Online Reporter
AROUND one million Zimbabweans live outside the country, the majority, just over three quarters, in South Africa but with significant groups in Britain, the United States of America and Australasia. Others are scattered in many other countries and between them they form a major asset for their native country.
Many of these are professionally or technically qualified, or are the children of those professionals, and manage to be both active in the countries where they live, or where they have settled and in some cases taken on citizenship, and yet still maintain ties to Zimbabwe and to family living in Zimbabwe.
Besides those living and working in other countries, there is also a vibrant community of Zimbabweans across the universities of the world studying and doing research, many of whom maintain even closer ties and will one day return with their skills.
President Mnangagwa has made it clear that Zimbabwe values those in the diaspora, not just for the money they send home and that is a significant US$1,8 billion a year, but for their many other contributions, what he called the social remittances when he spoke this week to Zimbabweans working and studying in Azerbaijan.
The President almost always manages to meet Zimbabweans keen to maintain ties to their country when he visits other countries, and these diaspora meetings, along with those with potential investors, are normally slotted into his busy schedule as important additions to the official programme with the foreign government or international conference.
The value of the monetary remittances is easy to quantify, and they appear in our national accounts and allow Zimbabwe to maintain its positive balance of payments. When inflows of foreign currency are higher than outflows, economic growth is speeded up.
Besides that there is a large block of families who are able to cope better because of money that comes in from relatives and family assets are being built up as a result.
But as the President made clear, he sees the social contributions as probably more valuable, the diaspora being a major link between Zimbabwe and the rest of the world and helping to ensure that Zimbabweans think more globally.
In addition, many people in the host countries who live with, work with and study with Zimbabweans have a far better idea of what Zimbabwe is and what sort of people Zimbabweans are.
This mix of different nationalities is now common throughout the world and does help to grease the wheels of social and economic advances. It is possible to be a valuable, law-abiding and active person in a foreign country, and the President made it clear that he expected Zimbabweans living abroad to do that, as well as maintain emotional, cultural and family ties with the “old country”.
Besides Zimbabweans working outside the country, there are large blocks of Zimbabweans studying outside the country.
The President saw these as another interesting asset, picking up new ideas and concepts, and quite often a new language as well, along with their more advanced academic studies and so benefiting themselves, and their country, over a broader range.
In some ways this immersion in a foreign culture must be the equivalent of the Heritage-based Education 5.0 their fellow citizens back home are now being immersed in. All this in addition to what was the traditional and more narrow education of the past allows our young people to move forward with greater confidence and a range of practical extra experience.
That, naturally, benefits the young person moving forward, but it also benefits their country as the more people we have who can innovate and apply everything they learn fully, the better off we are.
There have, in the past and still on some social websites, gross over-estimates of the size of the Zimbabwean diaspora.
Fortunately, hard numbers are easy to obtain and confirm.
ZimStat, in the census, now asks Zimbabwean residents if they have relatives living outside the country, and the statistical agencies in those countries are also interested in finding out how many foreigners or people of foreign origin they are hosting.
The multiple sets of totally independent statistics are remarkably close, and again they fit in very closely to what immigration authorities around the world keep in their databases.
The remarkable figures sometimes floated on social sites originally arose, when not deliberately distorted, from the fall in birth rates in Zimbabwe as a result of the major advances in primary health and female education after independence, the two drivers in many countries of a change to birth rates moving closer to replacement levels.
There was a gap between the estimates using the old rates from the colonial days and the actual numbers, that led to some uninformed speculation, kept going by those with a political agenda who are prepared to distort facts.
But a diaspora of one million is still a healthy and vibrant international community of Zimbabweans who can be automatic ambassadors for their country of origin by being decent, hard-working and ethical people, and bridge for the cross-pollination of cultures and other social ties that help to make the world a better and more interesting place.
leeroy mupariri
