Part 3 of 15 Thinking Mistakes That Cost You, Many Africans and Some Zimbabweans and South Africans Their Precious Time and Life.

5. Responsibility Avoidance

In many cases, we look at something or someone to blame as a psychological strategy, conscious or unconscious, to avoid responsibility and ownership. Blaming is avoiding responsibility. Every time we blame something or someone for our own situation or circumstance, the mother of every blame is;

“It is not me.” Or

“It’s not my fault.”

You can not possibly blame something or someone without first “saying”,

“It is not my fault.”

If you are supporting someone in blaming someone or something, you cannot succeed without first “saying”

“It is not his or her or their fault.”

“Or it is not them or her or him.”

When we say blaming, we mean a situation where you absolve yourself or defend someone who is absolving oneself from being responsible for some undesirable outcome or situation or occurrence.

In some cases, it is true that it might not be your fault for sure and it is counterproductive to accept responsibility for something you did not cause.

The problem is as soon as you say,

“It is not my fault” in matters that concern your own affairs, you are not solving any problem.

When you are in a position where you are supposed to solve problems and make things the way they should be in your family and you say;

“It is not my fault that I cannot provide for you. It is the government’s fault because it is not creating jobs,” you are not solving any problem and you are creating conditions and space to avoid the responsibility for providing for the family.

When you are leading a company or business and things are not going on well and you say,

“We cannot produce the desired results or better results because of the environment,” the environment may have not been good but still you are not solving any problem because leadership is about delivering results in the most difficult of times.

The environment has no ears and is not interested in your results. The environment rarely interferes that much with our ability to think and solve problems.

Imagine you were a commander in battle and you say,

“We could not win the battle because the environment was too hot or it was too cold.”

Can you negotiate with your enemy on a suitable date, weather and season to fight?

We are responsible to some extent to most of the things that happen to us and around us. Instead of avoiding responsibility, we must ask these questions;

How did I contribute to this? Or

How am I contributing to this situation?

Even when we did not contribute to our situations, we must still take responsibility to solve our problems and address situations.

There is a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits is;

Be Proactive

Being proactive means taking responsibility for your success and outcomes. This means accepting your contribution to any outcomes and also being part of the solution even in situations and in solving problems that you may not have contributed to creating.

Avoiding responsibility is a sign of a victim mindset and victim-minded people never win and achieve little if anything in any situation.

6. Overdependence on Other Countries and Continents

This one is big in Africa both at individual, country-level and continent levels. At a personal level, when people face financial and economic hardships in their countries, they skip borders and go to other countries. It makes sense because it is also not intelligent to sit around and starve when you have no other options. Many highly qualified and experienced Africans are working outside their countries and many outside Africa because leaving home is often the only option left.

The hope is that the time will come when more Africans will be able to create their own opportunities within their own countries so that they won’t s strong dependence on other countries. Here it is important to point out that those who leave their countries must not be blamed or treated like weaklings or cowards because people do the best they can to survive based on how they see their own situations. The hope is for a natural evolution not a forced situation on the individuals because individuals have the freedom and right to choose their own destinies. At the same time, the potential for tensions between countries remains high when uncontrolled migration happens as what is already happening for example in South Africa.

Most African countries are too dependent on other countries for very basic things and economic goods and services to the point where the countries will never seriously develop their own economies and gain real economic independence. It does not make much economic sense for an African country to import basic goods including agricultural products from another African country except under exceptional conditions such as droughts and disasters. 

Africa is still economically too dependent on other continents in the area of trade, with too much trade in raw materials and imports of finished goods. This is a big economic scandal because Africa provides raw materials cheaply to outside Africa, have goods produced and then buys the goods at prices that produce profit for the outside manufacturers. Because Africa does not make much in terms of production and manufacturing equipment; the continent suffers. This way, Africa cannot produce much of its own goods and services for global export and remains a supplier of raw materials and a consumer and market for finished products. This way Africa’s industrialization will remain talk ad infinitum.

Have you noticed how African countries is a leaking bucket education-wise? How the continent and most of its countries invest heavily in its education and then lose the educated who become productive in other countries and the educating countries get almost nothing for their investment in education? This is because industry and commerce development in those countries is sluggish and economies in either stagnant or regressive states.

Africa talks a lot about the right economic things but it does exactly the opposite of what it talks about. Many talks and conferences on industrialisation and economic independence but no serious action on the ground. Things are mooted in offices, carried to conferences and workshops and conventions, talked gloriously about it and then retired to heaven knows where. These conferences are lucky if they are at least recorded, documented, shared and secured so that at least future generations might use those outputs that are usable. Sadly, some of the outputs are merely academic-type outputs that lack much of any practically usable content.

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©Simon Bere, 2023