Zim needs only positive minded people

Columnists
THE armchair political analysts believe that the Zimbabwean political and social challenges can only be resolved by a home-grown constitution-making process, hence placing some credence in what will be anticipated to emerge from the long-awaited constitutional outreach programmes.

THE armchair political analysts believe that the Zimbabwean political and social challenges can only be resolved by a home-grown constitution-making process, hence placing some credence in what will be anticipated to emerge from the long-awaited constitutional outreach programmes.

The truth, however, is that as long as the current polarisation stands, nothing meaningful can be expected to be produced from the constitutional agenda. One needs to be pragmatic in order to come up with the conclusions that are driven by the laws that also govern nature. Yes, it is possible that the people of Zimbabwe can, and are quite capable of coming up with the best constitution, especially as they have gone through the challenges that should give them credible experience, but only if it were possible to remove the political party labels that identify the MPs, for instance. MPs should be the first to go through some rigorous training, so that Zimbabwe comes first, ahead of the respective political parties that they represent. I am envisaging a situation where a MP is known and respected as being an MP, without being associated with a political party that sponsored his or her election. The same MPs would then be expected to use their respective constituency platforms, to cascade to the general public, what would have been learnt from such a training exercise.There is need to develop the mindset that looks beyond myopic viewpoints. The land reform programme was only as bad as most of those who participated in it were driven by greed and other evil intentions. However, there is always something positive as a flipside of that which would be negative. Commercial agriculture had never been meant to be monopolised by whites, even though most Zimbabweans still think that the whites were born to be the best farmers, compared to their black counterparts. I remain to be one of those people who believe that human beings are the same, everywhere, and their individual characteristics should not be judged by the nationality, or the colour of the person’s skin.To start with, we have to realise that we cannot reverse the evils of the past, whether recently committed, or perpetrated some centuries ago. Ours should only be to learn from the past experiences, by adopting the best practices obtained from the past workable lessons, in seeking to develop our future, as a nation. The one and only retrogressive thinking stems from the belief that people should be categorised by their evil nature more than they should be categorised also by the goodness that can also come from them, as the flip side of their evil nature. By saying this, I am obviously not oblivious of being misconstrued as one associated with this or that political party. That has to be expected from a polarised political environment. It should, however, be noted that even from the most demonic characters, there will always be something positive that can also be derived from those individuals. In other words, no wrong can be corrected by another wrong, in the same way that no darkness can be illuminated by darkness, as only the light, which is the opposite of darkness, can do that. Some people still believe that by drinking from the cup of  anger and bitterness over what happened in the past, they would be displaying patriotism, when only the opposite should be viewed as true. Zimbabwe needs only the positive thinking people, if we are to move forward as a nation. If the future is to bring the needed light, we have to start now to take the steps that make possible the contributions towards that light. We do not need to compare ourselves with any other country in this world, because we are simply not any other country, except that we should only identify ourselves as true Zimbabweans.Our problems do not need foreigners to bring in investment or ideas more than we need changes in our mindset, to be enabled to learn from our previous mistakes and take stock of both the good and bad experiences that we would have gone through as a nation.

Andrew Masuku,[email protected]