Zimbabwe Does Not Need Saving At ALL

A man once explained Zimbabwe to me on a flight from Johannesburg. He had been in the country for nine days. He had a framework. It had four quadrants, and my country sat, apparently, in the bottom left one, which was the bad one. He drew it on the back of the safety card, which I thought showed commitment.

I did not argue. I have learned that arguing with a framework is like arguing with weather. Instead I asked him what he made of the fact that the woman who had checked us in at O. R. Tambo, the one with the Ndebele surname and the three phones, was almost certainly running a cross-border logistics business out of her handbag with a margin that would embarrass most of the funds represented at the conference he was flying to.

He said that was informal sector activity. I said yes. He said it was a symptom. I said of what, exactly, and he had an answer for that too, because he always did, and by then we were descending.

The rescue reflex

There is a particular register that gets used about Zimbabwe, and I have heard it in Geneva and in Washington and, more painfully, in Harare. It is the register of rescue. It assumes a patient. It assumes the patient is unconscious. It assumes the diagnosis is external and the cure is imported and the timeline is a project cycle.

What that register cannot see is the thing I find most striking about my country, which is not its collapse but its refusal to collapse. Zimbabwe has been declared finished more times than I can count. Somehow the schools still open. Somehow the kombis still run. Somehow a nurse in Chitungwiza works a shift for a salary that evaporates before she reaches the gate, and then goes home and sells airtime, and then puts three children through school, and does not consider herself remarkable.

Show me the country that has been managed this badly for this long and still functions, and I will show you a population of exceptional operators.

I am not being romantic. Coping is not thriving, and I would trade every ingenious survival strategy for a functioning currency and a state that keeps its promises. But if you cannot see the competence, you will design for the wrong country. You will keep arriving with plans for a patient, when what is in front of you is a rather tired but entirely conscious adult who has been running the ward alone.

What the plans get wrong

The plans are usually not wrong about facts. They are wrong about agency. They locate the solution in the wrong place — outside — and by doing so they quietly confirm the very thing they claim to be fixing.

Consider how often the intervention is a workshop. I have sat in a great many workshops. I have run some, which I mention in the spirit of full confession. The workshop is a technology for producing the appearance of movement. It generates a report, a photograph, a per diem, and a shared sense that something has occurred. Occasionally something has. More often the room agrees on a truth that everyone in it already knew, and then the room disperses, and the truth stays in the room.

Meanwhile the actual mechanism by which Zimbabweans improve their circumstances is stubbornly unglamorous. Someone buys a second truck. Someone gets a licence renewed without paying for it twice. Someone's daughter finishes her degree. None of it photographs well.

A better question

I have started asking visitors a different question when they arrive with their frameworks. Not what is wrong with Zimbabwe. Everyone has an answer for that, and most of the answers are correct and none of them are useful, because a list of ailments is not a treatment.

The question I ask is this: what is already working, who is doing it, and what would it take for them to do ten times as much of it?

It is a boring question. It does not produce a keynote. It leads you away from the capital and towards people whose names are not in your contacts, and it usually reveals that the binding constraint is something unfashionable — a licence, a road, a court that enforces a contract, a bank that will lend against a tractor.

It also has the considerable virtue of putting the outsider in the correct posture, which is not the surgeon's but the supplier's. You are not the protagonist. You have capital, or a network, or a technical skill. Good. Those are useful. Bring them, and then ask where they should go, and then — this is the hard part — believe the answer.

On being from somewhere

My grandmother farmed in [district]. She had opinions about maize, about her neighbours, and about my career, and she was right about roughly two of those three. She never used the word development in her life. She would have found the concept baffling as a category of activity, in the way you would find it baffling if someone flew in to help you have a Tuesday.

She had a plan for her land that ran about forty years, and she executed it without a logframe, a theory of change, or a single quarterly report. It worked. She would have told you that this was because she knew her soil, which is the only sentence in this essay that I am completely certain about.

Zimbabwe knows its soil. What it has been denied, mostly by its own governors, is the freedom to act on that knowledge. That is a political failure and it will require a political correction, and no amount of foreign goodwill substitutes for it. But the correction, when it comes, will not be a rescue. It will be a release.

The man on the plane, incidentally, sent me his deck afterwards. It was very good. I have not opened it since.