An Open Letter to Fadzayi Mahere: The Country That Educated You Runs on Leases Too
Zimbabwe got a direct flight to London back after fourteen years, and within hours the criticism arrived — one plane, one route, a leased aircraft, we need new leaders. This letter takes that argument seriously, concedes what is true in it, and then puts one question that has not been answered: if a leased aircraft is a national humiliation, what exactly do you imagine Britain’s trains, water, power and airports are running on? Because 53% of the world’s commercial aircraft are leased — and in Britain, the railway itself is rented.
Dear Fadzayi,
I write to you as an elder writes to a clever younger relative — muninina — with respect for your mind, real regard for your training, and complete willingness to say the thing nobody at the family gathering wants to say.
Let me begin by giving you what is yours, because an argument that will not concede is not an argument, it is a performance.
You are right that Zimbabwe once had more. Air Zimbabwe did have a larger fleet. It did fly to more destinations. It did have a reputation that carried. That is not nostalgia — it is the record, and the loss of it is a genuine national wound. You are also right that a country’s leadership should be answerable for how that was lost. Accountability is not disloyalty, and a Zimbabwe where nobody asks hard questions is a Zimbabwe I would not want either. You have built a public life on asking them, often at cost, and I do not intend to pretend otherwise.
So the premise is partly sound. It is the conclusion I have come to talk to you about — and the instinct underneath it, which I think you have not examined.
The Country That Educated You Runs on Leases
Your sharpest line was about the leased aircraft. So let us go there, properly, with the seriousness a Cambridge-trained lawyer would apply to any other set of facts.
Read those bars again. In the 1970s, every commercial aircraft in the world was owned by the airline that flew it. Today the majority are not. British Airways leases. Lufthansa leases. Emirates leases. American carriers lease. Wet leasing — ACMI — is a standard instrument used across the industry to launch routes, cover seasonal peaks, replace grounded aircraft and start services without first finding a hundred million dollars.
So when Air Zimbabwe wet-leases an A330 to restart London after fourteen years, it is not doing something shameful and improvised. It is doing the ordinary thing, the way the rest of the industry does the ordinary thing.
And then there is Britain itself
Here is where I must ask you to sit with some discomfort. You were educated in a country you have never, to my knowledge, woken up at dawn to condemn for the way it runs its own national infrastructure. Let us look at it.
The Same Facts, Judged by Two Different Standards
One Practice, Two Verdicts
Leases its trains from foreign-owned finance houses → described as rolling stock provision.
Foreign state railways run its franchises → competitive tendering.
Flag carrier owned by a Spanish-registered group → industry consolidation.
Wet-leases aircraft to cover capacity → standard operational practice.
Wet-leases one A330 to restore a route lost for fourteen years → national humiliation.
Restores a direct link for its diaspora → nothing to celebrate.
Earns a UK regulator’s permit after years of exclusion → barely mentioned.
Fills the inaugural flight → evidence of gullibility.
Sister, I want you to look at that table without defensiveness, because it is not an insult — it is a diagnosis, and the condition it describes is extremely common among the best-educated Africans of our generation. It is the quiet internal ruling that when Europe improvises, it is called ingenuity; when Africa improvises, it is called failure. That the same instrument, in our hands, becomes evidence of our unseriousness.
A word about ingenuity, since Britain is the example
The Industrial Revolution you were taught to admire was not built by people who owned everything they used. It was built on borrowed capital, joint-stock companies, imported technique, foreign engineers, leased land and enormous debt. The genius of that era was not ownership. It was assembly — the willingness to put together whatever was available and start moving before conditions were perfect. Every railway company in Britain began by raising other people’s money.
So when Zimbabwe assembles an aircraft, a crew, a permit and a route — and flies — that is not the opposite of the industrial spirit you admire. It is precisely that spirit, applied by us. The only thing that has changed is who is doing it.
Mweya weShora-Shora: The Spirit of Belittling
In our culture we have a name for a particular affliction. Kushora — to belittle, to disparage, to find the fault first and always. Not honest criticism, which is a duty. Shora-shora is different: it is the reflex that must diminish the thing before it can be examined, because something in us cannot bear to see our own do well.
And I say this to you with real tenderness, because you are not stupid and this is not a stupid person’s failing — it is an educated person’s failing. It comes from spending formative years in institutions where African competence was the exception that had to be proved, where you learned to be twice as rigorous to be taken half as seriously, and where — without anyone ever saying it aloud — the standard of what counts as proper was set somewhere else. You did not choose that. It was installed.
Here is the test I would put to you, and I put it to myself too. Ask what it would take for you to say, publicly and without qualification: “This is good, and I am glad.” If the honest answer is almost nothing would qualify — if there is no achievable version of Zimbabwean success that could earn an unhedged sentence from you — then the position is no longer analysis. It has become an identity, and identities do not respond to evidence.
