What’s in it for me? Vs. What’s in it for us?

STEMBILE MPOFU

Living in Zimbabwe from 2007-8 was very difficult for the majority of citizens. Our country was bereft of most goods, the supermarkets were empty and we had to hunt for whatever food and other basic commodities we needed. I remember on one of our Saturday morning “hunting” trips, my family and I had the luck of finding bread in a small shop, and believe it or not they were not restricting the number of loaves customers could take. I couldn’t believe my luck and proceeded to pile my trolley high. ZESA was quite reliable then and I could easily stock these loaves in my freezer. While I was in this frenzy, my husband asked me why I was taking so many loaves and wasn’t I going to leave some bread for others? My first, second and third thought was, has this man gone mad, how could I pass up a chance like this? It wasn’t a time to be thinking of other people, we had our kids and ourselves to feed and if I took full advantage of this opportunity, we would have enough bread for at least two weeks.

I reluctantly put some loaves back on the shelf but only because he insisted I do so. At the time I felt quite angry about having to do this. It was only after many months when we had developed some coping mechanisms that I reflected on this incident. I had always considered myself a reasonably generous person and someone who thought of others but within this particular context, my instinct to survive kicked in and my behaviour and attitude changed to ensure my family’s survival and mine.

As I reflect on my 2008 experience and see how we as Zimbabweans are responding to our current 2018 experience, I think of the human instinct for survival and the extent to which it influences us despite having evolved over thousands of years. There are conflicting theories on how biological evolution works. There is Darwin’s theory, which most of us are familiar with, which says that evolution takes place through natural selection. According to Darwin, living organisms make tiny adaptations over a very long period of time and gradually a new species develops that is distinctly different from its ancestors.

A different theory was advanced in the 1970’s by two biologists, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. They didn’t think that organisms evolved gradually. Their thinking was that species remain unchanged for long periods of time, remaining in balance with their environment. Change only occurred when the species was confronted by environmental challenges. They called these periods of change ‘punctuations’. Under these new conditions the species adapts quite quickly and a new equilibrium comes into being. The species remains stable until the next punctuation. I think that for Zimbabweans 2008 was one such punctuation.

The effect of Zimbabwe’s economic decline on the worldview and values of Zimbabweans as a whole has been profound. It has created a highly unpredictable environment where most people live in a state of intense insecurity because they do not know where their next meal will come from. This environment has affected how we, as Zimbabweans, behave as individuals and relate to each other as a society. Most of us expend great energy trying to meet basic needs like food, shelter and healthcare. This feeling of insecurity creates a very competitive environment that has negative consequences on the society as a whole.

Our environment has produced citizens who are highly individualistic, whose ability to see beyond their own needs has diminished. Where a person’s total focus is on meeting his own needs with little regard of the consequences for another individual, the community fabric disintegrates and there is little or no contribution that is made to the communal aspects of a society. In such an environment an individual will, before participating in any activity, ask himself “what’s in it for me?”.

The current economic difficulties Zimbabweans are encountering have brought to the fore examples of this mindset at all levels of our society. The current crack down on high-level forex cartels has shown the danger of this mindset when it is at work in individuals manning the institutions that should be safeguarding the country’s wealth. Allegations that Directors at the Reserve Bank have been facilitating the siphoning of the country’s money and minerals are deeply disturbing.

We can see the corrosive effects of this mindset when individuals within institutions that have been set up to protect the wealth of the country become the facilitators of externalisation in order to benefit at a personal level. It is the same when politicians use state funds to self enrich and provide financial favours for those close to them.

Those individuals are not concerned with the fact that the money they misappropriate belongs to a citizen who has worked for it but is being deprived of the benefit of their labour.

This is the same for the pharmacists who have decided to set their prices in US dollars or a bond note price well above the prevailing black market exchange rate because they must protect themselves against the economic turbulence. Like the pharmacist, the big supermarket chain together with the small tuck shop owner see an opportunity to make large profits from the situation and put huge mark-ups on products they purchased from their suppliers at their normal price.

Each is protecting his business and is doing so at the expense of their desperate customers. The customers, who like I once did, hoard what is available to stockpile supplies for their own families not worried whether others have or not.

Neither the pharmacist, the supermarket chain nor the tuck shop owner will return the extra money they make on exchanging currency to their customers because that’s what is in it for them. Meanwhile in conformity to this extortionate behaviour the Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association (ZIMTA) issues a statement threatening to withdraw their teaching services if government does not start paying them in US dollars. The US dollars are not available because Zimbabwe is not producing enough to export and earn forex. The little forex that is available is being siphoned out of the country by those who are supposed to be safeguarding it.

As we see, the result of this mindset is that we see each individual in our society using whatever leverage he may have to advance his individual agenda. This could be his job within the public or private sector, his position as an elected or appointed leader of an institution that allows him to access a resource that others cannot. In Zimbabwe the consequence is that few people are taking care of the communal space that must be maintained if the country is to function effectively. In such a context we end up with poor service provision as the majority of citizens fail to contribute to the larger communal space. Infrastructure like roads, schools and hospitals that need to be maintained are no longer providing adequate services because resources that should be earmarked for their maintenance have been used to personally benefit the individuals who should be managing them. A situation now exists where each person must fend for himself; there is no social cohesion or national identity to affiliate to.

We must recognise that the best chance our society has of entering a positive and constructive state of being is if it is cohesive. We have to recognise that that cohesion can be achieved through the realisation of a sense of collective responsibility that brings with it unity of purpose. How can we achieve this within this context? We must first be aware that in today’s Zimbabwe, when working to inspire a sense of collective responsibility we are working against the strong force of instinct triggered by the environmental punctuations taking place in our environment. This force is what will make each of us ask, “And…what’s in it for me?”. Work in every sector and at every level of our society must be directed towards changing that question for each of us and have us asking “And… what is in it for US”. This is a tough mandate to give ourselves. What is it that we must do to get a politician, a government official, a business person or an ordinary person who are all using their positions to accumulate resources for themselves, to begin to think beyond the me and start to think of the us? We must understand that each of these people is aware that outside the opportunity they have at that moment or their position of influence, there is a wasteland. They must understand that once they move out of this space their access to resources will dry up and that it is this that creates the continued insecurity that triggers their instinct to survive. This creates a vicious cycle.

Going back to my own experience and the lesson it taught me. I realised that if the customers only bought the bread they needed each the day, I was more likely to get a loaf of bread everyday. Because no one person took all the bread at once it increased my chances of getting bread everyday. There is less for everyone including yourself once you take more than you actually need. The pharmacist’s children will not have any one to teach them when the teacher goes on strike because he can’t meet his own family’s needs. The banker’s investment will not provide any returns because the society he has stolen money from will be too poor to buy his products or services.

The politician, like all the other citizens risks being involved in an accident when driving on a poorly maintained road even if he is driving the latest Jeep.

We must begin to see the benefits of being part of a larger and more cohesive social unit and develop the confidence to make the changes that we want to see happen. We do not have to wait for someone else or a certain group to change first. At every level of society we must begin to appreciate the benefit of transforming that wasteland into fertile ground. The punctuations that have created a society that relies on its survival instinct should not define our future.

We must recognise that these punctuations have had a very negative impact on our minds and our behaviour. We need to reflect and make conscious choices to shift the mindset that triggers this individualistic behaviour. We must make a conscious choice to defy instinct and change ourselves and with that our Empty shelves in 2008 whole society.

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