BREAKING A BEGGAR-MENTALITY IN 2010!

By Charles Mwewa

 

     Sande Ngalande and I knew each other from our University of Zambia (UNZA) days. I was the founder-president of UNZA-IFEC and Sande was the administrative secretary. We worked so hard to bring together all denominations and affiliations at UNZA. We had the unique blessing of being graced by the then UNZA vice-chancellor, Prof. Mutale Chanda. Our fame went wild on Zambian television, Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) and on Zambia Radio after our successful launch.

     From time to time, Sande and I liaise, especially that now I am the president of Our Zambia Forum (OZAFO). Sande is currently studying in Japan. Sande has continued to address me as “Mr. President.” Although I am a bit bothered by that, I, however, allow him to use that address because of our past connections.

     On Facebook the other day, Sande and I began to contrast and compare our experiences: Sande in Japan, and me, in Canada. I will begin by quoting what Sande said to me in one of our many exchanges:

Mr. President, people work here and you can see that their development is completely the result of their hard work. They do not depend on anybody and they use their own language. They work as though they still need to get their country developed and yet they already are. That beggar-mentality as you put it must go before we realize any meaningful result. OZAFO has started a good job, keep up the fight.

     We were discussing the legacy of begging on the African soil, what I call a beggar-mentality. The first time I was exposed to the West, I was dumfounded. People here are always working, even at night. In Zambia, for example, most manufacturing plants ground to a halt after 5:00 pm.

     I remember once, in Lusaka, a soft-drink plant going on fire. There was so much talk in the Zambian newspapers about the cause of the fire. Some people were enraged because the owner of the plant locked up some workers to labour during the night. The complaints to my surprise were not because employees were locked, but because the owner allowed them to work during the night!

     In developed nations, technology is even allowing the mass production of goods without human intervention. Industrial robots can deliver the all night the quantities required to compete in the busy market. This approach has enabled most industrialized nations mass produce for their benefit. Moreover, this approach, in part, explains why industrialized nations continue to lead the world in technology and economic progress.

     When I first visited Canada, I was amazed that even sixteen-year old boys and girls had to work to earn their dollar. I was barely one-week old in Canada when someone asked me if I could register at an Employment Agency. In retrospect, this was a blessing in disguise. At the moment, however, I was shocked. I had expected that when I went to Canada I would be given lots of money by people. I hoped that I would just be watching television, taken from place to place, and finally handed a think envelop before returning to Zambia. This was a typical Zambian mentality at the time.

     When I was spearheading the OZAFO vision, several people kept asking me, “Who is funding the organization?” Honestly, I was taken aback. It has been some years since I was last in Zambia, so my mind has really shifted. But I quickly came to my senses. Most people from my beloved continent believe that for something as big as OZAFO to succeed, there must be a big sponsor. Someone should dish out some big cheques. This is a very dangerous mindset. It has led, in part, to where we are now as a people.

     I thought to myself, “Some of my people do not believe that we can accomplish anything by ourselves!” This mentality has been an offshoot of poor missionary and colonial orientation. As a young catholic boy, I marveled at how the system dashed our prosperity hopes. We sang songs like, “Nangu nika tu ngwee pela Lesa tachenga (literally, even a two-ngwee coin, much far less than a penny, is enough to God).

     European missionaries and colonialist taught us that money was not important. But even if they did that, they are not to blame, we are. We ought to have known that if money was not so important why did they live in paneled houses, drive good cars and send their children to good schools when we did not. We ought to have known why our own people could not be managers of our own natural resources. We ought to have known why after retirement, they returned to their home nations to live like kings. For sure we are to blame. But we cannot go on grouching over spilt milk. We need to learn to work for what we want. We can do this when we begin to break the beggar-mindset and delve into intelligent thinking. We need to believe that among us are capabilities, abilities, talents and brilliances that can change our nation for the best!

     It is not every Zambian who thinks like that, though. During my interactions at Facebook, I have come across many innovative and forward-looking Zambians. One of them deserves special noting. Her name is Nchimunya Himunyanga. Nchimunya, like many OZAFO enthusiasts, thinks like me. She believes that Zambians can marshal resources within themselves, and not rely entirely on the goodwill of the donors. Like me, she believes that aid and donor help is necessary, but not everything.

     I believe that aid is only necessary to help in the initial stages. I do not believe that a person, and for that matter, a nation, should continue to bank on the generosity of other nations or people indefinitely. A beggar-mentality is a very dangerous state of being. Apart from promoting laziness, it leads to underdevelopment. Even aid, in the case of bilateral or multilateral agreements, does not truly help a nation develop. There are always strings attached, which manifest themselves in loan-repayment. This state of affairs has the unpalatable effect of derailing national development as the much needed dollar does not go to infrastructure development but to servicing the debt accrued.

     I have argued in my book, The Burden of Zambia, that “Begging is not necessarily a bad thing if we use it to stop further begging.” I had a very revealing experience one day. On a certain street was found a disheveled gentleman. He had asked me for some alms. I gave to him. The other day I visited the same place and there was the same gentleman, with the same excuse he had given me prior. After some time, I encountered the same guy, and with the same excuse. Each time he begged, he forgot to remember the person who gave him something. I concluded that to this gentleman, begging had become a mentality, and even worse than that, a way of life. To make matters worse, he never even made an effort to appreciate those who gave him something!

