Zimpapers Logo

Joram Nyathi, Spectrum
People solve their own problems, they don’t merely ape others. The bond is about Zimbabweans trying to solve their problems. Zimbabwe is not America.

It is not South Africa SLOWLY I am getting convinced that if Henry Ford had been a Zimbabwean the world might never have had the Ford motor vehicle at the time it did. The same fate could easily be said of the VW Beetle if Adolf Hitler had been a Zimbabwean. We are so mentally captured we have never felt the necessity to invent. We are more than content to manage, poorly at that, other people’s inventions. And that’s very disappointing, to put it mildly.

I am not technical but I am told Henry Ford brought together engineers and asked them to come up with some type of engine. Initially there was a lot of resistance.

He was told it could not be done. He told the engineers to do it anyway. They told him what he was asking them to do was impossible.

What was his response?

Do the impossible.

The result was a Ford.

That’s roughly how I recall that tale.

Hitler also got engineers to do the impossible. He wanted a vehicle with an engine at the back so it could not be destroyed by enemy gunfire. He assembled engineers to design one.

He was repeatedly told such a contraption was impossible. He told the engineers such a vehicle was urgently needed, and most likely blocked his ears and went away.

When finally the impossible became possible, he said the engine should not use water for cooling since it would be used in the desert. As they say, the rest is history.

The old Beetle is still on our roads with its oil cooled engine neatly tacked at the back.

What was thought impossible!

Rural America

But first let me deal a bit with the American election hangover. Like I indicated last week, we were “all” shocked because we place too much faith in the media who often want to conflate their wishes with the desires of “the people”.

That also goes for analysts and pollsters who tend to interpret the world and the behaviour of “the people” from their worldview. Donald Trump confounded them all, giving America probably the most unliked president.

It doesn’t really matter to me whether Hillary Clinton won the majority vote and was “rigged” by the Electoral College. That is their system. They went into it knowingly.  The result could have gone either way.

It wasn’t Trump who introduced it in order to win. He won despite it, except that the media and pollsters didn’t want him to win. In the end his party of Republicans also turned against him.

The reason why the “world” is traumatised after Donald Trump’s electoral triumph is because we have held America as a model of everything beautiful, everything every “progressive” nation should aspire to be.

We expect everything American to be perfect. It is the centre and universe of the Western world and the embodiment of its “values” — rule of law, human rights, equal opportunities, and cultural refinement.

Trump came out in the campaign as uncouth. That could not be America, we deluded ourselves. Now it turns out that for America what was uncouth is the simian creature currently occupying the White House. (How appropriate — white!) White women can’t wait to see the back of what they describe as an “ape in heels” — Michelle Obama.

They want a white lady in the White House. Obama represents everything the white world of Trump doesn’t want, whether you call it Latino or Muslim or African American. (By hindsight, one must wonder whether it was wise for Obama to join the pro-Clinton campaign.)

The Trump victory also coughed up something we thought remained only in uncivilised hinterlands of the third world. Now we learn some of the people who voted for him were in “rural areas” — any place 30 miles out of the city.

To say rural area is to talk of conservatism and backwardness. They are to blame. Rural Trump connecting with kindred spirits from Trump Towers in the heart of New York City! It defies science.

Our conceited opposition has often had to agonise over the same phenomenon — the backward rural folk messing up things in every election.

On a good day we are told they are  intimidated or forced outright to vote for the ruling party (Soldiers are not supposed to travel to their rural homes around election time in Zimbabwe.). Otherwise how can a normal person       (and our normal is the educated and most alienated fellow) vote for Zanu-PF?

Even when that person has been made owner of the soil — a son or daughter of the soil!

On a bad day they are accused of ignorance, what Karl Marx called “idiocy of rural life”. They don’t know what they are voting for. They don’t know what they want. The clever folk in urban settings know best what’s best for everyone.

They make “informed” choices because they are exposed to the media. Oh yes, the same Trojan horse which led to Hillary Clinton’s thorough hiding she might never believe in pollsters or newspapers or watch television again.

The situation is more tragic in our part of the world. Rural folk constitute about 70 percent of the population. Our democracy is open-ended. The “ignorant” vote is weighted the same as the “enlightened” urban vote. When properly mobilised, most eligible, registered rural voters will go out to cast their ballot. The urban voter on the other hand is often a disenchanted fellow, very cynical one who asks too many questions before he can decide whether joining a voting queue is worth his while.

Given a choice, the urban voter would love to rule over rural areas without their vote. Their interests are at variance. Yet one must hazard that intimidation or no intimidation, Trump’s and Mugabe’s rural voters seem to have something in common which the urban voter often doesn’t like.

They are rooted in the soil. They don’t vote to please the international community or foreign investors. It’s America. It’s Zimbabwe.

It’s something else with your urban voter, especially in Zimbabwe. Even when the Trumps and Bothas of this world remind him repeatedly to his face that “blacks are not people”. Well, prove that you are people.

Ford and the Beetle

Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler proved in their determination that necessity is the mother of invention. They gave the world the Ford and the Beetle out of the impossible.

Fortunately in Zimbabwe’s case the matter at stake is not anything like the Wright brothers trying the first plane, or something for the Guinness Book of Records or a Nobel Prize. What’s matter with the bond notes? Where are our economists? All we want is an educated and informative statement from them about the feasibility or not of getting a new currency for Zimbabwe. Something that’s not political. Economics or financial logic not burdened by the dead weight of incurable historical experience.

People solve their own problems, they don’t merely ape others. The bond is about Zimbabweans trying to solve their problems. Zimbabwe is not America. It is not South Africa.

Rural Zimbabwe might have to do it. At the risk of our enlightened economists playing the Trojan horse in the war to build a new Zimbabwean economy.