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Focus on Bulawayo Gatsha Mazithulela
This column has a focus on Bulawayo’s development issues and therefore it cannot avoid commenting on the only show in town at the moment – the 2013 harmonised elections. I will pinpoint an issue that has been very topical in many fora and even on this column and other newspapers – the qualifications of candidates or in many instances, the lack of qualifications.
It is not hard to guess what section of society makes comments about the unsuitability of political leadership of this city due to a general lack of academic qualifications amongst elected officials in the past few years. It is of course the educated or at least those who consider themselves to be educated who would make such comments. This is amidst a myriad of complaints about how service delivery will not happen and Bulawayo will not be developed if such poorly educated people are in power.
I would like to share a warning that a friend of mine recently made me aware of. Plato, that great philosopher put it very bluntly when he said “the heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself”. This, dear readers, is the penalty that all those educated people imposed on themselves when they declined to come forward and present their credentials for election in 2008.
Many of those educated people who have analysed lack of service delivery, lack of good corporate governance, lack of strategic planning for development and many other shortcomings of an academically challenged political leadership of Bulawayo wrote to the papers and complained bitterly. The question that I would like to ask is if they are so educated and can dance happily around political matters, why are they not presenting themselves for electoral contests?
Surely they will win and then all developmental projects in Bulawayo will kick off with much fanfare and lack of service delivery will be a thing of the past? But alas, a few weeks to elections, we the educated have begun lamenting on the of lack highly educated candidates in many wards and constituencies. I wonder whose fault it is when I didn’t see an army of intellectuals lining up with their formidable CVs to register for primary elections in all the political parties. Where is the highly educated political office bearer supposed to come from when educated people do not present themselves for political office?
There is of course another side to this story. Many of the educated people who presented themselves for political office, in all parties, were thoroughly beaten by their so-called academically challenged counterparts during primary elections. This includes yours truly. What is it about the structure of politics that constantly delivers this type of result? I would proffer to say that it is any number of things with the biggest being apathy of the higher classes in engaging in organised politics. They prefer to go about their business and have little regard of who is meanwhile running the affairs of various political parties. This is only until shock and horror when we wake up to find that the messenger or the postman is now our elected representative for the next five years. This is when we rush to the press and also have lengthy discussions in the comfort of our clubs, talking about how nothing will happen because of the quality of elected officials.
Wait a second however. Poor quality of elected officials? If they are elected, whose fault is it then? Some would say that it is the fault of those who vote for them! Voting for an unsuitable candidate says more about you than it says about the candidate. What is even worse is the situation that has prevailed for some time when elections are held – the low voter turnout on the day of the elections and this is prevalent in those areas where we the educated live in. If the usual 30 percent or so of registered voters turn-up, the 70 percent of the registered voters who do not bother to vote should not have much to complain about when the choice is made. There are many aspects to the voters roll debate and I do not want to be dragged into it but the point that I am making is that failure to go and vote is tantamount to declining to rule and Plato has already told us what happens in that event.
The third aspect to the result of the so called intelligentsia not participating in political activity is that the leadership space will be filled by those who want to, even if they are not educated to your level. That also means that political debate and management of political parties themselves will tend to become inferior to your expectations. Whose fault is that when the so called educated do not join political activity in their numbers? And there is no shortage of educated people in Zimbabwe.
In a recent discussion on these matters, one highly educated person postulated thus, “if a constituency chooses a postman or a messenger to become the elected political representative, does this mean that is the highest level of political thinking available in that constituency?” The answer is probably yes because how else do politicians get elected other than convincing you to vote for them? This will remain the case as long as the educated do not bother to involve themselves in politics and the few highly educated people that do, will always be taught a lesson at the primaries by those who live and breathe politics even as they are not educated.
The people of Bulawayo will be voting for a new leadership and they should remember the generalised complaints that were fairly unanimous in that education is a big input in how an elected representative eventually performs. If you are registered and you decline to exercise your right to vote, which is to decline to rule, you will be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. What Plato should have added is that you must therefore not complain! If you actually go out and vote for a candidate that you know has no chance of delivering anything, I’m not sure what we should do about that.
Dr Gatsha Mazithulela is a scientist with special interest in the development of Bulawayo. This column will be suspended until after the elections in order to make space for more urgent issues on these pages
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