National Development: Kick Out Corruption -Fr Chris Matsilele SJ

A Personal Concept of Development at St. Rupert Mayer Mission - Makonde (Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season waiting for the rains)

Fr Chrispen Matsilele SJ

Human beings are meaning making beings. Meaning making is sensible if our lives transfigure, transform and impact positively on the lives of others. St. Rupert Mayer’s development embodies this ethos, in my view. It is meant to be an experimental example for promoting a self-sustaining mission in the twenty-first century through which other missions would easily model themselves.

National development can be considered as the ability of a nation-state to positively transfigure, transform and impact the social wellbeing of its people: comprehensive medical care, quality education, meaningful infrastructure (transportation and communication networks), clean safe water, food, reliable-sustainable-effective sources of energy and necessary freedoms among others.

St. Rupert is a Catholic mission in the Diocese of Chinhoyi entrusted to the Jesuits. It is located on the rich soil hilly-countryside of Chief Chigaro in Makonde, about 80km from Chinhoyi town and 208km from Harare. It is one of the poorest missions run by the Society of Jesus in Zimbabwe serving the poor community of Makonde.

The Jesuits I worked with at the mission namely Trust Dekwende, Caswell Machivenyika and Frank Taruona embarked on the rough road to experiment with the idea of turning St. Rupert into a centre of excellence and meaningful development. The development plan was to speak to the following key areas: quality education (boarding school), medical care (through the hospital), food (through farming), reliable sources of energy (solar, bio-digesters and biogas production), and clean water (boreholes) among other

Mukai - Vukani No.76 | April 2020 | Mukai - Vukani No.74 | April 2020 | possibilities.

24 Boarding School and Creation of a market for Agricultural produce St Rupert Mayer Mission runs a primary and secondary school. Both are day schools. The two schools serve a community that exhibits a general negative attitude towards education so the rate of children dropping out of school and getting married are very high. Running a meaningful value addition education in Makonde is a mammoth task because of the harshness of the place. So it has always been almost impossible to retain skilled manpower in the two schools and the hospital. This made the situation worrisome. The victims of this non-retention of skilled manpower are moreoften-than-not, the pupils and the patients from the local community that the mission serves. Given that situation, running day schools was non-sustainable. The mission initiated a 600 capacity boarding

1. Provide value education for the locals by mixing them with other students from far. Through this mixing, it is hoped that a cross-pollution of ideas between the local, Makonde pupils and those from outside can bring about a fusion of horizons and help enlarge the local pupils’ worldviews. In the same vein, this would also expose those from outside to the reality of the pupils from the local community.

2. To be the center through which the pupils’ lives are transformed through quality education. Once were able to transfigure, transform and impact the young generation, then the entire community, which lags behind other communities, would never remain the same.

3. To make the mission’s high school self-sustaining and be able to retain highly skilled teachers and members of staff.

4. To foster through it the core of Ignatian spirituality of MAGIS (i.e., to do more and to be more) and experiment with value education that the Jesuit Education Office of the in Zimbabwe – Mozambique Province advocates particularly towards marginalized children and communities. This is intended to turn the frontier into a world of opportunities and better service.

5. To provide a market for the local community’s agro-business and for the mission’s agricultural produce. Food was going to be one of the greatest needs for boarding students; hence the idea of reviving the community irrigation systems in order to supplement what the mission through its farming projects would not be able to meet. Once the local community members are enabled to make money by taking advantage of the mission as a market for agricultural produce, then they would be able to pay school fees for their children. When I first arrived at St. Rupert Mission, almost up to 75% were unable to pay schools fees. This situation made it untenable to run a meaningful mission high school.

Scholarship program

The boarding school developed a scholarship program. Because of poverty education was not among the priorities of the locals. So the boarding school, from a humble beginning, developed a scholarship programme targetting local pupils from economically challenged backgrounds. As a Jesuit Priest, I used to get US$100 as pocket money per month. I used it to pay school fees for the poorest students who happened to be gifted. Moved by the plight of the students I sought help from Hans an Austrian friend. He became proactive and through him 3000 Euros was raised and the Fr Richert and Br Lisson SJ Scholarship was established. They say, “when you walk alone you walk very fast but only go short distance but when you walk with others, you walk slowly but go

Mukai - Vukani No.76 | April 2020 | Mukai - Vukani No.74 | April 2020 | far.” More than 20 pupils have gone through this scholarship program to date. The idea was simple: transfigure, transform and impact the most talented but economically challenged children of the local community and change the future.

Food, Water and Energy – the Heart of Development

The introduction of the mission boarding school with approximately 600 pupils called for food, water, energy and more so, waste management. Though very poor, the mission is blessed with plenty of water from Mpfuri River and 115 hectares of wonderful arable land. So we embarked on farming in the form of crop and small animals production. The larger picture in the small animals project was to jointly do chicken production with friends where St. Rupert was to have a 50% shareholding. The proceeds from this enterprise would help sustain the mission. This idea was to be based on the Monastery model in upper Austria in which the community would play a very pivotal role. The development would involve a process that first empowers the mission, the local community then other missions in Chinhoyi Diocese before expanding to other dioceses. This way, we could create a self-sustaining Church by turning the entire mission into a nexus of development. Fr. Gillie mooted this idea to me when I discussed with him about impactful development. He is a man ahead of his time in terms of vision.

energy at Makonde, we proposed to build bio-digesters and biogas facilities in order to avoid using none-renewable sources of energy like firewood and coal. Sewer waste within the entire mission was to be used for this purpose. The residual from the bio-digester would be manure for crops, trees and grounds in the mission. In this regard, the mission worked closely with a university in Germany (Technical University of Munich—TUM). Currently, there is a lot of deforestation taking place in Makonde. Our vision was to expand this idea of producing biogas to the local community so that they too could produce energy for cooking, heating and lighting. Imagine a community completely turned away from cutting trees for energy! Corruption and how it kills vision in Zimbabwe For national development to occur, indeed, corruption should be kicked out first. At the heart of corruption is personal deification: “I, Me and Myself.” This is a lack of vision beyond self. The corruption hubris begins with how we chose our leaders. When we choose leaders with no vision, we actually baptize corruption. Leaders with no vision spend most of their time destroying men and women with vision. They surround themselves with non-vision loyal subjects. The highest form of corruption, which is a disservice to national development, can be captured in the following observation: When you kill someone’s vision, it is not him that suffers but the people that depend on him. There is much evidence of sycophants in Zimbabwe due to lack of vision beyond oneself, destroying of individual vision and nepotism. In such an environment, national development will never live to see a new day until there is political and personal metanoia to kick out corruption. Conclusion In conclusion, development that is capable of transfiguring, transforming and impacting the wellbeing of the nation should always start with an individual vision, which then moves to the family, the community and the nation-state. For us, meaningful and impactful development was to start first within St. Rupert Mayer Mission, moving towards the immediate community of Chigaro and to the far outstations of the mission, then the Church in Chinhoyi Diocese before it become national. The success of missions is the success of the communities and the success of the communities is the development of the nation – state, if government takes a leaf from such endeavours. The Church can drive this change and development that we want to see. But national development is impossible without striving to kick out corruption in its different subtle forms.