And that matters practically, not just spiritually. Criticism is a currency, and you are spending yours at a rate that will devalue it. If every single development is met with the same verdict and the same closing slogan, people stop hearing an argument and start hearing a reflex. Then, on the day something genuinely requires alarm — and in our politics that day always comes — the alarm will not carry, because the bell has been ringing all year. You will have disarmed yourself. That is my honest worry for you, offered as a warning rather than a jibe.
If It Is Nothing, Then Do Not Fly It
Boycott the aeroplane.
If Air Zimbabwe’s return is genuinely nothing — one plane, one route, a rented aircraft, no achievement at all — then lead by example. Do not book it. Ask those who agree with you not to book it. Keep connecting through other people’s hubs, on other people’s carriers, and let the seats be filled by Zimbabweans who believe the thing is worth rebuilding.
That is not a taunt. It is the ordinary consistency we expect of anyone who asks to lead. Positions have costs; leadership is paying yours in public. Zvekukwira dzose nemhepo hazviiti — you cannot ride every wind at once, condemning the aircraft on Monday and boarding it on Friday because the connection is convenient.
And if you would, in fact, board it — if you would use the direct flight, appreciate the four hours saved, and be glad of it — then the honest thing is to say so, and to fold that gladness into the criticism. “This is real progress, and it is not yet enough” is a sentence that costs you nothing and would gain you a great deal.
Leadership is knowing when a nation needs encouragement and when it needs correction — and being able to tell the two apart in real time. Both are duties. Neither is optional. A leader who only ever encourages is a flatterer; a leader who only ever corrects is a scold. The skill is in the switching.
There is an old teaching in our households: mudziyo wemusha haurashwi nekuti sadza rakatsva — you do not throw out the family pot because one meal burned. You scrape it, you fix the fire, you cook again tomorrow. You do not abandon the vessel that feeds everyone. A nation is that pot. It can be criticised, improved, argued over fiercely — and it must still be fed.
A leader does not lose credibility by celebrating a national achievement. They gain it — by demonstrating they can distinguish between politics and patriotism, and that their judgement is not simply the automatic inverse of whoever is in office.
And on silence
Not everything requires a response within the hour. Kunyarara dzimwe nguva ndiko kuita hunhu — sometimes silence is itself the mark of good character. It is not weakness and it is not surrender. It is the discipline of deciding that this particular moment belongs to somebody else’s joy, and choosing not to walk into it.
Thousands of Zimbabweans in Britain wept a little at that aircraft. Not because they are naive about our politics — they are not; they live in the diaspora precisely because of it — but because for fourteen years going home meant a connection, a queue in a third country, an explanation to someone else’s official. You could have let them have the day. The critique would have kept until Thursday. It always keeps.
Decolonise Faster, Muninina
I want to say the last part gently, because I mean it kindly.
Cambridge gave you a formidable set of tools, and I would never ask you to put them down. But an education acquired inside the former empire also installs something else, quietly, at no extra charge: a ruler. A measuring instrument calibrated to somebody else’s normal, by which our efforts will always read as small, improvised, insufficient. The tragedy is not that our critics use it. The tragedy is that our brightest carry it home and use it on their own people, believing it to be objectivity.
Decolonising the mind is not about rejecting what you learned. It is about noticing the ruler, and asking whether it is measuring or merely judging. Britain leases its trains and nobody calls it a failed state. Britain’s flag carrier is Spanish-owned and nobody calls it a humiliation. If those facts do not move you but one leased Zimbabwean aircraft does, the instrument is miscalibrated — and you are too rigorous a lawyer to accept a faulty instrument in any other part of your life.
And a word about the generation coming behind us. They are watching, and they are less patient with this than we were. They have grown up online, comparing notes with young people across the continent, and they have developed an accurate ear for the difference between someone who wants Zimbabwe fixed and someone who needs Zimbabwe broken. A politics that cannot celebrate anything will not inherit them. If the opposition tradition you belong to keeps sounding like a permanent funeral, then the slogan will eventually be turned around — and people will begin to say, quietly, that perhaps every side of our politics needs new leaders.
I would rather that did not happen to you, because we need you. We need clever, trained, fearless Zimbabweans holding power to account. We simply need you to be able to say “well done” when the thing is well done — otherwise you cannot be trusted on the day you say “this is wrong,” and that day matters far more.
Congratulations to Air Zimbabwe, to its crew, and to every Zimbabwean who boarded. May this milestone become the foundation of a bigger one — our own certificate, our own aircraft, our own maintenance base, and a route map that grows.
And to you, muninina: the door of this couch is open. Come and argue with me. Tinokugashira — you will be received, and fed, and disagreed with warmly.
Ziva kwawakabva. Simuka utarise nyika yako nemaziso ako, kwete nemaziso avamwe. Know where you came from. Rise and look at your country with your own eyes, not with somebody else’s.
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