Zimbabwe The Blame Game

The Blame Game is a cycle of creative non-fiction pieces, pulling the readers through the politics of modern day Zimbabwe. Like in any game, there are players in this game, opposing each other. The game is told through the eyes of one of the players, thus it is subjective. It centres on truthfully trying to find who to blame for Zimbabwe's problems, and how to undo all these problems. Finding who to blame should be the beginning for the search of solutions. It encourages talking to each other, maybe about the wrongs we have done to each other, and genuinely trying to embrace and forgive each other. In trying to undo the problems in Zimbabwe, it also offers insight or solutions on a larger platform - Africa: particularly South Africa; that it might learn from other African countries that have imploded before it, how to solve its own problems.

In this book Zimbabwe: The Blame Game we start the process of talking by finding who is to blame for our political and economic problems and suggesting how to solve them. We need to face each other with an open mind, honest engagement, with real love that doesn't just run along the path to judging, with forgiveness, with real reconciliation. For us to do that we need to start to talk to each other, but this collection goes further than Zimbabwe, than encouraging talking. It still tackles Zimbabwe, even as it tackles life in exile, especially for those Zimbabweans who left for South Africa; what they had to deal with, especially the xenophobia of year 2008. There are also two particular pieces that deals with South Africa, what I think is happening in South Africa, where I think South Africa is heading towards. It is the Zimbabweanisation of issues in South Africa that I am trying to explore, above everything else. Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, mentor, thinker, literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with 23 individual books and 25 edited books, 1 music album and several songs, and tens of paintings and artworks curated, published, produced, exhibited and published in at least 35 countries worldwide.

One of the fundamental challenges in rethinking and remaking development in Africa from a Pan African perspective is that too much “mere talk” and “blame game” have played out at the expense of “real action”. The blame game and mere talk on Africa’s poverty and underdevelopment jam have remained printed in bold on the face of the continent, yet Africa’s dire situation warrants nothing less than real emphatic action. This book focuses on the empirics of the production and reproduction of poverty and underdevelopment across Africa in a fashion that warrants urgent pragmatic policy attention and quest for workable homegrown solutions to persistent predicaments. The volume advances the need to recognise the realities of global inequalities and move swiftly in a most informed and transparent manner to address the poverty and underdevelopment conundrum. The book sets the tempo and pace on the need for praxis and pragmatism on the African situation. It is handy to students and practitioners in African studies, poverty and development studies, global studies, policy studies, economics and political science.

One of the fundamental challenges in rethinking and remaking development in Africa from a Pan African perspective is that too much mere talk and blame game have played out at the expense of real action. The blame game and mere talk on Africas poverty and underdevelopment jam have remained printed in bold on the face of the continent, yet Africas dire situation warrants nothing less than real emphatic action. This book focuses on the empirics of the production and reproduction of poverty and underdevelopment across Africa in a fashion that warrants urgent pragmatic policy attention and quest for workable homegrown solutions to persistent predicaments. The volume advances the need to recognise the realities of global inequalities and move swiftly in a most informed and transparent manner to address the poverty and underdevelopment conundrum. The book sets the tempo and pace on the need for praxis and pragmatism on the African situation. It is handy to students and practitioners in African studies, poverty and development studies, global studies, policy studies, economics and political science.

Zimbabwe: The Urgency of Now, is a follow-up creative non-fiction book to Zimbabwe: The Blame Game. It goes further than The Blame Game and focuses on Zimbabwe in the GNU entity, the 2013 elections, post elections and post GNU Zimbabwe, and Now. They are a myriad number of problems, issues, limitations that still unbundles Zimbabwes push towards multiparty democracy, social justice, economic sanity and growth, and The Urgency of Now focuses on the solutions to these. It also tackles the land reform in South Africa, how this could be its biggest problem going forward. It goes further and tackles the larger Africa problem toward democracy, growth, stability and unity, and why the progress towards the United States of Africa has been moribund.

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenomenon is not all bad, Hood demonstrates that it can actually help to pin down responsibility, and he examines different kinds of blame avoidance, both positive and negative. Hood traces how the main forms of blame avoidance manifest themselves in presentational and "spin" activity, the architecture of organizations, and the shaping of standard operating routines. He analyzes the scope and limits of blame avoidance, and he considers how it plays out in old and new areas, such as those offered by the digital age of websites and e-mail. Hood assesses the effects of this behavior, from high-level problems of democratic accountability trails going cold to the frustrations of dealing with organizations whose procedures seem to ensure that no one is responsible for anything. Delving into the inner workings of complex institutions, The Blame Game proves how a better understanding of blame avoidance can improve the quality of modern governance, management, and organizational design.

This book comprises 19 creative non-fiction pieces and essays centred around the topics of language, thought, art and existence seen through the prism of practising artist in contemporary Africa. The collection continues with Zimbabwe’s Tendai Mwanaka’s creative non-fiction ideology of presenting non-fiction in a creative, fresh, easy reading, simple language. With most of the essays driven by personal stories, the author ably renders them accessible to a wide spectrum of readers from the scholarly to the journalistic and the general. The pieces are grouped according to the topics, with the language essays starting the book, followed by thought, existential, and art essays. In tune with the adage the personal is political, Mwanaka lets the personal drive these essays as he tries to investigate and conversationally navigate his thoughts, beliefs, feelings and experience on language, existence and art. This is an invaluable contribution to the academic establishment, social theorists, linguists, literary theorists, journalists, activists and the general readership.

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka wrote letters to Robert Mugabe, Constantine Chiwenga, Morgan Tsvangirai, The Zimbabweans, Emerson Mnangagwa, Nelson Chamisa, The Police, and in between infused the letters with deeply literary and psychoanalytic essays on the motivations of political players in Zimbabwe. Using this nonfiction literary form, the letter writing form, to protest against Robert Mugabe and the Mugabeism the letters were initially written to protest against Mugabe's continuing clinging to power, the collection has been expanded to include other issues related to Zimbabwe society. As the country moves towards a better multiparty democracy if there is change in thinking in these very important facets shaping Zimbabwe such as constitutionalism and rule of law, change and devolution of government, developmental agenda, and freedom of expression and association.