Written By Tafadzwa G. Gidi

Our people need to understand that diversity is great for Zimbabwe. I am not just talking about accepting Whites or Asians or Chinese who in many cases have roots in our nation going back for generations. For these people, Zimbabwean is all they have ever known.

(Pictured: Arnold Schwarzenegger – An Austrian immigrant who became a US citizen and went on to become a famous Hollywood action film icon. He later joined politics and is serving as governor of California. Schwarzenegger’s story is one of the best examples of how a progressive immigration policy can be beneficial to a country.)

It is their home! If we manage to look past the wounds of the past, we can all acknowledge that the fabric of our great nation will be lesser without them. More importantly, I think we should embrace the diversity that comes with further immigration into our country now and in future years.

For many years, admittedly when the nation was still prosperous, Zimbabwe benefited from the influx of Malawian and Mozambican immigrants who came and did the jobs that most of us wouldn’t do for a day.

They tendered our gardens, herded our cattle, held menial farm jobs and spent countless hours in the dark shafts or our gold mines and our nation reaped the benefits of their sweat. In turn, our nation gave them excellent schools for their children, better healthcare and an opportunity to send money back home to help their families survive. Funny how the irony of history reminds us of how good we used to have it, but that’s a topic for another day.

National discourse
Our national discourse on this matter has been limited to sound bites that stereotype foreigners as bad and all white people as white farmers who stole our land. This not only ignores the facts but poisons our minds against a very crucial factor that will define how successful we will become as a nation in the 21st century.

United we stand ... fun scenes at a Human Rights concert in Harare 20 years ago.

Photograph: Neal Preston/Corbis

Earlier in the year I was having a conversation with a friend. He is a British born white man (born in Dunstable, England) who chose to become a citizen of post-independence Zimbabwe. Having studied to become a librarian back in England, he worked for the University of Zimbabwe for many years and now runs his own media company.

An honest immigrant who deserves every success he has achieved. And yet, the colour of his skin proves a barrier to him moving up the ladder even after almost 30 years of being a Zimbabwean. An asset to the nation he chose and loves being hindered by superficial differences to all our detriment. That cannot be right!

A certain Mrs Keys was my English Language teacher. An expat and missionary from America who had fallen in love with the continent of Africa, spent years teaching in different African countries and eventually arrived at my high school. She was also the teacher in charge of scripture union in the school.

In the years that she taught me, she not only excelled as a teacher but more times than not was willing to sacrifice her own personal resources to make sure we had the best education possible. Thanks to her, I fell in love with the art of writing and reading comes as second nature to me which is weird for someone whose whole education focussed on sciences and business related subjects.

As you can see here, thanks to her, I turned out to be a pretty decent writer. Should the colour of her skin or the country of her birth negate the enormous contribution this remarkable woman has made to so many generations of children in Africa?

Learning curve

Our nation is only in its infancy in terms of development. Europe, Asia and most of the Americas are way more advanced than us in every sense. They have been through what we are going through now already. The industrial revolution, rebuilding collapsed economies, managing national resources (like the Marange diamond fields) for the good of the nation and most recently the internet and other technological revolutions.

There is no doubt that our nation will benefit from engineers from Germany, IT and internet experts from the United States to cite a couple of examples. With their contribution, re-inventing the wheel becomes unnecessary. If we can tap experts from these more advanced economies, our nation can avoid the pitfalls of a learning curve and the painful process of learning from our mistakes.

Who among us can stand here and say Lubumbashi stars living and performing in Zimbabwe did not enhance our culture? You may disagree with their politics, but who is in any doubt that Senator David Coltart and Dr Faye Chung have added some value to the education of our children?

How can people like the British doctor I met at the Edinburgh Festival last week who spent five years working in our country be perceived as a bad thing for Zimbabweans on the streets of our capital? Surely, the contribution made by Mohammed Musa, the groceries wholesaler, is demonstration enough of how our nation benefits from this diversity.

