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Cont Mhlanga
I HAVE been out and about across the country in the past weeks, including visits to our district capitals. I can conclude that our own local business people operating businesses in these rural towns across the country are the worst enemies of the people and country.
In all these centres, I have observed that local business people establish bars and night clubs to trade alcohol more than social developmental enterprises. If they are not selling groceries, they are selling alcohol and prostitution. My goodness!
What kind of business people is the nation producing? What kind of future and country are we creating as business people?
Zimbabwe boasts of being one of the most educated societies in Africa with a 96 percent literacy rate and yet its business people operate more beer sales enterprises than intellectual promotion enterprises. What a shame! Kuyayangisa lokhu bantubakithi!
Take Filabusi town, the capital of Insiza district. I counted three night clubs and not even one library! Three night clubs bakwethu, no IT centre and library! Yimhlolo le.
This is not unique to this business town of the district but this is the scenario with all business towns of our districts. Local business people are the town. They decide what a town should look like and what life a town should offer to its citizens and at what cost.
Local business people are the country! They create the country they want to see. Politicians are less important in nation-building because they create no country. If truth may be said, politicians are influenced and driven by business people. Business people’s role is to build the nation through private enterprise while politicians protect the business person to do their work of building the nation.
Before we got to Russia and China and other countries to get AKs to fight for our independence, it was the local business people, our grandfathers and Indian business people, that financed our nationalism and created the politicians we call heroes today. We had local business people funding teachers and trade unionists to become politicians.
How then do today’s business people relegate themselves to the role of alcohol merchandisers and expect the politicians alone to create a great country? Today’s local business people are extremely irresponsible when it comes to serious nation building. They are behaving worse than mercenaries in the land of their birth. What a shame!
It is not a problem for me that these so called business people are running these Sodom and Gomorrahs, but what they are not doing with part of the money that their businesses generate in the community. Surely, a dozen business people in a district town can keep a library open and operating as an information centre, IT centre, bookshop, creative centre, copy shop, communication centre and so on to serve the district children who are hungry to develop and will grow up to be better customers for the same business people. Such a library can even generate the money that these business people seem to be so hungry for.
Another dozen local business people can come together and build a football stadium that can be a wonderful functions and event centre, generating good money for the local business people. The stadia can even be a home of a district sports academy and in no time can sell a single talented footballing or cricketing child for more money than all the amount of beer they can sell for five years in those rural night clubs.
I can give so many examples of what our local business people can do to create a wonderful country. But alas, wherever you go in these rural towns, its local business people making young people drunk and keeping them in poverty as alcohol generates no knowledge and announces no new self-development opportunities to those that consume it.
Our local business people of the 40s, 50s and 60s, despite the fact that they operated under colonialism and funded the founding of the liberation struggle, they went on to create and fund such heritage brands like Dynamos, Highlanders, Dorothy Masuka and many others. Every weekend citizens dressed in evening designer clothes (amalabheli) to go out to dance parties and events in the towns and cities where the local business people ran their operations. Today, citizens lock themselves up in their houses because the town is full of drunk and uncontrollable young characters after six in the evening, with others walking half naked on the streets!
The local business person of today in an independent country commits their money and time to nothing but pushing alcohol and sex to young children. What do you expect the future generations of this country to inherit from you as a business person? Beer crates and empty bottles? Ngamanyala la engiwabonayo!
Cont Mhlanga is a playwright and social commentator. Contact him on e-mail: [email protected]
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