     A beggar-mentality has the following drawbacks:

     First, it leads to laziness. A beggar by definition is someone who does not use his or her initiative. He or she relies on the ideas, ingenuity and hard work of others. Most of the time it is not that the beggar does not have the strength and energy to work, it is plainly that he or she wants everything to be handed to him or her on a silver platter. He may even argue that jobs are hard to come by and that he or she lives in a poor country. But what surprises me is that in the so-called poor countries, some seem to be doing just fine. Of course, this is not to downplay the general poverty condition of a nation like Zambia. But at the individual level, everyone ought to be doing something to maintain a respectable standard of living.

     What people with a poor-mindset don’t realize is that for whatever they want to enjoy, someone has paid for it heavily in terms of time, energy and pressure. Even relocating to the West does not heal a poor-mind; it may even exacerbate it. Take for example the case of Canada with a striving social welfare assistance program. Most poor people still elect to remain on welfare, and not to work, even when working opportunities are plentiful. This vindicates my hypothesis that a poor, begging mindset is not due to lack of opportunities, but due to a lame culture of indigence, pennilessness, neediness and a notion of reaping where one did not sow!

     Second, it results in a life without purpose. Imagine that every time you want to move forward, you expect someone to push you. It may happen that some day the person who pushes you is dead, has gone into bankruptcy or is incapacitated. That will lead to disillusionment and stagnation. Most people who are perpetually on welfare or receiving-line never plan. They are always banking on chance and luck, not business chances but divine chance. They think, “Perhaps today I will be walking and someone will drop some money for me!” Some hide in religious self-deception that from nowhere God will rain manner from the skies! Nowhere in the Bible did God bless a lazy person. It is said of Isaac that he sowed even in drought and had a good harvest (Genesis 26:12). So there is no excuse for a struggling nation like ours.

     Third, begging perpetuates poverty. A beggar, I write in The Burden of Zambia, is always a “slave to the lender.” Begging leads to poverty, the inability to manipulate the means of production into useful resources. Most poor people or poor nations are not poor because they lack resources. They are poor because they neglect to use available resources, and do not plan for scarce resources. Economics is the science of resource manipulation. Everywhere on the planet, resources are in short supply. In other words, they are scarce. Economics is the household management of scarce resources in order to continue the art of living. Poor-minded people and nations are either poor at managing available or scarce resources, or are plainly negligent.

     Fourth, it murders ideas. This is straight forward. No individual or nation can survive without ideas. It is imperative that a person or nation engages in some form of mental-exercise, a pattern of thinking or behaving about possible courses of action. They say an idle mind is the devil‘s workshop, I say an idle mind is the graveyard of ideas! To marry this point to the third one, here is what I write in my up and coming book, Emerging Zambian Leaders:

Japan, like so many other Asian countries, made use of their local technologies and the ones they could borrow from other nations to enhance the development of the country. I have argued in The Burden of Zambia that it does not matter if you have to intelligently borrow some technological knowledge elsewhere in order to develop your own. It is like begging for donor support. The nation that borrows in order to stop further begging ultimately wins. Begging cannot be done forever. It must come to an end someday. Similarly, you cannot continue to rely on technologies created in other nations. Eventually, such technologies will either become too costly, or you may have to grapple with outdated ones.

     In this passage I argue that a nation that does not engage its citizens in innovative and technological thinking cannot develop. Similarly, a person who is always begging cannot use their minds to innovate and birth new ideas to conquer their environment or enhance their status.

     Last, perpetual begging is poison to dignity and respect. A beggar does not earn respect, they lose respect. A nation which is always begging cannot expect to be a force in regional or global sphere. If Africa in general and Zambia in particular, is to rekindle her place in international and global affairs, we need to begin to depend on our own ingenuity. We can borrow technocratic aid, but not to remain beggars. Whatever we borrow should be channeled into development projects. In business, entrepreneurs and business owners are always borrowing. But they reinvest what they borrow for profit. In the end, they repay the loan and remain with profit to show for it. A nation should be managed like a business. Emerging and up coming Zambian leaders should refuse to borrow for borrowing sake and insist on reinvestment.

     OZAFO cannot win with a beggar-mentality. In December 2009, we launched the Finance Resources Mobilization Team (FRM). The primary purpose of the FRM is to define a financial regime for OZAFO. Yes, we shall solicit for donor funding to successfully implement our initial phase in our economic and democratic promotion quest. But we shall not end there. We shall strive to become self-sufficient so that the organization can self-sustain and be unlimited in designing and implementing projects. We may fail, but we may also succeed!

     Zambia, we cannot continue to beg. We must resolve in 2010 to stand on our own two feet. We can ask for assistance, but only as a catalyst for development, the means to the end, not as the end. OZAFO, we should believe that we are capable among ourselves to raise any amount of money we need to carry out our objectives. We should not trail back into the begging mode. That will not help the Zambia of the C21st.

     I followed the Obama primary election strategies. They did not raise most of their money from big and powerful donors. They utilized the small, but frequent donor approach. In OZAFO we intend to adopt that strategy. We will look into ourselves and believe, like the Obama stratagem that, “Yes, We Can!”

     A beggar-mentality will not help our cause; it will not develop our nation either. We need to begin to believe in ourselves. We need to begin to expect our own ideas to take shape and breed great results for us. We need to work hard like my friend Sande Ngalande said the Japanese people do. And we need to believe like Nchimunya Himunyanga that we are capable of generating resources among ourselves.