By Prof Artwell Nhemachena
OFTEN, many of us are quick to condemn others as having failed but we fail to acknowledge our own failures.
The West has failed to pay reparations and to restore resources to Africans whom they enslaved and colonised for centuries – but whose duty is it to mitigate Western failures?
And why is it that Westerners are obsessed with attributing failure to African States to whom they have failed to pay reparations?
Failing to see logs in their own eyes but quick to see specs in the eyes of African States, Westerners set up so-called NGOs and CSOs to ‘civilise’ Africans after independence.
The global media consistently tells us that African leaders have failed to an extent African States cannot even provide services to their citizens.
In this entire Western discourse, African citizens are presented as clients of their States who are owed duties by the States that supposedly are not owed anything by citizens.
In other words, citizens are advised by Westerners that they are owed and should demand services from their States but the citizens are never taught that they owe duties and obligations to the States in return.
In Africa, we meet multitudes of brigades of human rights NGOs and CSOs that supposedly serve Africans by defending their human rights vis-a-vis African States.
Strangely, it is never asked why no Western NGO or CSO has been formed to inform African citizens about their obligations to their African States.
Instead, Western NGOs and CSOs presuppose that it is only African States that must serve the citizens.
It is never envisaged that African citizens have to also serve their States.
Indeed, there are even discourses about servant leadership but never any correlative discourses about servant citizenship.
If there can be such a thing as servant leadership by African State leaders, why mustn’t there similarly be servant citizenship wherein the citizens serve their States as much as they expect the States to serve them?
The point in the foregoing is that African citizens have duties to pay taxes, for instance, to their States and this constitutes the basis of relations between the States and the citizens.
A citizen is not owed a duty by the State simply because he/she is a citizen.
A citizen is owed duties by the State because the citizen is paying his/her obligations to the State in the first instance.
The problem is that some citizens evade paying their duties, including taxes, to some African States.
Yet the same citizens expect the States to serve them – to deliver services to them.
Service delivery by the States is premised on citizens’ fulfilment of their obligations to pay taxes to the States. Yet, often those who evade paying their taxes are the loudest when it comes to demonising the States for any (imagined) failure to deliver services.
In the early 1990s, well before the so-called economic crisis in Zimbabwe, I have seen some citizens evading their duties to pay taxes to the State.
Passenger vehicles, including kombi owners and drivers, evade the payment of license discs for their vehicles.
Even as I was one of the passengers in some of the vehicles, the drivers would detour and reroute when they realise the police and vehicle inspection officers were manning the roads in order to enforce the payment for licence discs.
Similarly, food market vendors often evade the payment of taxes to the State and they run away from the police or from the municipal police officers who seek to enforce the payment of taxes and other dues to the State.
Besides, when citizens evade the payment of import duties at the Zimbabwean borders, the effect of such evasions is to disable the State from performing its duties, including service provision.
Indeed, even Western transnational corporations often evade paying duties and taxes to African States.
A brief review of recent media reports shows that the phenomena of tax evasions and evasions of import duties are rife in Zimbabwe:
The Sunday Mail recently wrote: ‘ZIMRA to lose US$1bn in revenue this year’.
The Mail & Guardian reported: ‘Swiss company accused of tax dodging in Zimbabwe’.
The Standard recently headlined: ‘Porous borders: How Zimbabwe loses millions to smuggling syndicates’
The point I am making here is that, before States can deliver services to citizens, it is necessary for the citizens ensure they pay their dues to the State.
It is not productive to simplistically blame the States when we all know that the citizens themselves are not meeting their duties to the State.
In other words, if citizens do not have clean hands, they should not demonise the States for supposed failures.
The so-called CSOs and NGOs should not merely focus on human rights of citizens but they should also educate citizens about their obligations to their institutions – obligations to their States, obligations to their communities, obligations to their families and obligations to their marriages.
Life is not all about rights, rather it is also about obligations.
Similarly, civilisation and civility are not all about asserting one’s rights, rather they are also about meeting one’s obligations to others, including to one’s State, community and family.
Civilisation is not all about rights – it is also about meeting one’s obligations.
Africans are not necessarily being civilised or granted with civility when they are educated about human rights that ignore human obligations.
We would want to see the so-called NGOs and CSOs educating Africans and the entire world about human obligations, in addition to the human rights which they are already evangelising.
One very big reason there is a lot of violence in Africa is that some citizens know and care a lot about their human rights which they are taught by the so-called human rights NGOs and CSOs.
However, they know next to nothing about their human obligations which the so-called NGOs and CSOs do not care to teach them.
The so-called NGOs and CSOs know very well how to perform and execute activism but their activism is only about human rights and never about human obligations. The reason in Zimbabwe and the broader continent of Africa citizens have developed a toxic culture of waiting for the States to do everything for them is that the so-called NGOs and CSOs teach Africans a lot about their human rights but nothing about their human obligations.
Even when an African State fails, it is the duty of citizens to mitigate the damage or harm arising from any such failure by their State.
Africans need to realise that they cannot solve anything by merely blaming their States.
They should mitigate damages or harm arising from any of the alleged State failures much as the States mitigate the damages or harms caused by their citizens.
If a spouse fails, the other spouse has a duty to mitigate the damage or harm arising from the failure.
Similarly, if a sibling fails, the other siblings have duties to mitigate the damage or harm arising from the failure.
Citizens must not only tell us how much African States have failed but they must also tell us what they have done as part of their duties to mitigate any damages they allege to have happened.
The point here is that if citizens fail to mitigate alleged damages, then it means they would have failed as much as the States that they accuse of having failed.
When Cecil John Rhodes witnessed the British people clamouring for bread in the midst of poverty and unemployment borne of the First Industrial Revolution, he did not merely blame the British State for the crisis or for failure.
Rhodes decided to mitigate the damage or harm by colonising African States such that he would send back to Britain proceeds from colonial projects.
In other words, Rhodes did not choose to go all over the world singing songs about British State failure.
Yet, in Africa, we often shy from paying taxes to our States – and when the States fail to provide services we then go all over the world singing songs about African State failure.
We need to do some introspections about our own failures as citizens.
When a spouse fails to provide food on the table, it would be stupid to run all over the show singing the song that the spouse has failed.
There is a duty to mitigate damage or harm.
When the so-called NGOs and CSOs teach us to sing songs about African State failure, we need to reflect not only on the credibility of such songs but also on the morality of singing such songs.
And, of course, we need to introspect on our own failures and on the failures of the so-called NGOs and CSOs.
It doesn’t help to run all over the world singing songs about someone’s failure.
After all, even the Westerners who are funding the so-called NGOs and CSOs have failed to pay reparations to Africans who they enslaved and colonised for centuries.
What Africans need more is to observe the duty to mitigate damages.
