Everyone knows by now that Zimbabwe’s education has deteriorated to levels that will be tough to reverse without any radical policy changes. Other commentators have however opined that until there is a new political dispensation, we cannot expect any real change for the better, which could in effect rather ominously mean these woes will be with us indefinitely – of course with the post-September 2008 political power games being read as pointers to predict the country’s future. Others have pointed at the diamond windfall as just what the doctor ordered to fix the abject education and health services, but inveterate pessimists who know gemstones in the hands of an African politician are not holding their breath.

There still is unabated brains flight in the country’s once awed institutions of higher learning as academics apply for or are offered staff development programmes outside the country but never return to their varsities. And with good reason, some would say. Meanwhile, students who graduate with what have been mocked as unbaked degrees return as teaching assistants, something that would be frowned upon by serious academics. But then this can be found all over the whole education sector here where unqualified teachers are taking children for their O’ and A’ level classes and straight to university!

As we speak, for the umpteenth time the opening of some varsities has been pushed further and some students are already saying they are imagining the academic year may well begin in December when classes should have begun this month. I know a number of National University of Science and Technology students who have left for South Africa as they say they cannot just sit and wait for the unknown. While they have said they will be coming as soon as they are informed that classes have started, such stories have been heard before with many abandoning their studies altogether after having found jobs during their sojourn. All this despite the fact that once upon a time getting an opportunity to study at university was literally embraced with both hands as it was a guarantee that one was set for life. Now students abandon their studies without any second thoughts, after all they are failing to pay their fees, so why pay the exorbitant fees only to have lecturers absent from their posts? It makes sense then to exchange one’s academic cap for hustling in the mean streets of Johannesburg when a degree ought to provide one with a middle class lifestyle – at least in a normal economy.

Zimbabwean students themselves attending university here are witnessing how standards have gone down and one quipped that while some are quitting their studies and complain that they is no learning going on to give weight and meaning to “degree”, she will stick it out as long as in the end she gets that piece of paper that says she went to university and has “qualifications.” But the circumstances of young people who have university education become heart-rending when other countries we always thought viewed our education with awe become “suspicious” of these university degrees and have second thoughts about employing a Zimbabwean graduate.

A young man told a sad story recently about how his “degree” failed to get him a job in South Africa. You see, he got a degree from one of the “state universities” that were once teacher training institutions, but prospective employers in South Africa told him they did not recognise his institution and therefore his degree. He reports he was told the only Zimbabwean degree these people would accept would be from the University of Zimbabwe, but also with reservations. And their reasons? There is no meaningful education going on in Zimbabwe’s universities! How’s that coming from a bunch of people whose education standards is something people here have always mocked?  Now the young man is back in the country clueless about what to do with his future despite having invested four years of his life studying toward his now useless degree. The superiority of Zimbabwean education is no doubt under scrutiny not just among Zimbabweans themselves, but also in the region if not across the globe and the unfortunate part is that young people who enter university and those who acquire other tertiary qualifications have their sights set on regional and overseas job markets as there are no employment opportunities here to match their “qualifications.” So where does that leave them? Skills development is no doubt every nation’s richest investment that overlaps generations but Zimbabwe’s circumstances raise the spectre of diminished returns, after all students are already virtually teaching each other and graduates being produced out of those “interactions.”  The list of top 500 universities in the world was released recently and some watchers did not even bother to check where ours are placed.

On Zimbabwe’s Heroes’ Day two weeks ago, I had the great embarrassment to be among some South African friends. As the news on SABC – South Africa’s national broadcaster – came on with a report on the event, everyone in the TV room hushed down and turned up the volume. Anyone who was still talking was given a glowering eye which meant, “Shut up!”

And so the report came on. And there he was – our 86-year-old president – telling everyone in the west to go to hell in a speech delivered at the hallowed Heroes’ Acre where all the ‘patriotic’ sons and daughters of the soil are laid to rest. There was even a shot of a few ardent supporters holding up a banner that read, “To hell, hell, hell, hell!”

