‘Seek yea first the economic kingdom and the political demands shall be added unto thee’
CONTRARY to Nkrumah’s 20th century belief of seeking first the political kingdom, the 21st century has suggested otherwise for the Zimbabwean, “seek ye first the economic kingdom and the political demands shall be added unto thee”. The dynamics of status quo politics need not to be confronted in an unquestioning perspective; it needs a critical questioning approach which interrogates the correspondence of speech politics and the transitional demands in economic spaces for young people.
The 2019 challenges to Zimbabwe’s political economy are presenting numerous pedagogues to the diverse constituencies in Zimbabwe. The citizen, both young and old, self-sustaining and dependent, elite and the mass have so far, for the better of 2018 compromised its own identity in the quest to realise the benefits of much sacrifices made in 2018, whose results are expected much sooner than economic craftsmen expect. In the unfolding of the deeply embedded Zimbabwean challenges such as long winding fuel queues, extortive three-tier pricing of basic commodities, a growing and de facto normalising parallel market, the effects of El Nino, and a blackmailing political environment where the main opposition party is constantly threatening worsening an already struggling livelihood, life is becoming unbearable for young people.
While Zimbabwe is struggling to realise itself in the broader economic definition, the young citizen is also struggling to locate him/ herself in the economy of Zimbabwe. The youth is not only subject to the nation’s global economic isolation but also subject to the systemic rejection from the national fortunes. Usually when a nation’s economy is dismantling, political decisions are at the helm of exploring the possible alternatives. In Zimbabwe where the youth constitute the majority of the direct economic citizenship, the quest for economic solutions seems to be selective in endowing dividends of access to state means of production.
As I have argued in this space before, the economic disenfranchisement of a critical and majority demographic in Zimbabwe propelled many to flock into the political spaces to feed neo-patrimonial structures and benefit from systems of patronage hence their presence in politics, for now, has little to do with serving Zimbabwe, but more to do with escaping poverty and inspired by an easy yet unorthodox avenue of wealth creation. When the youth choose to think political for their problems they subconsciously neglect the critical vessels of their empowerment which happen to be the economy. In the unhygienic political landscape of Africa as Professor PLO Lumumba would suggest, the economic misfortune of the youth has become a fortune for the other generation’s patronage structures, a system that is not worth celebration. Rethinking themselves is the only solution to the economic political ills confronting them today, the major problem facing the youth now is no longer the fractured politics of who has the power, it has translated into who is producing what and where.
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