I also agree with Taka with regard to finding our moral compass. Not that I think we lost it or didn’t have one all this time. I think that by and large most Zimbabweans have been able to draw the line somewhere through out all this.

In my mind I remember when it was announced that the war veterans were being given ex-gratia payments of $50 000 each, as well as a $2000 stipend per month. I was living in Chitungwiza at the time, and the question on everyones lips was “Were does that money come from?” It was a large chunk of the GDP at the time and as I recall the World Bank warned against such large unbudgeted expenditure. Our President replied “They can go to hell”. Within days the dollar had tumbled against all other currencies. Adn it never stopped declining….

Then in 2000 the No vote in the Referendum shocked the ruling party to the core. Within weeks, they amended the constitution, with verbatim amendments that had been rejected by the people weeks before. The “land reform” program began….with no plan….Given that our economy was largely dependent on agriculture, no thought was given to how killing that economic sector would impact on us a nation. Putting people on land with no support to enable the agricultural sector to continue producing was the death knell of our economy as we knew it. With no title deeds, no finance was available to new land owners to farm the lands. Foreign investors ran for the hills, who wants to invest in country where at the stroke of the Presidents pen, your rights of ownership are removed? The pebble in the pond impact of the collapse of the agricultural sector saw support industry collapse as well. The workers forced off the farms joined the ranks of the unemployed. The farmers (most of them anyway) left the country for greener pastures……and we began to slowly starve as a nation.

In 2003, the World Bank terminated it’s final project in Zimbabwe. The Project was titled “Land Reform Support” and had been running since 1998. When the Zimbabwe government lost interest in an orderly approach to land reform and did not ask that the project be extended, the WB had no option but to terminate. In their (WB) words “The Government lost the political will to go through with the community-initiated pilots as the political situation in the country changed drastically due to the emergence of a strong opposition party.”

Hopefully, we will rise up again as a nation, look to the future, after realising that a decade of focusing on the past destroyed us as a nation. Racism and polarisation has thrived for the past decade, and we have achieved very little, now is the time to focus on ourselves as one nation, a nation of Zimbabweans.