Professor Lovemore Madhuku says the major problem affecting Zimbabwe is lack of leaders capable of providing solutions to solve the country’s challenges.
He said another challenge is that those who have solutions, choose to keep their ideas to themselves and not share with the current government.
Responding to questions at a press briefing Bulawayo Friday, Prof Madhuku, a POLAD member, conceded that Zimbabwe suffers from a leadership crisis.
“We actually have leadership that is not capable of providing solutions to our country and then leading us through. Every group of people survives on having a capable leadership because God created problems. But for you to be out of the problems, you have to think on your feet and there’s no way you can start except from developing ideas of how to get out of your situation,” Prof Madhuku said.
He pointed out that POLAD came into existence after the Zanu PF led government acknowledged it wanted help to solve the country’s crisis.
“Now, if you are unlucky that you have a group of people who have no ideas for you to get out of your situation, then the only thing they have done well is they have said, ‘look we were given the power to govern but we are unable to do it on our own, can you help us with ideas and we came in with those ideas,” said Prof Madhuku, who is also leader of the National Constitutional Assembly party.
However, the challenge, Prof Madhuku said is there were others who insisted on not giving their ideas to the current government as it was ‘illegitimate and not properly elected’ but would rather sit on them.
“(They said) we will keep those ideas to ourselves and will never give them to anyone until those pretending to be in government leave office. I am sure you aware these are the two problems we have at the moment.
“You have a situation where you have a government in place and we all agree that as it stands now, the government under ED (Mnangagwa) won’t give us the solutions on its own but somewhat has the mandate from the last election and they will not go away till 2023.
“So we have two options either to sit at home and let them fail while we suffer or say well, I will not sit, let me go to them and suggest ways of how they can get us out, which is what we are doing,” said the chairperson of the Governance and Legislative Agenda under POLAD.
He lamented that those who have stayed away have rather “scandalised” POLAD.
“Our point of departure as POLAD is we believe we can engage the government of the day and together we can find solutions. But we also respect the views of other politicians who say they will never engage this government and will wait for 2023 to have votes again yet in the last five years did nothing but just criticise the government of the day,” Prof Madhuku said.
Prof Madhuku added that it was nonsensical for anyone to claim Zimbabwe was not under sanctions or affected by them yet countries that imposed them “keep telling you that they will not remove them until you reform.”
He also lamented that politicians changed their views in order to be populist.
“When Tendai Biti was out the MDC he was supporting the points I am making now in the brief period that he was out then when he goes back to MDC, he sings praise of (MDC leader, Nelson) Chamisa. Chamisa has no idea of how to get to us out of this situation except to say that Mnangagwa is illegitimate… he says let’s go for demonstrations. What is that, I will say that is nonsense I think,” Prof Madhuku claimed.
Rapporteur of the International Relations and Re-engagement subcommittee, Kwanele Hlabangana, concurred it was “foolish to hate your country and rally against destroying it just because you disagreed politically.”
“It’s undebatable that the international community has taken a position to isolate Zimbabwe economically meaning we have lost all relationships we used to have. We argue that sanctions are targeted but they hurt me and you. People like Mnangagwa, his VPs and officials in government can still afford to go shopping.
“When ED (Mnangagwa) goes to the UN summit in the US, he is given a 40 km radius to do shopping from the best boutiques within the environ of the summit while you and me are defending things we don’t know. It is important that we look within and say what are our problems,” Hlabangana said.
