"Leadership roles in Zimbabwe/Africa must be looked at in terms of transformation as a key aspect of leading. Transformation involves changing people and organisations in a literal sense – changing them in mind and heart, to enlarge the vision, insight, and understanding, clarifying purposes, to make behaviour congruent with beliefs, principles, or values and to bring about changes that are permanent, self perpetuating and momentum building.
Viewing public office as an opportunity to enhance self-interests has taken cultural proportions for many amongst our business people, civic leaders, trade unionists and politicians. The political culture that has been defined in Zimbabwe for the past 30 years is showing its ugly face in many organisations in both the political and civic spheres. Public office is routinely abused for personal gains and many in leadership positions have become too engrossed in protecting the interests of their regimes and dominant constituencies than in serving the interests of the majority outside of these groups. A discussion on transformative leadership and transformative politics is, thus, very timely at this crucial moment in our history.
We should look for a different kind of politics and governance that serve the disenfranchised. The question of democracy has to be extended to focus on the struggles for clean water, electricity, health care, environmental justice and democratic gender relations. A new leadership should look further and envision the struggle for democracy to broaden beyond the necessary and urgent issue of democratic representation, and the guarantee of social and economic rights.
Our concept of reconstruction should be a wholesome process that encapsulates the struggles of women for democratic gender relations, the new concepts of bio-democracy and and a new appreciation of the significance of hunhu/ubuntu. Our conceptions of liberation must move beyond apartheid and indeed beyond Zanu Pf/MDC politicking with the realisation that exploitation can wear a white face as well as a black one."
Courtesy of Esau Mavindidze
Senior Project Lead
Zimbabwe Diaspora Network North America
http://www.zimbabwebusinessnet.com/
NOTICE: The contributing Authours of this blog are not necessarily members of Freedom Justice Coalition Zimbabwe but independent writters who have either been approached by FJCZ or offered to share their perspectives on Zimbabwe, it's people, it's economy and it's future which FJCZ sees as valid contribution to helping us find answers to many of our recurring challenges.