I cringed.

My South African friends laughed.

And then the sadness came over me.

Zimbabwe is the joke of southern Africa – if not even the world! People everywhere tune up the volume on their televisions and radios to listen to the rantings of a man so uniquely obsessed with Britain and the US that it makes for what I can only describe as verbal masturbation. After all, he did once tell Tony Blair to keep his England while he kept his Zimbabwe!

Now, the reason I am writing about this all is because a good friend of mine, Delta Milayo Ndou, recently posted a quite fascinating commentary on her blog about the role that Zimbabwe’s youth has to play in rebuilding our woeful democracy.

Because, so often, Zimbabwe’s young people are excluded from discourse around reform, we remain clueless and disinterested. We flock to other nations with better infrastructure and opportunities for self-actualisation, thereby leaving our own nation barren and desolate. I remember quite vividly a television jingle – shot around 2003 when the land reform was still in its strength – that showed a group of young people in a twin cab  dancing and singing about their future being “this land of ours, our Zimbabwe”. I was 19 years old then and believe me, no amount of propaganda could have ever made me interested in picking up a hoe and planting anything!

So as Delta questions, how can we ensure that Zimbabwe’s youth indentify with this nation’s future?

Well, since I began with the example of Heroes’ Day, let me continue with it. For as long as I can remember, Heroes’ Day has always been an event about honouring people who died in the liberation struggle; about guts and gore and guns and corpses.

Heroes Day has never been about ordinary people. Instead, it’s almost always been a guilt trip with people being made to feel like they should be eternally grateful because the ‘freedom’ that they now enjoy is founded upon the death of someone who heeded the liberation maxim that stated Tora pfuti uzvitonge (Take a gun and rule yourself).

Now, that was more than 30 years ago. And appreciative we are. But progressive we also are. When a hazy picture of some liberation hero competes with the hazy idea of success for a young person, trust me that the latter will win out.

You can’t keep Zimbabwe’s youth interested through guilt and propaganda that doesn’t speak to any of their aspirations! It will not work.

Why, I ask, is the definition of a hero so narrowly defined anyway? Should one have died for their nation to be defined as such? Should one get the 21 gun salute to simply qualify?

Heroes abound among us – living and dead. My heroes include people like Oliver Mutukudzi who have put Zimbabwe’s music on the global map; Haru Mutasa who has shown other young black female Zimbabwean journalists that they can make it onto the international media platform; sporting legends like Kirsty Coventry, Peter Ndlovu and Benjani Mwaruwaru who have dazzled the world – all the while making us proud to say “Vana vedu ivavo!” (Those are our children!)

Other heroes are entrepreneurs like Strive Masiyiwa, Nigel Chinakire and the late Peter Pamire who have all shown that age should never be a deterrent to being financially successful and prosperous.

But Heroes’ Day doesn’t appreciate that. Its symbolism is too deeply entrenched in war and victory and what ZANU PF has done for Zimbabwe.

It is too much engrossed in the past to resonate with our youth who are flooding out of Zimbabwe’s border posts because of their disenchantment and disillusionment with the way this amazing nation called Zimbabwe is treating them, as well as everyone else.

Thirty years is a very long time to continue to laud past efforts.

And don’t get me wrong – the British and Americans still remember their war heroes too. But they also provide space for emerging leaders in different fields – look at the way living legends get knighted by the Queen of England or how getting a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame is such a prestigious thing for Americans.

Do we have anything similar? Do we have well-recognised national accolades or awards that are instantly recognisable?

Of course not. If your remains aren’t interred into the Heroes’ Acre, you just aren’t really a hero of any kind.

New heroes have been born since 1980. And while we remember the old, let’s also celebrate the current ones.

If we don’t get Zimbabwe’s young people excited about Zimbabwe, then who will rebuild our stumbling nation?