The contribution of veteran journalist and former nightly news anchor Noreen Welch must mean something to us as a nation I reckon. Tell me, who will dare challenge the enormous contribution of the hardworking immigrants from Malawi and Mozambique in the 80s and 90s?

Poaching minds
America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth partly because they have embraced the strength of diversity. The United States has poached people of exceptional abilities from across the globe over the years including many of our exceptional countrymen.

Russian nuclear scientists, German engineers, British economists, Chinese whiz kids etc. Our very own deputy prime minister, Dr Arthur Mutambara, worked for NASSA for years.

Hollywood is the movie capital of the world today because they embraced an attitude of accepting great actors no matter where they come from, the colour of their skin or the language they speak.

America is a country were a foreigner can become a citizen, a world renowned action hero, a businessman and eventually governor of the largest state in the country, all in one lifetime; not necessarily in that order of course. They are a perfect example of how to attract the best to help your country become better for generations to come.

While I can certainly understand why people fear what is different, all evidence points us to conclude that if we get past our anxieties our fears normally turn out to be wrong. To anyone with an open mind, the benefits of common sense immigration policies, diversity, inclusion and tolerance far outweigh the perceived draw backs.

If immigration is managed wisely, we will be richer as a nation because of it! If our nation draws on all the talents at our disposal from Zimbabweans of different races, religions, languages and political persuasions we will reap the greater benefits off it. Most importantly, if we become a more tolerant nation, we will handover to our children a nation more prosperous than what we inherited from our fathers.

Article originally published in The Zimbabwean and also on Taff's Viewpoint.

Compiled by Ashley Mwanza

Billy Wilkerson wrote that Generation Y is definitely living up to its name. Why, why, why, everything is ‘why’ these days. It appears that the good old days of say it and obey it are over and behind us. Blind faith leadership is becoming a thing of the past. After all, as Colin Powell said, “if you have a yes man working for you, one of you is redundant.” Yes men, and women, add no value to problem solving. This is not to be confused with the need for command structure on an emerging emergency scene. But, when there is time, “WHY” has its place.

Today’s challenges are more complex than ever before. With twitter, facebook, linkedin, google, iPhone, etc., technology is changing the way we interact with the world, and Generation Y is changing the way we once blindly accepted the status quo. This generation will redefine problem solving. By not being afraid to ask why, they will learn instinctually how to solve problems at the root cause level. They force the previous generations to intelligently support their methods of doing business with facts. And when they can’t, this forces them to change. Without even realizing it, Generation Y is leading us into the future, thereby demonstrating their true ability to lead.

Generation Y have grown up in a very different world, therefore inevitably their values and conditioning is different.

This true story illustrates how easy it is for conflict to arise between the generations. A young high-flier in an ad agency emailed the CEO to tell him that he disagreed with a decision that he had taken. The CEO responded immediately saying “I have run this company for X years and I think I know what I am doing”. The young graduate replied by saying “I realise this is an uncomfortable conversation but I am not the only one who thinks this” And he went on to give reasons and rationale as to why he disagreed with the decision. The CEO, although he had always said he welcomed feedback, ‘open-door’ policy and all that, was indignant at receiving this email from this young upstart.

I firmly believe that there are many assumptions and practices in the world that need challenging. And much of what Generation Y is challenging needs to be challenged.

The young man in this story didn’t want to stay silent when he thought a mistake was being made. It did not occur to him that he may annoy his boss and their bosses by going over their heads and emailing the CEO direct. He did not know that the hierarchy and your status in it was such a big deal. He couldn’t understand why he received such a terse reply from the CEO. The problem is that the CEO grew up in a very different time when you did not challenge the boss. By emailing in this way he had spoken to the person not the position. Long ago people were conditioned into speaking to the ‘position’ not the ‘person’.

