"If blacks rule themselves roads will be impassable" Smith predicted. Racist rhetoric is now daily reality! W Mukori

 In 1975 lan Douglas Smith, Prime Minister Rhodesia said, "If blacks are to rule themselves people in towns will walk on sewage until they believe it's normal, all the gains from colonisation will varnish, infrastructure will collapse, roads will be impassable, trains will kill people until they're abandoned as an unsafe mode of transport, hospitals will be closed ,farms will be grabbed and there will be nothing to feed the nation.”

Many, many blacks dismissed the remark back then as white supremacist rhetoric. I would wager that many of them did not even consider that, insulting or not, it was possible the prediction could turn into a prophecy and then a reality.  

Well, 44 years after our independence, there is no denying many people in our towns and cities are walking on sewage and the infrastructure we inherited in 1980 is all in varying stages of rot and decay. 

Are blacks really incapable of self-rule? The reality on the ground says all that  needs be said on the subject.

The more interesting question to ask here would be: what was it that Ian Smith saw in blacks that made him predict with such pin-point accuracy that Zimbabwe, under black rule, will become the epitome of the failed state? For surely it was not written in the stars that blacks are incapable of self-rule.

One of the greatest and obvious weakness amongst blacks is our affinity to shut out, both physical (close our eyes and plug our ears) and mentally (those with low IQ have the knack for dismiss as trivial all those things they do not comprehend), what we do not want to hear. We did not want to hear that the country’s economy will collapse under black rule and so we angrily dismissed that the prediction. 

In 1975 many other African countries had gained their independence and the economic collapse and political chaos had started soon thereafter. There was a distinct possibility that independent Zimbabwe would go down the same path. We did!

It is disheartening that even with all the evidence of our failure to govern ourselves, there are still many black Zimbabweans who still continue to deny Zimbabwe is a failed state much less that the root cause is 44 years of bad governance. They have yet to learn that it is sheer folly to shut out what we do not want to hear especially when it is the truth because it will not go away and, worse still, it will bite you. 

Some races, nations and societies have learned that it is foolish to ignore one’s weaknesses and mistakes whilst we, as black Zimbabweans, have chosen to bury our heads in the sand and have repeated the same mistakes over and over again. We have failed to benefit from human history and our own tragic failures. The penny has not dropped and there is real  fear that it may never drop!