By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

WHERE I was seated at the official opening ceremony of the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF), there was booing, shock and outrage when it was announced that the City of Harare had won the best municipality award for 2018.
It is not clear why the press did not pick up the story about this spontaneous public reaction to the announcement.
But the meaning of the public reaction is even more important because it demonstrates the limits of marketing and public relations for entities where the relationship between the daily public operations of the entity and its basic reason for existence has reached a crisis point.
In Risk Issues and Crisis Management, Micheal Regester and Judy Larkin observed that: “Deeds build a reputation far more effectively than words in advertisements or glossy brochures.
In today’s climate, accountability, promises – words alone – are greeted with cynicism or disbelief.
Such an approach actually creates a target for attack should the slightest lapse in performance occur.”
In the case of the City of Harare, the public relations officer Michael Chideme was frequently heard on several talk radio shows when typhoid cases were reported in the city and followed by reports of cholera.
Therefore what Harare needs are deeds not fantastic exhibition stands.
The fact that the Ministry of Health and Child Care quickly acted to isolate the cases of typhoid and cholera and prevent an epidemic does not resolve the crisis because service delivery in the whole city is in a deplorable state.
And this Harare is the seat of the same central Government leading a worldwide campaign under a new dispensation and repeating the theme which the ZITF also adopted that ‘Zimbabwe is Open for Business’ and that it is also promoting ‘the ease of doing business’.
The crisis of Harare is at the heart of what ‘Operation Restore Legacy’ and the new dispensation are meant to solve.
In this sense, Harare lags behind the rest of the country for reasons which cannot be blamed entirely on the current city administration. What Harare lacks is a municipal culture.
David Korten in The Post Corporate World tried to define this culture when he wrote:
“Shared spaces create shared destinies and interests – the imperatives of co-operation.
Although the competitive aspect of life’s evolution has dominated attention since the studies of (Charles) Darwin, paradoxically competition’s most constructive contribution to evolution generally has been to create an imperative for co-operation.
In the interdependent world, unrestrained competition is generally self-defeating.
Those who survive and prosper (despite the crisis) are those who find a niche in which they meet their own needs in ways that simultaneously serve others.
Thus it is that in healthy systems the interests of part and whole – self and other – remain in exquisite balance.”
Harare clearly lacks that balance in most respects. Contrary to the said imperatives, the City of Harare represents the exact opposite of the balanced development required by the Constitution of Zimbabwe in Section 13:
l The worst excesses of Mbare Musika have taken over the entire Central Business District, triggering warfare between business owners and vendors with Municipal Police caught in the middle.
l The chihwindi culture of ‘zvangu zvaita’, a dog-eat-dog mentality, mainly originates in Harare but is now spreading to other areas.
l Harare, for a long time, has been the epicentre of the most backward form of trade-unionism mainly based on suicidal stay-aways led by people with little understanding of the whole economy of Zimbabwe and no understanding of economic trends.
As a result, we found unemployed and self-employed people being herded to stage stay-aways!
l Worse still the backward trade-unionism in Harare mutated into political stay-aways through the destruction of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and its replacement with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, which then took over most municipal councils in the country.
The MDC formations were disastrous for the city and the country because they were dominated by chihwindi and contemptuous of Chimurenga; they were based on the notion of ‘toda kumbodyawo’ (we also want to eat and enrich ourselves) which worsened corruption and vitiated town-planning as councillors jostled for building stands even in wetland areas and over sewer pipes; and they brought to Zimbabwe a brand of opposition politics which pursued opposition for the sake of opposition without offering citizens real alternatives to governance.
l Former South African President Thabo Mbeki recognised the suicidal character of the adversarial politics being pursued by the MDC formations against ZANU PF and Chimurenga.
l He proposed and succeeded in bringing the parties together into an inclusive Government (IG) for five years.
However, instead of the IG being able to bring a real synthesis between chihwindi and Chimurenga, the opposition’s chihwindi infected the whole inclusive Government and gave rise to a G40 mutant within ZANU PF which worsened and deepened the anti-liberation ethos in Zimbabwe and especially in Harare.
l The G40 cabal was led by persons who were not only anti-ZANU and anti-Chimurenga; they were also motivated by the ‘toda kumbodyawo’ attitude, with the dishing out of illegal stands to so-called youths, tending to worsen municipal governance.
From the preceding, it should be clear that the crisis of Harare cannot be resolved through public relations and good exhibitions at trade fairs.
Even strategic plans based on good intentions alone cannot resolve the problem.
Harare remains the seat of the worst forms of adversarialism in politics, in law, in business and even in the so-called informal sector.
The pricing practices prevailing in the retail sector, the role of banks in feeding the so-called parallel market and even the ‘gender’ politics being promoted by some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – are all based on the ‘zvangu zvaita’ ethos which worsens the crisis.
In essence, we do not live in Harare, we fight and struggle through Harare.