The solution I offer is to do as a popular South African song instructs – make the circle bigger. Only by applauding the good works of heroes that our young people can actually identify with can we ever hope to get them interested in building on the legacies of so many great Zimbabweans.

I am not saying do away completely with the old. Absolutely not! I am just saying we need to increase the options – across all sectors and within all fields.

Zimbabwe urgently needs a redefinition of what a hero is. And for me – and many others – the real heroes of my time aren’t the people who lived and died before I was born. They are the people I see myself in; the people I stencil my future against because of their singular focus on an unsubstantiated dream that could only become real through self-belief and faith in the elements.

I therefore call loudly – and without inhibition – on the establishment to take the time to seriously ponder celebrating Zimbabwe’s new heroes.

After your hard work
Carry your condoms
And place them in a bin

Sign writing on a wall in Harare, Zimbabwe where street level litter includes broken beer bottles, beer cans and condoms. Men just wanna have fun.

For all his arrogance
Damn! He’s got a huge white chip over his shoulder
For all his English erudition
Damn! He got it in not-so-splendid isolation
Many years in a penal institution
Many years later he seeks mental emancipation
For all his readiness to spew diatribes
Damn! How come we keep listening?
For all his claim to moral rectitude
Blimey! The man neither drinks nor smokes
Damn! For all his Saville Row suits
He ain’t debonair
But he dresses in garb worth enough to feed Africa
How now, what do you know?
For all his affected intellectual glow
He does not comb his hair
Silly old man

There is a certain class of people that has always existed among Africa’s urban populations ever since independence came to these shores and that sought to stand apart from the rest of the impoverished populations typical of urban Africa. Historians and critics point out that their attitudes, mannerisms and all that pretentious jazz was inherited from settler colonialists who set visible economic benchmarks of “the life” around material wealth. While it will be agreed that the settler and even the present day white man took economic empowerment and its attendant trappings as an entitlement never mind how it was acquired based on notions of racial superiority, the present post-independence Blackman has taken the possession of wealth and material trappings as something that has to be flaunted – also never mind how this was acquired – to ridiculous heights.  You only have to look at politicians to see how wealth among starving masses ought to be celebrated.

With the fall and fall of Zimbabwe’s economy, there emerged a class of people who blazed the trail as the nouveau riche making sure everyone was left in no doubt about what economic rungs they occupied in an otherwise economically wretched society with no wealth to speak of. For example, for these people, owning a car especially became a symbol of undisputed middle class trappings which defined their economic worth and they came to typify their ideal financially sound Alpha African male. Now, because that worth was being measured against the backdrop of other Zimbabweans singing the blues as they were caught up in an economic vortex that rendered yesteryear middle class’s paupers, it left no doubt then that they were better off despite their obvious intellectual paucity, as the envious mocked them. And they in turn equally and brutally mocked those claiming superior intellectual clout that their education had turned them into paupers. “We are buying teachers beer,” they would brag – bearing in mind of course that teachers once upon a time formed what were seen as Zimbabwe’s educated minds that could afford to buy houses, cars, beer and of the finest women – but not necessarily in that order. You can see them everywhere you look – deep pockets, shallow minds, others say rather bluntly.

Whether the flowing cash was thanks to remissions from friends and family in the Diaspora, it was – and actually still is – woe betide him who had no claim to a relative domiciled abroad as an economic refugee. But then came the global economic recession and the remissions thinned or slowed down, and the envious rubbed their hands in glee as the reality of being just an impoverished neighbourhood chump set in. However, as the country trudges along on its rather long road to its economic Damascus, there remain folks who still use rather dubious benchmarks as their economic barometers. Capitalism has always emphasised a work ethic that demands that you only get as much as you put in despite the inherent imbalances that have denied well-bodied and intellectually astute individuals to realise their full potential within that system. Yet you see a guy who still thinks in this day and age for example driving a car – any car – is a symbol of economic attainment, especially among peers who still “walk on the ground like lions” as they are fond of reminding the drooling class.

