What are we marrying off? VENDORS sell their wares along Lobengula Street in Bulawayo yesterday. There has been an increase in the number of vendors of late. Inset: Bulawayo Mayor Martin Moyo

Joram Nyathi
ZIMBABWE currently enjoys the distinction of having the highest literacy rate on the continent. But it’s more than mere reading and numeracy. It now has more than 10 State universities from one at Independence 35 years ago. It has several teacher training colleges, private universities, polytechnics and technical colleges. This is one fact among many which rile those with a dystopian view of Mugabe and his government.

Which doesn’t absolve them of equally many blunders along the way.

The dystopian view exposes the problem with Zimbabwe’s education system. All these universities and tertiary institutions churn out thousands of graduates every year. Most of these graduates are either unemployed or unemployable because there are few employment opportunities or they don’t have technical skills to either get into industry or create employment for themselves.

In the majority of cases, they all want to be employed.

You have a problem as a country when you have young people, most of them degreed but unskilled and ideologically bankrupt. Let’s revert to this controversy later.

Brain export

The government’s latest policy decision to export brains is no novelty. There are several facets to it: one is to officialise what we used to complain about as a brain drain. The hope this time around is that the movement will be well-managed so the nation doesn’t unnecessarily lose critical skills and the best brains. The other is to acknowledge that as a country we are producing more graduates than can be engaged productively at the current levels of industrial activity. These brains are being exported to seek gainful employment elsewhere, but more importantly, to acquire experience or skills for better use by the country.

While the issue of foreign currency remittances is significant, perhaps it is more of experience and skills acquired in other countries which should be of greater interest to Zimbabwe as it navigates a hitherto uncharted (in Africa) developmental trajectory of broad-based economic growth. It is easy to peep over the wall voyeuristically and shout about how much foreign currency India, Indonesia, the Philippines and other Asian giants earn from remittances and miss the matter of our lack of skills and entrepreneurship. That would give us false hope and soon we could start accusing those we export of not remitting enough or lack of commitment to the country, thus nurturing misplaced resentments.

Vendor mentality

A little detour is in order here. A few years back there was a lot of noise about “foreigners” coming into Zimbabwe to sell trinkets, thus taking away easy jobs from locals. The main targets were Chinese and Nigerians. They had taken over the Gulf Complex in downtown Harare to sell anything from vehicle spare parts to clothing materials. A decision was made to reserve non-productive sectors for locals. Thank God this didn’t lead to xenophobia or afrophobia attacks.

For one reason or another, despite this gesture by the government and local authorities, not much appears to have come of this policy position. Instead, our people appear to have demonstrated their skills and entrepreneurial flair by flooding the cities to sell tomatoes, apples, bananas, oranges, sweets, cellphone covers, belts, shoes and pesticides on street pavements.

That is what they do in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban and many other cities in South Africa. Very few occupy formal shops.

On the professional side, on Tuesday this week the South African national assembly was being told of a massive skills flight in the public sector, especially teachers, because of low salaries and poor conditions of service. The government must do something, was the warning. Those are the positions our teachers are most likely going to take over for lower pay. Which means in the short-term to medium-term, people should stop fantasising about a foreign deluge.

Entrepreneurs

Here is my point: in most parts of the world, be it Europe or America, one is most likely to encounter a Chinatown, a Portuguese, a French Quarter or an Indiatown or enclave in many cities. We have such enclaves in Zimbabwe, including suburbs such as Belvedere, which was almost exclusively, until recently, Asian.

These people are entrepreneurs, which so far we are not; they occupy formal shops, which we don’t; they generate wealth, while our people earn wages or eke out a living on the streets selling pirated CDs; they make enough money to remit back home to start new enterprises or recapitalise existing ones while our people, from their wages and salaries, can raise only enough to support themselves and remit a little for relatives back home to buy food. Something is fundamentally flawed with our system of education while the curriculum review process might just be rendered obsolete by technological change.

The answer is a return to basics, to grow entrepreneurs in the model of former F2 schools which train people to be carpenters, bricklayers, farmers, technicians, etc. The country needs artisans and more. Vocational training will reduce the number of degreed people loitering on the streets. This part of empowerment is not getting sufficient attention. Which takes us to the ideological discourse, and what it is we are exporting or marrying off.

Ideology

When we were growing up the aunt was a powerful person in the family. She was the fountain of wisdom, and cultural values of the clan to our young women. The young girl imbibed these values along with the acquisition of education and other life skills. The Bible reinforces the good values in Ephesians Chapter 5 and in the tale of the Good Wife in Proverbs 31. (I wish there were no overt gender bias, but then we can’t alter a single word of the Bible without the risk of burning in hell.)

These values overall, to me play the same role as an ideology in terms of shaping and influencing the way we perceive and interpret daily phenomena, the way we relate to other people and the attitude we have towards our country and national institutions. More important, ideology tends to be gender neutral, thus imparting the same expectations of men and women.

One thing we can’t take from whites is how positively they want to speak of their countries despite their personal circumstances. The reverse is often the case in regard to Zimbabwe, and perhaps Africa in general. Whites of all shades know it is very easy to get Zimbabweans to disparage their own country and to get all the confidential data they need. Rarely do we have Zimbabweans doing the same with whites to obtain intelligence that enhances protection of the national interest. We are the givers always, as if we had nothing to safeguard or to be proud of.

Coloniality disposes us to the perpetual service of neoliberal interests while we disparage every effort by Africans to chart their own path to economic independence. We are happy to be in perpetual bondage, perpetual slaves, perpetual followers, imitators of other people’s ideologies against our best interests.

Aunt was a tutor to the young girl. This was important because at marriage the girl carried with her the family name, family values and manners. In short, she played an ambassadorial role in all her bahaviour. She could not afford to shame the family name, it didn’t matter the circumstances of the family.

Is that the kind of daughter Zimbabwe is marrying off in this new brain export venture? How well grounded are our exports to protect the honour of the country?

It is hoped that those in charge of this export initiative fully grasp their mandate. The initiative is in line with regional integration and the lowering of barriers to human and commodity traffic. Zimbabwe is leading the breaking down of borders and hoping to catch the fat worm.

We are currently not in the best of economic circumstances. But it would be remiss of those in charge if those being exported felt they were being treated like so much flotsam to be easily jettisoned to lessen an intractable unemployment crisis. Let them feel they have an obligation to their country, and that Zimbabwe is there for them in their hour of need. We are marrying them off, but they remain Zimbabwean.

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