CHIBHORANI TALK
WITH SEKURU TAURAI

These cool days in Chibhoraniland it is master plans here, master plans there and master plans everywhere. Master plan season when I am hearing of urban and district councils going through the process of coming up with urban and district master plans. Well, it is not so difficult to come up with a master plan. You can just hire professional planners to walk you through the process. They will look at your weaknesses and strength, what you have and what you don’t have, what you did and what you didn’t do while consulting a few stakeholders and finally give you some advice on what you should actually do and not do and there you are, master plan in place! You then have to reward them for their efforts of course, mind you these consultants don’t come cheap, and off they go their wallets fat leaving you with a very, very nice document. A good master plan will of course need to be realistic, able to help you solve your problems and should leave you living a more comfortable life during and after implementation.
The main question here then is, what are you going to do with the nice master plan document? You see to succeed with your master plan you have to master the technic of master plan implementation. First of all the process of putting together a master plan exposes your weaknesses, kuita kufukura hapwa chaiko as the master plan maker will show you and the world where you are doing it all wrong while of course patting you on the back for the few good things you would have done. So you got to be ready to swallow your pride, apologise and promise to do better. The big BUT however is that this is not enough because you will still need to go on and implement the master plan otherwise the nice master plan document will just be there to gather dust on the shelve or remain hidden in the darkness of a filing cabinet, thus keeping beneficiaries standing in square one.
We are soon going to see a lot of beautiful master plans being thrown around all over Chibhoraniland giving us hope as we journey towards Vision 2030.

Now implementing a master plan is not a walk in the park. You will need adequate human, financial and material resources. To all this please add commitment and transparency. This is where we usually get it wrong and fail dismally when master plan implementers are just not committed to their work. Then they wouldn’t care if garbage is not collected, roads are not repaired, health services are not provided, kids have to walk 20 kilometres to school and a host of other unsolved challenges. To that add inefficiency and corruption when allotted resources are abused, misused, diverted, converted and heaven knows what other evil practice. In the end the master plan comes to naught as the deflated progress balloon comes down to land on the ground leaving the people of Chibhoraniland walloping in worse poverty. So after planning let us see some serious implementation of the master plans. With all its material and human resources Chibhoraniland should have landed the Above Middle Income status way before countries like Botswana and Namibia but unfortunately we have been making poor master plans that fail and failing to implement the good ones. Please let’s do better with our master plans this time around. Ndini venyu Sekuru Taurai vanotaurisa nezvimwe zvisingasitaurwi.