As Winston Churchill once remarked; Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
We have seen in Zimbabwe that our leaders, despite stumbling upon the truth that it's time for political change, continue to hurry off as if nothing is urgent. Our leaders actually fear change and the battle in my country Zimbabwe is really about the new challenging the old.
The old continues to dominate simply because of its access to arms of war and control of the security sector and therefore they will always pose a potential threat to destroy or expunge those of us who wish for substantive change. That does not make them legitimate or right. It also does not mean we should give up or cower at the first sign of intimidation, but rather we should be strengthened by their resistance knowing that all we want, all we aspire to be, is a better society that lives under better life conditions. That is not impossible.
Resistance to change seems a common factor is our society; whether in government where we have old dogs that really have no capacity to create the Zimbabwe we want; our private sector which has become less competitive and more internally focused on surviving without any leadership change; in our public institutions where we have seen incompetent and overpaid leadership that is arresting progress and development. We even have resistance to change in our community and social organisations where leaders claim positions for life despite the lack of results. All are seeking to maintain lifestyles and are afraid of the pain of the social transformation which we desperately need.
Because of our unchanging and anaemic political leadership, Zimbabwe is stuck in a time bubble of the past. We can hardly progress were we are continually reminded that the past matters more than the future. That is indeed a tragedy. Societies that progress focus more on the future and most are fast progressing as we remain stuck in the past that has no benefit to our people at all. Our neighbours' economies are fast advancing and even surpassing ours as we bicker about what happened yesterday and who did what.
As leaders our responsibility must now be to change this narrative. We have to renew everything that we are about so that we may see social progress. We must embrace change and continually renew how we operate and how we seek to change our circumstances. If we do not do that, we will regress as a society as we have seen in the last thirty four years.