Waste not, want not
I suppose we have all become accustomed to, and to some extent, accepting of, the torrents of water gushing freely from broken municipal pipes or streetlights that are lit at midday. Perhaps we might grumble about this wastage to friends and family but let’s face it, we are not known for doing much else. We are certainly not going to hold a march against it, or even pen a letter of complaint. Blatant wastage of limited public resources is a given and many of us have resigned ourselves to it.
What I do find a bitter pill to swallow is wastage on a smaller scale, done by individuals, within our homes and in our daily lives. I’m referring to situations where security lights and water sprinklers are left on for the whole blessed day! A look at the piles of refuse littering our open spaces reveals shameful amounts of discarded food and clothing. And I know you are all familiar with that idiot driver who burns fuel speeding at 120km/hr to the red robot just ahead. I find this behaviour especially disturbing because I recall the dire times Zimbabwe has recently emerged from. We’ve been through commodity shortages, endless queuing, power cuts, water cuts, etc. Given our first-hand experience of being without, one would think that people would be more appreciative of what we now actually have. Good sense would advocate for conservative usage of our limited resources especially since we are not out of the woods yet.
Pop psychology does provide some explanation. Apparently, when societies emerge from situations of deprivation – à la Zim 2007/8, the Second World War, Communist regimes – there is a tendency towards one of two forms of reaction. People have been observed to become either ultra-economical, like the survivors of the Second World War, or else, like China’s new nouveaux riche, they develop really extravagant tendencies. (Closer to home, remember the stories of how our previously disadvantaged war veterans lavishly spent their compensation money). In light of this I’m more related in spirit to the WWII survivors, who would also probably be irked by my neighbour’s 24-hour flooding of his lawn.
My neighbour, whom I suspect might be a relation of a billionaire Chinese, may ask, “What’s my extravagance got to do with you? It’s my water/car/floodlight/ etc and I’m paying for it with my own money!”
This is true and I am definitely not questioning the right to use it, or the ability to pay for it. What I am trying to do is to appeal to humanity and an innate need to live for something more than you. We don’t live alone; we have to be mindful of our neighbours, countrymen and fellow Earthlings. Our individual actions will have an effect on the next person, directly or indirectly, immediately or eventually. Personal efforts to conserve our limited resources will ultimately provide a better life for all beings on the planet, human or otherwise.
So, if we find wastage by public bodies reprehensible, why don’t we question what happens in our own homes? While we can’t come together to stop the waste by the powers that be, surely each of us can switch off a light, close a tap and drive more slowly? Ultimately our individual actions to use limited resources more conservatively will combine to achieve a greater good. Now, that’s a civil action that I think most politically inactive Zimbabweans can civilly engage in!