I saw a guy driving a literally rotten car behaving behind the wheel as if he was behind the “popemobile” feeling as haughty as the typical African who has recently picked some cash when others are wallowing in dire poverty. The neighbourhood guys are supposed to envy such “attainments” and you tend to wonder: is that what African aspirations have been reduced to by the economic hardships that have stalked us for so long? Get into a little cash, buy a car and no one is left in doubt, and this in a country where doctors, teachers, lawyers cannot afford cars and houses of their own!

The other day I saw another guy blasting real loud music from his car radio as he screeched to a halt outside a drinking spot. It was supposed to be some grand entrance – as if people care – as all eyes were turned on him who was polluting the air with such uninvited ruckus. The guy killed the engine but left the music blaring as he went in to buy the green beer imported from South Africa – another plebeian sign of financial clout – but when he came back and turned on the ignition so that no doubt he could screech and kick dust into the eyes of the drooling class, the vehicle refused to budge. What does the guy do? He is soon opening the bonnet “to fix” the problem. And it took him long enough for all to point and laugh!  When the drooling class has a laugh, be sure it lasts longest – literally.  Why think driving a dead car to the pub will mark you out as better off financially, the cynics ask.

Zimbabweans have over the years been forced by their unfortunate economic circumstances to flaunt wealth they do have as there no any culture of saving or investment. But they have their reasons after many lost their lifetime savings to insane inflation. Not many look into the future anymore and say, okay, I am going to invest in the stock market, in this or that enterprise but the cash in my pocket must be seen bulging in the here and now or else no one will know anyway that I have the cash. Others have been heard saying that they do not keep money in the bank because they are afraid the RBZ will wake up one day and just take it – yes, the masses believe their money is not safe after the RBZ was accused of sponsoring Zanu PF. So they now go on and buy rotten cars that become exhibits that they do not need relatives abroad to afford to drive. It is the same guy for whom buying a house, investing in real estate, building a nest egg fro the kids is a proposition that has no place in his order of things but seems to think sleeping in a car is fashionable!

These behaviours must be pondered over by every thinking man who must interrogate the circumstances that engendered the death of working class rungs.

How did the dollar die? What kind of people has its death spawned? A bunch of people with no aspirations beyond owning a car? That’s exactly why Zimbabweans who settle abroad become parodies when they are awestruck by possessions the natives have embraced as part of their daily routine not a sign of deep pockets.

Here the masses have been tempted to live on borrowed time imagining that the country’s economic woes have presented them with opportunities to have it made despite their painfully palpable intellectual want such that all things being fair, they contribute to the betterment of their country and fellow man. But then in a country where everyone seems to be dreaming of one day waking up a millionaire but without losing a sweat for it, it is expected that measurement of economic worth becomes that which does not obtain in countries like South Africa for example where driving a car is expected of every working man and not interpreted as a sign of anything – just a sign of having a decent job that’s all.

Here’s a poem by the late, great Dambudzo Marechera. Writing on Poetry International, Irene Staunton suggests that … Marechera’s work, his ideas and his defiance live on in Zimbabwe, particularly amongst the youth, who find inspiration in his willingness to be the lone outsider, challenging conventional and authoritarian views.

The last line in this poem, published in 1992, reminds me of Zimbabwe’s unity government.

There’s a Dissident in the Election Soup!

I have no ear for slogans
You may as well shut up your arse
I run when it’s I LOVE YOU time
Don’t say it I’ll stick around
I run when it’s A LUTA time
I run when it’s FORWARD time
Don’t say it we’ll fuck the whole night
The moon won’t come down
At first awkwardly, excruciatingly embarrassing
But with Venus ascending, a shout and leap of joy

When the sheets are at last silent
Don’t ask “What are you thinking?”
Don’t ask “Was it good?”
Don’t feel bad because I’m smoking
They ask and feel bad who are insecure
Who say after the act “Tell me a story”
And you may as well know
Don’t talk of “MARRIAGE” if this reconciliation
is to last.