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My "famous" analogy of the lawn: why the state of suburban yards explain the reason why African economies go down post-independence and why time or an exceptional leader is the only solution...a thread!!!
1/ Before independence, most suburbs had manicured gardens: lush green lawns, flowers that seems to bloom all year round, working flood drains & just well presented gardens. They were straight out of the gardening magazines...
2/ Black people, in most cases, could only be in those neighbourhoods with a pass for work. Very few were allowed to or managed to buy those homes during that era. The majority heard about them as legends told by those who worked for "Murungu".
3/ Our explanation for those lush green gardens was that white people had garden-boys (hate that term but that's what it was). Our simple our equation was: Murungu + garden-boy = manicured garden. It didn't help that the garden-boys bragged to other blacks that it was their work.
4/ When we could finally buy those houses post-independence, we remembered that equation and employed our own garden-boys (the name didn't change to match the equation). We would have the same lush gardens since we followed the equation.
5/ We all know that never happened. Some had success but they were a minority. The vast majority of gardens turned into deserts & wastelands. If the yard within the walls were bad, the area outside would have given anything for murungu to come back.
6/ Take a walk down any suburban road now. It's not only the remains of what used to be roads but the sad state of houses. Hedges that have all but given up, crumbling durawalls, blocked flood drains and walls that last saw a lick of paint before 1980.
7/ How does this relate to the economy as a whole? Colonialism reduced us to people who can only take instructions. We were not taught how to think but to operate on manuals that white people gave us. What we were not taught, we created simple equations. Child + Pvt school....
8/ We thought we had the knowledge but we didn't. We applied those equations in EVERY walk of life. From our homes, schools, companies, government, judiciary... you name it, we just blindly applied those equations. And when they didn't work, we didn't stop to question why...
9/ You see the white man got it right so who are we to question those equations? So we apply and apply hoping that some day we will get it right. While that is happening Murungu is creating new manuals & we are constantly updating our equations again without questions...
10/ We are chasing a moving target based on a flawed idea of what that target is. We are in the race to be the best Murungu we can be. It is why we take so many short cuts from economic programs that destroy our economies to corruption at all levels. We are chasing white dreams.
11/ Until we realise that to truly evolve we must stop & question everything, we are on a very fast treadmill to nowhere. We will get there eventually but it will take so much unnecessary pain. Sometimes you have to dig up the whole yard to create the garden of your dreams. END
