at success instead of resorting to endless rowing? If you will allow me to use an overused adage, is it not better to ‘go down fighting’ than to submit and just fade away quietly?
They said the unity government will not work and yet the signs we have seen so far are optimistic. After meeting with the new Prime Minister and David Coltart, the new Minister of Education, the teachers unions have instructed teachers to go back to work. The US$2,300 pay demands have been thrown out of the window. The unions believe “there is a new thinking at the top of the governmentâ€. Is this not change we should at least give a chance as the teachers have sensibly done?
We may have just witnessed a turn of the tide and didn’t even notice it because we were busy moaning. Many years down the road, we may look back on the day Tsangirai became Prime Minister as the day our nation began healing itself. That prospect alone is enough for me to give this unity government a try. It should be enough for you too.
Incidentally, homo sapien is Latin which means “wise human†or “knowing humanâ€. You would be forgiven if you took this to mean that wise and knowledgeable creatures like ourselves would understand that we need to constantly evolve (i.e. change) and adapt to our changing circumstances if we are to stand a chance to survive long into the unforeseen future. Not so!
I hope as a nation we find the strength to go against our natural urges that incline us to resist change so that we as a nation can improve, adapt and continue to exist for generations on end.