WE are failing at the family level.
When I was growing up, my mother always told me that if I ate vegetables, got good grades, stayed out of trouble, ate what we grew and was obedient to her, even a lowly boy from Honde Valley could grow up to hold any big office in Zimbabwe.
The entire village, our teachers and local priests would reinforce this message regardless of whether you were not their child. It was an entire village raising children collectively.
Then, churches taught us values and responsibility as being above money and a vacuous display of riches.
Our generation failed as a choice.
The nauseating displays of riches are unfortunately unique to Africa and or black people as very few Caucasians derive value from showing off money amid poverty. It becomes sad if it is promoted by us parents and the present-day prosperity churches.
We are a third-world country not because of climate, soils, minerals and so forth but our mindset that somehow making money is not synonymous with creating value and wealth may even come from miracles and prayer.
Our children and grandchildren will to grow up stupid.
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We don’t care about our children enough, making them intellectually and socially crippled. Just about anything is measured using money as a yardstick. A Machiavellian society in which the end justifies the means even in sacred issues like love and relations.
It is possible to blame our education system. It is getting worse by the day; that much is true.
We still have physical libraries and the freaking internet which is packed with information but it's what we are doing as parents and the information our children are feeding on that’s making our children consume only nonsense.
Children no longer read books, even the e-book version and consume only entertainment. I doubt any nation can prosper from such polluted minds.
Children are unfortunately being fed a good measure of gawking at half-naked parents gyrating on social media and looking at money as the ultimate. These are today's parents whose known strengths are not values but their behinds.
A culture of private school prostitutes who lead families. It’s like money or nothing sex all over. That a body is for sale or that it must be purchased.
Children need to be thirsty to know stuff.
They need to read for both enjoyment and content. And that comes from parents! Parents are investing all the spare time they have on socialites with warped views on money, relationships and society.
Parents should ideally advance societal goals.
The idea of what should make a great home, hard work and success must originate at home.
The present-day children are taught what the future holds by mbingas who now don’t put in the real work, mothers who twerk and show their nakedness as a source of income, fathers who drink without relent, villages with parents who mind their business and a government that promotes criminals.
A government should not openly promote or defend criminals.
Not all children are going to be stupid.
Some children are very smart, and at some point in the future, they will realise the vast gap between them and those with parents who lived for the now, who worshipped money and displayed extreme love for attention and sex.
Unfortunately, even a small percentage of our children can’t end up as Zimbabwean mbingas, become gospel entrepreneurs, paid socialites, twerking and bum showing mothers in prostitution, tenderpreneurs and so forth.
We just need new heroes and that start with sorting it at the family level.
To defeat our children's way of thinking and develop a nation, we must start a well-structured way of teaching our children in the home. College is not doing it, and pre-college education is not doing it either.
Our government has let us down remarkably by causing the struggle of what we looked forward to as our future teachers, government clerk, council workers, nurses, doctors and so forth.
The economy has done a number on us! Now, even in professions like law, accounting, medicine, engineering, banking and finance, sociology and so forth, parents leave homes to work to cut corners (kiya kiya) and our children are learning very bad lessons from us.
The mbinga culture in its present form must be resisted and frowned upon, starting from the home environment. These can’t be our country’s heroes and sources of inspiration like what is obtaining now.
Imagine our mbinga heroes mocking the poor, showing off their riches, having no respect for the country’s success, promoting corruption, saying it's networking, are beyond the ambit of the law, shrinking democratic space, stealing from the poor and causing pain and suffering.
We should teach our children that creating wealth is great but should be done in a manner that doesn't increase the country's dysfunction through crumbling infrastructure, promoting death by not funding hospitals, increasing the country's debt, destroying livelihoods, causing screaming poverty and under-funding education.
Our mbingas are horrible creatures whose influence is cannibalising our societal fabric. They create an impression of success without value creation. They are destroying our country and the principles, values and ethics of hard work.
Let's change our mindset and propel our countries to the sanity of hard work. Let's rid our society of these people's influence.
- Brian Sedze is a strategy, innovation and compliance consultant. He is also the executive director of Free Enterprise Initiative. He can be contacted on brian.sedze@gmail.com
