Take self-reliance to another level

selling simple goods at flea market stalls or growing their own food and with any surplus for sale. They are sending their children to schools that they may have built with their own hands and now supplementing the meagre salaries of teachers.
But the role of Government is very important where the infrastructure is concerned. It will still be Govern­ment’s responsibility to guarantee the security of its cit­izens and the country as a whole. Other Government responsibilities will have to be the co-ordination of policies to do with marketing of goods, such as the recap­italisation of the GMB.
But what has gone wrong in the scheme of things or politically as far as the philosophy of self-reliance is concerned? Of course politicians being what they are will confuse people by promising them what they can­not even fulfil. If people are left to decide for them­selves what they are capable of doing, life would be more predictable.
Take for example the proliferation of public trans­port epitomised by the kombis. Out of nowhere, the people themselves became more enter­prising to import vehicles for public transport. The one provided by Government, Zupco, failed to run effi­ciently. The same can be said of Air Zimbabwe and NRZ, the two transport entities under Government control.
One thing that should have been developed under the self-reliance political philosophy was encouraging people to use their surplus cash to buy shares into com­panies especially manufacturing concerns like David Whitehead for textiles and many others manufacturing agricultural implements.
We may have taken nearly all the farms from the white former occupiers, but one thing we overlooked was that those farmers also owned shares in industry. This means they also controlled the manufacturing sector, which depended on farming. Our farmers now do not own any factories, nor do they have any shares in those factories.
They sell their products and take the money back into their operations without any thought about sustaining the industry from which they derive their inputs. This was the original design of the setting up of the Farmers’ Co-operative, which has been renamed Farm and City. Farmers had shares in this company.
But today’s farmers are not shareholders in any con­cern that can support their operations. All what we hear is about lack of inputs and Government support.
If self-reliance had been taken to another level, today most of industry could have been owned by resettled farmers.
Tobacco farmers are earning a lot of money, but they do not have shares in processing companies. Even the policy of indigenisation is not focusing on the farmers to own substantial sharehold­ing in manufacturing companies. Some people have even suggested that public hos­pitals should be allowed to operate medical aid schemes where people can pay in advance for treat­ment at these institutions.
A Hospital Trust could be established into which people could pay money in advance as long as it is credited to their accounts. All what the hospital would do is to deduct the costs of treatment from the patient’s account.
This could be regarded as way of hospital self reliance measure instead of always waiting for Govern­ment allocation which is not at all adequate to meant the hospitals running costs.
The philosophy of self-reliance could be well understood by the general population. It is in the blood of the people that they want to improve themselves with minimum interference from the Government. There are certain areas where the Government would play a major role including an equitable allocation of public funds to all districts in the country.
The policy or philosophy of self-reliance cannot be equated to devolution. Just setting up the infrastruc­ture of devolution in every province would be too costly and unmanageable.
But a policy of decentralisa­tion would still give responsibility to communities to manage their own affairs. Imagine having parliaments in each province just to debate issues. What the people want is the support from central authorities to provide marketing infra­structures for their goods. If the roads are well main­tained, transporters would flock to the areas.
People must be left to form their own economic organisations to enable them to market their goods and improve their standard of living. At present, the concern is that there is no adequate support from the Government to allow villagers and farmers to move away from subsistence farming into commercialised units.
Why should rural communities be subjected to using donkeys as draught power? Why MPs be given                  US$50 000 each as constituency development fund instead of the money used to buy tractors for each constituency? This would make sense if tractors were made available in each constituency to improve the farming output.
More people still live in the rural areas despite the fact that there has been a land resettlement programme. All what the rural people want is not to move into the towns to live as squatters, but to remain on the land with improved marketing facilities for their products.