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being via the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education’s devolution project which made MSU the third State university, the institution has churned thousands of graduates.
MSU has its strategic goal as establishing a fully semesterised university with 10 faculties, 18 000 students, 900 teaching and 400 support staff, with the requisite services and infrastructure.
Over the years, a growing number of young people, currently employed and unemployed, have come from MSU — quite a chunk bigger than those coming from the University of Zimbabwe and National University of Science and Technology.
As I write, the word Gweru is almost synonymous with the Zanu-PF conference that is currently going on in the city. The theme of the conference is “Indigenise, Empower, Develop and Create Employment”.
The theme for this year largely echoes Zanu-PF’s policy of indigenisation and economic empowerment, but the MDC-T has accused Zanu-PF of stealing its idea on jobs. In fact, ahead of Zanu-PF’s conference last week, the MDC-T after a number of false starts, finally launched its blueprint called Jobs, Upliftment, Investment, and the Environment.
The timing could not be more interesting. What is also more interesting is Zanu-PF and MDC-T’s battle of wits in providing jobs in particular and in taking the country forward socio-economically in general.
This brings one to the demographic contained in the expose of this piece — young people.
Zanu-PF argues, as its spokesperson told me last week in an interview, that “if you,” as Zanu-PF seeks to “indigenise, take control of your resources and develop skills and competences, you create a viable business . . . ensure full exploitation and empower people in mining and agriculture you create employment”.
The MDC-T’s way of creating one million jobs in the next five years is by, according to Juice, largely by “establishing a friendly environment for both domestic and Foreign Direct Investment to rapidly increase the productive sectors’ capacity utilisation to a level that ensures job creation through genuine capital investment”.
These thrusts need to be put to rigorous tests and obviously a person of this generation, my generation, cannot be disinterested. Just last week, Senator Obert Gutu, MDC-T spokesperson for Harare province, whom I consider a very good Facebook friend of mine, began a chat with me with the word “Juice”.
Unlike many people who might have thought of an inviting coolant on such a sultry afternoon, I immediately knew what he was driving at. I had a copy of the Juice blueprint, but had not gone over it yet.
So I asked what the good Senator liked about “Juice, what is the winning idea?”
He replied: “Juice will stimulate domestic savings mobilisation . . . I like that because most of the times people think that Zimbabwe can only get rich by getting foreign money. Juice intends to create one million jobs between 2013 and 2018 . . . and this is possible. Juice aims at reconstruction and rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. Juice aims to create a US$100 billion first world economy by 2040 . . . Juice intends to increase power generation capacity to 6 000 MEGAWATTS BY 2018 (emphasis not mine).”
I was interested, did a little mental and asked: “What kind of jobs will be created at an average of 20 000 thousand (per annum), in the absence of FDI, if I heard you correctly?” Senator Gutu did not reply to this last bit. He has not.
I do not think that he has not seen the question, which has hung uncomfortably in the air since Friday, at 9.21am. I hope that he will finally reply me, as behooves him as a friend and as a party spokesperson.
Senator Gutu is a lawyer — a good lawyer I hear — and he knows from the legal field that he has a right to silence although the same silence can be used against him in some circumstances. Given his prolonged silence, which is both impermissible on the Facebook chat mode and unacceptable from a spokesman who has to win even this young heart if lucky, one can conclude that there is some yawning vacuity in MDC-T’s job claim. This is simply because the man who offered the Juice cup to me simply did not avail it to test and taste.
It is known, and I have written on this, MDC-T has a way of plucking high sounding figures from the air and dispense with the same with similar abandon.
Finance Minister, MDC-T secretary general Tendai Biti, is one adept at this. Witness what he has been doing with economic growth or lack thereof. The party has been promising heaven to be had courtesy of the party’s foreign friends. Heaven has come.
The friends are in a hell of their own, as they are grappling with economic meltdown for a couple of years now. There is scant reason to believe they may come to anybody’s benevolent rescue any time soon.
Onto what Senator Gutu said he liked about his party’s Juice. One simply wonders how, for example, a party under whose command the Energy Ministry has gone from bad to worse in electricity provision will turn around the country’s fortunes. It is a matter of course that the Zimbabwe of 2007-8 had better blackouts than 2012.
Elias Mudzuri and Elton Mangoma have presided over this black horror — when we thought they knew better. Elton Mangoma, for his own part, is fingered in stalling the Chisumbanje Ethanol Project which rueful action has not only the principal product of ethanol, but has also cost thousands of jobs and electricity that can light up the whole of Mutare, according to the company involved in the project.
So where is the Juice? A US$100 billion dollar economy by 2040 would really be a nice thing, but how can we get the same when Biti, even in this Juice, insists that Zimbabwe is an impoverished and highly indebted country which he seeks to better via a dubious debt clearance strategy, which has not worked anywhere under the sun except saddling countries further with obligations to international money lenders.
Then come in the foreword of Juice, MDC-T leader, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s not so inspiring words.
Credit to him, he situates a big challenge of this era by acknowledging that, “We have to generate decent jobs for the hundreds of thousands of young men and women that are leaving colleges, vocation training centres, polytechnics and universities every year.”
“In order to do this,” he says, “we need to build a sustainable economy framework that grows the economy.”
Never mind the syntactical mumbo jumbo; the MDC-T leader says there should be grown the national cake and that concentrating on “sharing the small and diminishing cake is recipe for disaster.” We must increase investor confidence, says Tsvangirai, and “We should never allow a situation where the goose that lays the golden egg is killed.”
In Tsvangirai’s book, the foreign investor is the golden goose, which must never be killed. Only he does not tell us that the same goose keeps all its eggs!
Is it lost to Tsvangirai that the same undeniably foreign geese use the fertility of our natural resources to lay and keep its golden eggs?
How can a situation of an entrenched foreign, white economic hegemony be sustainable, when there are happenings like Marikana, and governments in DRC, Botswana and even Rwanda have only recently moved to control a mandatory 35 percent stakes in mining businesses? Local control is fast becoming the norm — and most progressive states may achieve that pretty soon.
Which brings one to Zanu-PF and its own economic thrust. The revolutionary approach has been successful, both in its militancy and speed — dating back to the days of the liberation struggle when the gun finally led the way. The land reform was successful, even when arrested by some rough edges and things can only become better and better. The current indigenisation and economic empowerment programme is a hell lot more complex.
For all that has been done so far, nothing has been comprehensively done for the MSU generation, despite all the talk. A pretty small number of young people have benefited from the programme — and anyone who may question this may only have to go onto the street and ask the first 10 people they meet.
The likes of CABS, which are responsible for disbursing youths funds, have been accused of being slow and lethargic. Community share ownership schemes, while being disparate and spread apart, have also been largely an elders’ affair.
Zanu-PF simply has to refine and expand on the current indigenisation programme to cater for the real geese that lay the electoral and progressive golden eggs — the youths.
Online Reporter