This was a clear case of each person judging the other on their behaviour not on their intentions. And of not understanding the rules of the other’s game. Barack Obama in his inauguration speech said, “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” Later on in the same speech he said “For the world has changed, and we must change with it.” We need to move with the times and stay on course, whole generations will need to be engaged to think and act in a way that matches the scale of the challenge/s we face today. This is an exhilarating time to be alive as society is challenged to re-design and re-think many of its assumptions about progress, development and the finite capacity of the Earth to provide the resources necessary to sustain the human enterprise.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

One day in the not so distant future, men and women of all ages and races will come to realise that change we can believe in, change we can achieve, and that change waits for no one because “WE are the ones we've been waiting for!”

Ashley Mwanza

It takes very little observation to conclude that suffering is a universal phenomenon, whether it is seen from the individual, society’s viewpoint. People from every walk of life suffer in different ways, for neither sickness, tragedy nor death are respecters of persons. They visit the high and mighty as readily as the hovels of the shanty towns of the world. They come uninvited and unwanted by all. They are not impressed by a person’s station in life: they cannot be bought or sold, manipulated or controlled, although political leaders like to give the impression that they can control everything.

Whole nations languish in the grip of injustice, war, famine and disease, which even worldwide relief agencies seem powerless to control. The problem only seems to get bigger.

On the individual level suffering comes in many varied ways, even if we are lucky enough to have plenty to eat, are in sound health, and living in a country with a reasonably sound economy.

Suffering is meted out at the hands of others, either intentionally or otherwise. There is the almost inexplicable mystery of man’s inhumanity to man, seen at all levels of society and in all works of life. In the rush to make “our first million” we may walk over many others along the way, discard those people that are not “useful”, buy the friendship of the “great” while manipulating or controlling the weak ones.

Our first thoughts of oppression towards mankind usually suggest the more extreme types. We are more inclined to think of slavery or severe forms of authoritarian physical abuse rather than the more civil and disguised forms of oppression. In this drama of everyday life we may find ourselves either the oppressors of others or the oppressed.

Every organization has a purpose, a reason for being, described in its mission statement. It is becoming increasingly important for organizations to also have a code of ethics - a set of rules that define what behaviours are acceptable and those that are unacceptable - since shareholders, clients, and employees prefer dealing with establishments that uphold high levels of ethical and moral standards of practice. Firms that wish to succeed in the long run had better take a long hard look at their ethics. So it goes for us all, if we want to succeed let us not hurt others along the way. Let us try to do good all the way.

A simple rule of ethics (for business, organisations and the individual) can also be derived from the sage Hillel’s philosophy (Babylonian Talmud, Avot 1:14): “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I only care for myself, what am I?” An organization must achieve its goals (e.g., profit) but must also care for others. I must achieve my goals but not trample on others as I pursue those goals.

The many sufferings that beings in the world today experience are caused by people’s ignorance, lack of concern, no sense of awareness, that the suffering they inflict on others would also hurt them. They are unaware because they have not put themselves in the situation of their victims. As a result of this, people in the world keep on inflicting great suffering on one another.

Our actions have consequences. Most of the time, we are unaware of any except perhaps the most immediate of these consequences. We are like a person who has dropped a pebble into a pond and can only see, at best, one ripple the pebble made in the water. We know from our experience that the pebble actually causes many ripples, perhaps an infinite number, that extend all the way from the spot where it was dropped in the water to the edge of the pond.

Our actions are the results of causes and conditions from others, and the actions of others are the results of causes and conditions from us. If we can change our actions, we can create a chain of events that will change the karma of many beings.

None of us can live a life in which every action creates only positive consequences. At best, the consequences of each action we take will be mixed. All we can do is to live as mindfully as possible and to expand our horizons so that we start seeing more and more of the ripples in the pond when we drop that pebble.

We are defined only in relation to each other. Only together are we whole, completing the most sacred circuit the universe has ever known, a circuit through which life continues to proliferate.