TAU TAVENGWA: I’ve been reading about the work you are doing in Zimbabwe, specifically dealing with human rights. I thought we could chat about what that means in a context with a massive youth demographic, and experiencing quite significant migration of these young people into the country’s cities. Tell me about your organisation, WELEAD.

NAMATAI KWEKWEZA: WELEAD Trust is a youth leadership development and advocacy organisation based in Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s been in existence since November 2017. We focus on increasing the participation space for young people. We use the Zimbabwean constitutional definition of “young”, which is 15 to 35. That definition is also affirmed in the African Youth Charter. We train leaders using what we call the iServe leadership model: Innovation, Servant leadership, Empathy, Responsibility, Volunteerism, and Expression.

As an institution, we have this radical belief that every human being deserves to live a life filled with opportunity, a life lived of unlimited possibility. We want everyone to have access to infrastructure and systems that affirm and support all their capabilities and aspirations with the condition that they are willing to pursue it and work for it. This is not possible if you are in an environment where your rights are consistently violated.

If your right to a good education is denied, if you cannot access clean drinking water, you have limited freedom of expression, [freedom] from torture, or the right to legal representation of choice when you need it, that limits your potential.

This is what we focus on as an organisation, and is why we fight for human rights. That’s why we do what we do.

TT: How do you define opportunity?

NK: How we define opportunity is always relative and subjective, and depends on context. We are not prescriptive, and do not seek to define for others what an opportunity looks like for them. We focus on the fundamentals.

If you work on education [but] not on having a good economy that supports the socio-economic rights of people—where they don’t have jobs, cannot access credit, or build businesses that can create even more opportunities for others—that’s not enough.

That’s the situation in Zimbabwe right now. We keep educating people knowing full well that they wouldn’t have an opportunity for employment or to make a good livelihood. The environment is not permissive.

We target the government, those in power, and we work through various channels to apply pressure to decision-makers to ensure that whatever decisions they’re making are designed to fulfil the fundamental rights of every citizen for a start, and to create an environment that allows individuals to take whatever opportunities emanate from that. We leave it to the individual to take and decide whatever looks and feels like an opportunity for them.

TT: An interesting statistic I came across recently is that across the African continent there are about 11 million people annually coming out of educational institutions with some kind of higher education certificate, diploma, or degree. However, all the economies across the continent only manage to create about 3.9 million formal jobs annually. They just get absorbed into the huge number of people whose only chance of earning a penny lies in the informal economy. I thought I would mention that, because it contextualises what you’re saying about how you define what an opportunity is. We have this big challenge across the continent. Let’s go back to something you also mentioned. That applying pressure to the authorities, to the government, is an important component of what you do. What form does that pressure take? How are you doing that?

NK: It’s a spectrum. In certain cases, we engage with parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Youth, others with the Ministry of Youth, for example, or whatever the relevant ministry is on the issue we might be working on. Other times, that’s neither possible nor enough, so we use other tactics that can range from petitions, protests and marches, or digital/social media. The ability to tell our stories with our own voices is a powerful thing, and all our campaigns are premised on that.

I’ll give you one example of this. For a very long time, the Zimbabwean government was refusing to publicly acknowledge
the horrible conditions in our public hospitals. We spent about three months earlier this year running a campaign as citizens to highlight what we were observing. Initially, there was a lot of backlash against people speaking out, but after the deluge of stories and experiences that were shared, the authorities could no longer ignore the situation. Time will tell how it goes, but now there are some attempts to fix the issues in our hospitals and public health facilities. The ability to shape the public discourse, to shape a narrative, is something that we prize, and take very seriously.

I’ll give you one example of this. For a very long time, the Zimbabwean government was refusing to publicly acknowledge the horrible conditions in our public hospitals. We spent about three months earlier this year running a campaign as citizens to highlight what we were observing. Initially, there was a lot of backlash against people speaking out, but after the deluge of stories and experiences that were shared, the authorities could no longer ignore the situation. Time will tell how it goes, but now there are some attempts to fix the issues in our hospitals and public health facilities. The ability to shape the public discourse, to shape a narrative, is something that we prize, and take very seriously.

