I believe it was Prince Metternich of Austria who said ‘ I once ruled Europe but never Austria’ in reference to his regional influence and overseeing what is usually referred to as the ‘ Age of Metternich’.

From the time we started our work in Zimbabwe in 2018 me and my colleagues have been invited to maybe 5 events as a speaker, a couple of workshops as part of an audience and very few radio appearance thanks to Tafara of Classic263 who developed a liking to me- probably because I was always eager to participate. Our work has not been widely cited. I still have to introduce SIVIO Institute. We are not a known brand. However, I have been all over the world during the same period.

This is not about ego. We established SIVIO to contribute to a narrative. We can only do that by being part of the public conversation. So if we are not active in the public space (AGORA) of ideas how do we achieve our goal? Our politics or set of ideas have been measured and never popular. We have annoyed both the ruling party and the opposition. The ruling party has called us a ‘fake’ organization due to their disagreement on how we measure their performance. The opposition is mostly made up of my contemporaries. We meet at important events now and again. But they struggle with some of our initiatives such as the Vision 2030 Dialogue Series, our local government tracker and even scoring of government. Whilst ZANU-PF was unhappy with our overall score of 56% as too low, opposition actors felt we were too generous. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

But seriously Zimbabwe will humble you. It is a country with some of the smartest people. One always needs to be at the top of their game. Lately however I feel a certain level of myopia spreading especially within civil society. It’s becoming a bit narrow, only comfortable with ideas that support or align with our beliefs (not researched positions). Debating has been reduced to trading insults. Politics has become moralized around what is perceived to be good and evil. We have generally become an intolerant society.

My initial take was that we had to address partisan based polarization through evidence generated and balanced views but there is little interest in that. Hyperbole and sensationalism rule the day.
We are not giving up. N’ah we don’t give up so easily. Our new approach entails creating new technology based platforms to increase visibility and help shape a narrative that puts Zimbabwe above partisan based positions. Maybe we have been complicit as well. Others found our work very technical and unreachable. That also has to change. Whilst we are interested in a technical subject like policy- our take is take that we should use everyday language to discuss complex public problems.

Zimbabwe will humble you.