Posted on 07/03/2002 9:22:05 AM PDT by Clive
AFTER those two horrific road disasters that cost 48 human lives, everyone wants to know: Who is to blame? Who is responsible? What caused the accident?
Was it bad driving? Human error? Was it the bad state of our narrow roads? Once you ask such questions you are right into budgetary politics: What do we spend our money on? What are our priorities? Who makes these decisions? I remember a bus driver telling me that he was forced by his employer to drive extremely long hours, all day and most of the night, for days on end so that he suffered from chronic fatigue while on the road. Exactly four weeks later he died, together with 25 passengers, in a head-on collision. I felt his employer was more to blame than that driver.
Similarly, certain people sitting in faraway Harare offices deciding on our budget, including on how much to spend on road construction and repair, may have a greater responsibility for such fatal accidents than the men who died driving the vehicles involved. Zimbabwe is facing famine and starvation. Not for the first time.
Drought is a regular occurrence. It does not hit us like lightning out of a blue sky. It is foreseeable and predictable, at least in the sense that sooner or later there will be a drought year again. Therefore, you have to be prepared for it. The grain silos must keep an adequate reserve at all times.
The State is duty-bound to ensure food security. No one else can do this. Like healthcare, education, communication and transport, the basic food requirements of the nation will not be provided for by the famous “market forces” as if by magic. Making sure there are enough basic food supplies is too big a job to leave to private firms.
Government must play a role here and take control for the common good. Not government alone though. Whoever has the technical, managerial and business expertise to produce food must be encouraged by paying prices that make the risk of farming worthwhile.
But this class of people, instead of adding to their number from the population as a whole, is now systematically being destroyed. Does not genuine land reform need such expertise? Those responsible blithely guaranteed food security at a time when the experts warned them that there would be a severe shortfall.
Do they resign now that they have been proven so disastrously wrong? It does not seem to be part of our political culture to accept responsibility for failure.
It has been said that the popular vote, democratic government, human rights, good governance, accountability and transparency are abstract concepts ordinary people are not interested in. All that is mere theory only middle class intellectuals are interested in, they say.
Urban workers and rural peasants who have their feet on the ground don’t want to hear about it. “You can’t eat human rights,” they are supposed to be saying. “You don’t feed children with something called ‘democracy’.”
The present crisis teaches us that such talk is dangerous and irresponsible. It is precisely bad governance that has got us into the present fix from which we expect the rest of the world to rescue us.
Bad governance consists precisely in government no longer listening to the people that put them into power, and out of arrogance no longer answering their questions. Good governance consists in leaders being answerable, which means the same as responding to, or being responsible to, the true sovereign, ie the voting public.
Why are the grain silos empty in a country that used to be known as the “bread basket of the southern African region”? Is it merely due to a “natural disaster”? But then why did the people in charge not have sufficient foresight to keep those silos full? The citizens certainly have the right to ask such questions in a free media which is vitally important precisely when we do not want to send our children to bed hungry. You cannot eat democracy, true. But you cannot eat without democracy, either. A natural disaster is called in English an “act of God”. That is a fine way of evading our own human responsibility.
We blame God when it was our job to forestall, if not the disaster, then at least its destructive effects.
People ask: Why did God allow those young people from Masvingo to perish in a ball of fire? They should also ask: What did we, and the leaders who claim popular support and responsibility, do to prevent it?
We were given intelligence and foresight for a purpose. There is a contradiction in our society. People want to be free agents. But if you tell them, “Since it was your free decision to do this, you must be held responsible,” they turn round and say: “No, I was under duress, I could not help it, it was not my fault.” You are enslaved to the ones you blame. You admit they still have control over you.
How can you claim freedom, yet never accept responsibility? Is it not time to grow up? Children do not have to have answer for themselves in a court of justice. But as an adult you have to. People want justice. Why do we have to suffer? The question will not go away. Will someone answer?
Will someone respond, accept responsibility? That is the reverse side of that precious coin called “freedom”. Leaders who claim to rule in the name of the people should be glad to be accountable to them. Why would they be afraid of them? Why should they have to gag them?
There will be justice. There will be a judge and judgment. That judge will not want to know what we think the sins of the British are (he knows them anyway). He will want to know what we have to say for ourselves – what “we did to the least of his brothers and sisters”.
No more fooling and silly word games. The truth must come out. Only if we answer in truth can we hope for a lenient judgment. There will be justice. So we must insist on it and keep asking questions until leaders answer for their actions or non- action.
Disasters do happen.
But the mother of all disasters is human irresponsibility.
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