By Charles T.M.J. Dube

“DANDA haridariki rutswa kaviri,” is a Shona proverb.
I have picked the above proverb which is used to give warnings against repeating mistakes otherwise fatal and dangerous.
Another would say: “Ramba kuudzwa akaonekwa neropa pamhanza” (He who shuns retributions and warnings is recognisable from the injuries he suffers from consequence thereof).
We have had 37 years of independence, made strides and regressions; there is no doubt, that it has not been all rosy, especially the last 15 years or so.
There must be reasons to where we found ourselves at. Some of the reasons date back before our independence or even what we did wrong soon after independence.
What did we do right?
What did we do wrong?
How else could we have done it?
In 1980, the country was moving from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, from a shunned isolated pariah state to an internationally-embraced new nation.
As Rhodesia, thanks to economic sanctions, we were a relatively self-sufficient economy with industrialisation pegged at 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
From 1980, we were now darlings of the world with grants, loans, commodity import programmes and foreign direct investment and all at our disposal.
And yet in 1987 and 1988, as I gathered boxes of information on our economy from the World Bank in Washington DC for my research with the University of Ottawa, I could smell a red herring while the rest of the country was still in celebration mode.
My diagnosis then was what I called the problem of accelerated integration into the international economic system.
I could read the economy grinding to a halt over time.
The Bretton Woods institutions and the rest of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) countries had certainly overestimated our capacity to read the goings-on given the number of degrees to our disposal gained from all over the world during the exile days.
Thus, in the pursuit of their own interests of realigning the world, they ended up overkilling as they tried to integrate our country in the international supply chain.
Those who would have known better got carried away in driving technical assistance vehicles, overseas trips, travelling and assistance claims, while mortgaging their country, in satisfaction of foreign whims and emasculating our own inbuilt capacities.
In the process, our country was being reduced to an over-dependent fourth world economy which could shrink at the slightest of shocks induced reign in compliance to bilateral and multilateral shenanigans and gamesmanships.
Like Rhodesia before us, we were to find ourselves in international isolation, less harsh though, for all intents and purposes as we still had better windows to engage, unlike the Rhodesians who were completely shut out.
Why is it then that our own isolation produced more negative outcomes?
Was it because we were black-led and Rhodesia white-led?
It is certainly not so, even though a kith and kin relationship could have played its own positive soft spot sparing palliative role.
There were certainly lessons to learn though from the two epochs.
I would hazard a guess here and say the difference though was that in the former epoch. We had a political and business elite, united by a will to survive and determined to make it work, at the macro level.
In the latter case, we had political and business elites who wanted to appear as a cut above the rest. These preferred individual to national interest, unpalatable as this assertion could be.
Thus, their pre-occupation became amassing wealth at national expense. They ran expensive fleets, and proliferation of mansions of monstrous proportions.
Where in the former dispensation, those with access to resources reinvested in production, in the later dispensation, they added more top-of-the-range vehicles to their luxury fleets, got more concubines and mansions and or even helicopters and personal planes.
They went on a spate of primitive accumulation using mostly well-thought-out intrigues and scheming, invariably criminal and costly to the national interest.
It was each man for himself and God for us all.
With an educated lumpien, when the adage if you can’t beat them join them got into play, it became a free for all and we even lost out own currency which got reduced to a commodity and no more just a unit to facilitate exchange.
Even when we adopted other people’s currencies, it still remained game on.
We are in a new dispensation where the windows of the world are in the process of opening up for us.
Are we going to draw lessons from what we did wrong or right?
Are we again going to take pride in driving technical assistance vehicles and obtaining loans for temporary feel-good sensations and praises from the international community, even at our own expense?
Danda haridariki rutswa kaviri.
We need to learn to weigh the implications and consequences of the loans we will be lining up for our children to pay and or even of freebies in the form of grants, for we cannot afford to be reduced to a ‘thank you’ nation even with all the resources we have.
We must learn to say ‘no thank you’, especially if it does not enhance our capacity to stand on our own or make the future generations more economic independent.
Countries like the US buy oil to bury into the ground for the less rainy day despite their abundance of the resource.
It is time we managed our own natural resources with future generations in mind.