adminOn their part, the voters must consider whether, first embassy upon embassy of words of promise made by political leaders at the last elections rang true in terms of real action on the ground, or have simply paled off into distant echoes to be renewed in preparation for the next polls.
Secondly, the voters have to convince themselves that those as-yet-untried leaders eager to step into bigger roles have proved their worth to be trusted with bigger things as role models in their communities.
What all this suggests is that the intervening period between now and the impending elections should be a time for a big audit on Zimbabweans at various levels of leadership.
Such a conscientious evaluation will succeed if the bottom line formula of leadership, the four “Ls” — “love, listen, learn and lead” — is scrupulously followed. The big question that Zimbabweans ought to ask is whether each and everyone of the present crop of top political leaders love the people they lead. If they do, why do some of them unleash violence to coerce people to join their political party or to punish those opposed to their party policies? It is obvious that if as a leader, you love people; you will naturally listen to their aspirations. Today, the dominant aspirations of most Zimbabweans include repossession of their land,
and this also means repossession of what lies buried underneath, the land and what sits on it, as well as putting the economy in the hands of the indigenous population.
Yet, in spite of that, we have people who claim to be national leaders digging in their heels in opposing land reform and indigenisation and economic empowerment. Where, then, is those leaders’ love of the people if it cannot be demonstrated here?
Moreover, the repossession of land and the economy as means to empower Zimbabweans are a resumption of the revolution that wrested this country from the hands of foreign rulers and back into our own hands.
The truth, painful though it might be to surrogates of the imperialists who opposed majority rule and democracy in this country, is that the revolution in which people lost their lives until the struggle was won in 1980, remains incomplete until the economy and the land become the last chapters of the struggle for independence, freedom and self-determination.
Of course, those Zimbabwean leaders who are specialists in short-term thinking and are incapable of grasping and communicating a long-term vision to those they lead, want to settle for quick political gains which they believe will come their way with the intervention of foreigners — who themselves want nothing but quick economic gains from any country that they occupy directly or by remote control — on their behalf.
For them to lead effectively, people are expected to have the capacity to learn what others think and desire to improve their lives, which implies a close proximity, rather than insularity, between leaders and their followers.
But how many of those in Zimbabwe’s top political leadership can be said to be always “with the people” as Maurice Nyagumbo writes in his book, in order to learn first-hand about the trials and tribulations of povo so as to prescribe appropriate panaceas?
Is it not true that for most of Africa’s premier leaders, political rallies are the connecting lines between them and the people they lead before being whisked off to their posh, fortified residences where they ironically but remain tragically so near and yet very far from the very people who put them where they are.
The danger here is that, by relying on third-person information about the state of affairs in their country, they risk being fed doctored information, some of it too remote from reality on the ground, by aides who themselves might be driven by a propensity to colour information in order to ingratiate themselves with their bosses by telling the leaders that which the aides think the bosses want to hear.
However, those African leaders who keep a finger on the pulse of their population will always come up with grand initiatives to improve the welfare of their people because they know first-hand what the people and their country need.
Leaders who are not totally detached from the people with whom they mingle when opportunity avails itself for them to tap into the joys and sorrows bottled up in the people’s hearts, draw themselves much closer to the masses and open up effective channels of communication with them and are more likely to influence and win new supporters and friends than are those leaders who remain closeted up in their political cocoons.
In simpler terms, leaders fired up by an unflinching determination to take their nation from point A of impoverishment or underdevelopment to point B of sustainable socio-economic development will always find accommodation in the hearts of voters at election time regardless of what foreign detractors might say or do to try to discredit such popular leaders.
In Zimbabwe, there is one particular leader, President Mugabe and a few others in his camp who are consumed by a raging revolutionary fire that not even the combined water canons of Western imperialism have succeeded in extinguishing. It is these kinds of people who are credited with initiating positive social and economic change in this country, notwithstanding vehement opposition to the transformation much needed by the masses.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are local authorities some of whose councillors are travesties of true leadership qualities. Under these people, social development finds itself in a rut with in some cases roads in such a state of disrepair as to be virtually impassable by car, not to mention buildings in tattered coats of paint, if any at all; with shop pavements showing resilient traces of polish that remind one of the old times; and with some streets still bearing names of foreigners revered by Europeans who previously lived in residential areas now occupied by blacks.
That councils have failed to replace such names with names of Zimbabwean heroes of the liberation struggle makes one wonder whether the street depicts an irresistible sentimental longing by the councillors for whites who once held sway in this country.
If leaders cannot change place names, what else can they change if they continue to occupy their positions? Certainly, those councils that have been tainted with corruption by the activities of some of their councillors need to have their image redeemed by new leaders not steeped in corrupt activities.
Back to the constitution, the experts tasked with crafting a draft of the supreme law of the land do qualify as “leaders” by any definition. As such, if they love Zimbabweans, they should have learnt by listening to the views of the people given during the outreach consultations and then proceed to assemble rock-solid facts as bricks with which to construct a credible preliminary copy of the constitution.
But if their work so far, as critiqued by analysts, is anything to go by, the “experts” took information from constitutions of some African states whose political culture is not quite similar to Zimbabwe, thereby, reducing the proposed constitution of this country and Zimbabweans themselves to carbon copies of other countries.
Perhaps journalists, who by their training can capture needles imbedded in haystacks, might have summed up gems of information from people’s views and produced a constitution in which Zimbabweans would see their name.
Now, if these legal gurus are allowed to proceed with their work without some kind of mechanism looking over their shoulder, they might no doubt use their carte blanche freedom to present a final product that will be a botched-up supreme law at best, and at worst, a monumental hijack of views presented by the people during the constitution- making process. If that happened, the outside world would frown at the huge question mark hanging over the educatedness and learnedness about which Zimbabweans tout themselves, and wonder how on earth a nation that boasts a 92 percent literacy rate fails to immortalise, in black and white, its best wishes and best aspirations as also a bequest to posterity.
In the final analysis, thus a thorough going vetting exercise of leaders seeking re-election become the only plausible, logical way to weed out rotten eggs from the country’s political system.
Online Reporter