It’s critical to be cognisant of the context we operate in. There has been a sustained erosion of civic space in Zimbabwe. A lot of governments across the African continent are dealing with their people heavy-handedly.

We have to factor this into how we strategise because sometimes participation comes with great risk. We have had many moments where people do not show up because they feel that the cost of just showing could be much higher than what they are willing to pay. So that’s also something we think about a lot, and we employ whatever tactics work best under each circumstance.

TT: What in that toolbox of tactics have you found most effective? Where have you gotten the best results?

NK: I feel we’ve had the most wins with our leadership development programmes. We have done a lot of training, and some of the young people we’ve trained have gone on to do their own thing, and it’s actually really dynamic. We believe in the ability to replicate good leadership and one’s capacity to show up for your community as a full citizen. So, leadership training is one of the most powerful things we’ve done. Some of the young people that have participated in our training programmes have gone on to become members of the Model Youth Parliament, for example. A few are now parliamentarians, and even more have gone into local politics and become city councillors.

NK: I feel we’ve had the most wins with our leadership development programmes. We have done a lot of training, and some of the young people we’ve trained have gone on to do their own thing, and it’s actually really dynamic. We believe in the ability to replicate good leadership and one’s capacity to show up for your community as a full citizen. So, leadership training is one of the most powerful things we’ve done. Some of the young people that have participated in our training programmes have gone on to become members of the Model Youth Parliament, for example. A few are now parliamentarians, and even more have gone into local politics and become city councillors.

Some of the biggest issues we are faced with are infrastructure-based, where you’ve got roads that are so dilapidated, no access to electricity, and water [shortages], as I mentioned.

This is not just the result of more people in the city, but largely the result of a lot of corruption, a huge problem we are dealing with across the country. It’s very easy to see how an instance of corruption results in a terrible road regardless of the fact that money is being spent on it every year to fix the same problem, for example. Some of these big companies win tenders to build roads, and then they will build something so substandard that in three to five years, it’s already pothole-infested.

We are seeing this play out in Harare, and our work and advocacy is intrinsically connected to how we get better outcomes.

I was born in 1998. By that time, the Zimbabwean economy was in shambles, and many systems that I am told were previously highly functional were starting to collapse. This was accelerated by the volatility and repression that came with, and followed, the land invasions that were orchestrated by Mugabe as he clung to power.

So, my generation has never seen or lived with function and normalcy. There are young people growing up in Harare who have never seen water coming out of a tap in their house. In the country’s largest urban area, they have grown up fetching water at a community well. It’s unbelievable. And then you see the president proudly going about commissioning wells in urban areas. It’s embarrassing. I can’t remember the last time I drank water from our tap. We always buy mineral water, because tap water is filthy. If you leave it in a bottle, it turns green after a few days.

When I went to Germany, it was a culture shock. I kept requesting bottles of mineral water. And the Germans would gossip that, “Oh, she’s such a diva. Look at her. She only drinks bottled water.”

And finally I told them, “I don’t drink tap water, because where I come from, it’s dirty.” And they said, “here in Germany, it’s safer to drink tap water than bottled water.” And it was a culture shock for me. I was like, “so I can actually drink this?”

I’m saying all this to illustrate one point. Because we’ve been so traumatised and used to the trauma of things that don’t work, when we find ourselves in environments where things do work, our instinct is to resist how they work. It creates a whole other psychology that is difficult to shake off, and that trauma will impact the future.

Something has to give.

We need leadership or a movement that can capture the collective imagination of a young mind in Zimbabwe. We need a movement able to spark an imagination of the future in ways that animate the youth of Zimbabwe, and the continent, into being hopeful, and [driven towards] clear planning and thinking about how to get there. We need a vision of the future that’s greater than the fear of what will happen to us if we challenge and disrupt, or try to dismantle, the status quo.

We have no nostalgia or reminiscence of what used to be. We want a future, and that comes with a plan about what we want to happen in the next 20, 30, 50 years. As young people, it is worth going out of our way to fight for this future. It is worth struggling, challenging, and being threatened with death and imprisonment for.