An apology & a suggestion

I was wrong to say Zimbabwe is the country with no laws.

In fact, Zimbabwe has a great number of laws, piles and piles of paper going yellow and mouldy in some government store room, but most of them are not observed.

The practical effect on your life and mine is the same, whichever statement is true, but knowing which is correct affects how we act about the situation.

If there are no laws, then making laws might be a constructive thing to do, but we can see that the man in State House keeps making decrees, and having ordered some action, he assumes that the action has already been done. But we know better.

I started that previous article with an example from people’s behaviour on the road. If you hunt through the piles of papers at the Government Printers and the records of parliamentary legislation, you will find that there are a lot of laws about how to drive on the road. You can even buy copies of the Highway Code which translates the laws into language you and I can understand. The trouble is that the laws are not being enforced. We have a police force, or at least people who look like police parading around in packs, but rarely present when you need them. You only need to have your pocket picked to experience this. Occasionally we see some of the boys and girls in blue at road junctions. Maybe one of them will be waving traffic on or signalling it to stop. They are learning a bit, because as far as I can see, traffic jams are less common than they used to be and some police may even be able to do what a hwindi could do in ten minutes, even if it takes them half an hour; disentangle the traffic jam.

We don’t need more laws. We do need those who claim to enforce the existing laws to prove they are doing something.

Of course you will laugh at that suggestion.

Maybe you will say we must have some citizens who have been trained to organise traffic and that training should make them more efficient than a self-taught hwindi. There are Zimbabweans in charge of providing essential services in many countries around the world; engineers, doctors, town planners, . . .the list is long. Surely somewhere there is an expert in traffic control: if not in UK, maybe the USA , Australia, Europe, maybe even Asia (I recently met an engineer who is working on a wind power scheme in Taiwan, so the expert we are looking for might be in Seoul or Singapore). I would be ready to make a small bet that there is a traffic control expert somewhere, but there is one problem. Maybe we could promise to pay him (or her) as much as they are getting now, but what are promises like that worth? Can we be sure the salary will continue to be paid and not disappear when some highly connected thief steals the Ministry’s whole budget for next year? Then consider working conditions; can we guarantee job security? The answer will surely be: “Only if we can be sure that the job won’t suddenly be given to a son of this chef, an uncle of that one or even somebody’s daughter-in-law”. Can we guarantee adequate equipment, or even office supplies and be sure it won’t all be stolen? The answer once again is “Only if we can stop the corruption”.

It might even be easier to make our police and law courts observe the standards our diaspora experience in all those more advanced countries. Yes, it is a tall order, but we have spent too long moaning that the world won’t help us. Many of them have tried and gone away frustrated. It is time we got out of our armchairs and started doing something.