Vision: An unwavering commitment to the future

To them the vision became secondary in their circumstances at the time (Exodus 17v3).
Pain and huge sacrifices normally accompany a vision so it’s very tempting to recede into the visionless existence that previously existed.

Vision requires strong and focused leadership. The attainment of vision comes through blood, sweat and tears.
This can lead to loss of vision as most people are quick to look for and opt for less painful options.
Sight can be the enemy of vision. Sight can reinforce the status quo and therefore inhibit creativity.

Sight enables us to build patterns. For sight to be useful it must be accompanied by serious and rigorous usage of the mind.
If your mind is not exercised (i.e. not trained to think continuously) then sight will not be a value-adding tool. Sight will be used to accept the status quo and mediocrity.
Excuses for not carrying out visions.

Most people have come up with idle excuses for not having visions, the major reason being poverty.
Yet visions have nothing to do with money! Some people tend to concentrate with worrying about the present and forget that there is a future.
Vision is about unwavering and unflinching commitment to the future. Vision is about two things, what has been talked about and the actions of people who are leading the vision.
Vision is about looking into the sky and thinking how one could replicate his life here on earth.

Moses did not have money but he led the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Jesus had nothing but he convinced the likes of Peter to quit their lucrative fishing businesses and follow his vision.
Liberation movements in Africa shared one common vision. i.e. to decolonise Africa.

The liberation movements succeeded with limited resources against a ruthless, hostile and well-armed enemy because they stuck to their vision.
In my village there was a poor man, Mr Rukweza, who worked as a gardener in Harare.
He decided to establish an orchard and would bring seedlings whenever he came to the village.

Fellow villagers discouraged him for various reasons. After about 10 years he started harvesting and selling the fruits and used the proceeds to look after his family.
The orchard transformed Mr Rukweza’s life and other villagers (including those that discouraged him) and they are now also establishing their orchards.
Most managers fail to generate powerful visions because they pay too much attention to the noise around them.

Noise can be personal circumstances, political set-up, economic setup, unpaid bills or opinion leaders.
If you look around and over consult the future is bleak and normally visionless.
There are people out there who can convince you that whatever you visualise cannot be implemented.

The rise of the dependency syndrome in Zimbabwe
Everything that we do is the manifestation of thought, which is normally associated with sight.
By mere thought you can change the course of life if desire and then action follow the thought.
Normally your mind works according to the dictates of sight.

People are normally programmed to view certain events, structures and ways of doing things as standard and therefore unchangeable.
To some extent the more we programme our mind to see certain things that we think are standard, the more we block our minds from going beyond the standard.
This can be coupled with certain cultural settings that tend to restrict our vision and settle for mediocrity.

At times its the role models in our society who can limit our vision as the role models would want people to work in a certain way.
The philosophy of the educational system in Zimbabwe is heavily skewed towards creating graduates who are dependent on looking for employment.
The vision for entrepreneurship is dwarfed at early years by this system.

The educational system has created a vicious cycle of dependants, people who think in terms of grants from well-wishers and a leadership that believes and relies on grants/donations as a source of income.
The system kills independence of the mind. We can’t relate to ourselves as a people and rely on foreigners for most of our things because this kills our vision.
Out of about 20 institutions of higher learning that we have in the country the concentration appears to be on arts and business courses at the expense of research and development and technology.

Even the religious system was based on dependency on Europe/America for clothing, Bibles and church buildings.
Due to lack of desire to change the Zimbabwean landscape the most common entrepreneurs today find solace in forming non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The core business of NGOs is to write project proposals whose core business is to induce sympathy from third parties.
NGOs depend on aid, donations or grants since they are not in the productive sector.
Some of them get more aid from donors so that they can be more dependent.

In most cases a large percentage of the aid goes to administration expenses and less to the poor the NGOs purport to be assisting.
I still have to come across a country that has prospered from aid/donations and not from the enterprise of its citizens.

What happens to visionless existence?
A person who refuses to be visionary endures pain in perpetuity.
The children of Israel were in pain of bondage in Egypt.

But they would yearn to go back to Egypt when it appeared the vision of the Promised Land was not attainable.
People with vision endure pain during the sweat and blood period.
They overcome the pain because the target is to reach the Promised Land.