IT’S ALL ABOUT CAUSE, RESPONSIBILITY

Given any chance, many people would always want to take the easy way out of any tricky or difficult situation.

This is one of the common facts about life. If you asked as high school student as to why they got bad results in their final high school examinations, they would most probably give you all sorts of excuses except the real reason why. You would most probably be told about the lack of school fees, hence having to be frequently expelled from school and thereby missing many lessons.

You would also most likely be told about family hunger and poverty, hence having to sleep or go to school on an empty stomach. Then you would also be told about the poor learning conditions at school, lack of textbooks, teachers, teaching aids and so forth and so on. You would be told about everything else except about the lack of appropriate effort on the part of the student!

That you would not be told about at all! This is because lack of appropriate effort on the part of the student would take away the causes of and responsibility for failure from the realm of fate or destiny, where the student would like these causes to be and put them squarely in the hands of the student himself or herself, where, in all honesty, they rightly belong regardless of everything else!

Some of you may think that putting the blame or responsibility for failure in the hands of the student himself or herself first and foremost under such dire circumstances as described above is being rather too harsh or too cruel, or oblivious of other very important attendant factors as suggested by what the student would like to premise as alluded to above.
But this is not true or correct at all, and I will show you why just now. In fact, this is the whole gist of this article. Success or failure in life is not about fate or destiny. Success or failure in life is not solely or primarily caused by prevailing unfortunate life circumstances or conditions. It is primarily caused by failure to take appropriate responsibility at the personal and individual level. Every one of us always plays a hand in and is primarily responsible for everything and anything which happens to us in life, good or bad!

This is a fact of life which many people do not want to accept, but it still remains a fact of life all the same. You are the maker of your own fate or destiny in life. Life is not all about fate and destiny but it is all about cause and responsibility! I might as well end this article here and now, but let me continue to explain myself further for those doubting Thomases amongst us.    

I have seen and known of students who came from very, very poor family backgrounds, and went to very, very poorly-equipped rural primary and high schools. The schools they went to did not have enough teachers, textbooks, teaching aids, running water or electricity. The students were frequently expelled from school for lack of school fees, thereby missing a lot of lessons. They also frequently slept on empty stomachs. But regardless of all these odds staked against them, they still passed their final high school examinations with flying colours, went to university and became very successful medical doctors, engineers, teachers and university professors.

Considering their poverty stricken family backgrounds, the very poorly equipped rural schools they went to, the lack of textbooks, teachers and everything else, one would have thought that such students were destined or ill-fated to fail their final high school examinations. But they did not fail. Instead, they passed with flying colours!
Naysayers and those who believe in fate or destiny would contend that such students were gifted with natural intelligence anyway, and that this is the reason why they passed their final examinations with flying colours regardless of everything else.

But this is absolutely not true or correct at all! Even if such students may have had Albert Einstein like IQs (intelligence quotients), they would still have failed their final examinations if they had not given their studies their all and everything despite the odds being highly stacked against them. Natural intelligence alone without studying would never make one pass any examination, let alone with flying colours! You cannot know what you have not learnt, studied or read about. What high achievers do is that despite the odds being stacked against them, they would always consciously, deliberately and purposefully try to fight very hard and win against all those odds.

Thus, faced with highly-poverty stricken backgrounds, high achieving students would have the greatest motivation to get out of that poverty and then do something practical about it. Empty stomachs would spur them forward instead of discourage them. The little food they have would not be wasted but used for maximum benefit. During the time they are expelled from school for lack of school fees, they would borrow textbooks, notes and other study materials and then hungrily devour them.

Their heightened motivation to get out of poverty would see their information retention capacity from reading borrowed textbooks, notes and other study materials soaring through the roof. Students from relatively rich families who afford to have the required textbooks frequently perform worse than students from poor families who borrow and read those books for just a few moments!

Our poverty stricken students do not just sit back, fold their arms and accept that they were destined or ill-fated to fail their final high school examinations anyway just because of their poor backgrounds. Instead, they fight against all the odds which are naturally stacked against them and succeed.Rather than just sitting back and taking the easy way out by blaming their unfortunate and out of their control circumstances for their failure, they take responsibility and cause their own success despite all the seemingly insurmountable odds.

This is the kind of thing which we as human beings do not usually do in life and yet we should always be doing!   
When faced with teething life challenges, we usually just want to give up, sit back, relax, moan, groan, cry, pray and do absolutely nothing to help ourselves out. We want to blame fate and destiny for our own failures in life. For failure to pass our final high school examinations, we usually want to blame everything else, or to just take refuge in the fact that we have different intellectual gifts or talents from the most high.

And yet that failure would not have anything to do with or been caused by our natural lack of intelligence, impoverished or unfortunate circumstances of any sort, but by our very own and personal relaxed work ethics, lack of dedication to duty, lack of vision and laziness, or lack of commitment to the task at hand. Sometimes we are even wilfully distracted from our very important life goals and objectives by other extraneous things like concentrating on enjoying ourselves while in high school or university instead of concentrating on our studies.  And yet at the end of it all, we still want to blame fate or destiny when we fail in our life endeavours!

One of the saddest scenarios whereby most people just give up to fate and destiny instead of taking responsibility and fighting for the cause or doing something positive to help themselves is in the realm of the politics of government, be it at local or national level. At local government authority level, many people do not know or realise the personal and individual powers which they have to improve their own living environmental, social and economic conditions.

Many city and town dwellers do not know or realise the fact that city and town councils are put into place and deployed by them and in order to serve them and not in order to boss them around as they usually do. City and town dwellers do not know that they are the bosses of city and town councils instead of the other way round. City and town residents have got the right and power to hire and fire their own city or town councils as they wish, if and when they do not deliver the services for which they put them into place in the first place.

If the state of the provision of such services as shelter (housing), food, health, education, transport, communication, safety and security in the city or town leaves a lot to be desired, city and town residents have got the freedom, right, responsibility and obligation to kick out their municipal or town councils and install fresh ones which would deliver needed services to their desired service quality levels.

The same applies with the government. Citizens have got the right to good quality service delivery from their own national governments. They also have got the right and freedom to install and uninstall their own national government as they please. If any national government no longer serves the purposes for which its own people installed it, those people themselves have got the inalienable right, freedom and responsibility to uninstall government and to install another one in its place.

However, most people are not aware of their freedoms, rights, powers and responsibilities in this regard. Instead they unfortunately think that they are ill-fated or ill-destined to be ruled by monopolistic, incompetent, racist, dictatorial, autocratic, corrupt, cruel, fraudulent and murderous regimes, and yet this is not the case at all. It is not all about fate and destiny but all about cause and responsibility!

The responsibility to transform one’s life for the worse or for the better, either as an individual or as a collective, is, has always been, and will always be in one’s own hands, either as an individual or as a collective. No one will ever cause anything to happen in one’s own life, good or bad, except oneself! Hence the saying that you deserve what you get rings true and correct bells through and through!

People who live in so called rich, developed and democratic countries really deserve to live in those countries because they are the ones who made those countries to be as rich, as developed and as democratic as they are, both as individuals and also as a collective. It is them who made sure that their politicians did what they wanted them to do for them and their countries instead of being dictatorial, selfish and corrupt.

Similarly, people who live in so called poor, undeveloped and undemocratic countries also really deserve to live in those countries because they are the ones who let their own politicians run their countries as if they were their own farms and also as if themselves, the people, where their farm workers! Need I say more? I rest my case!    
Dr Cleopas Sibanda: Occupational Health and Social Protection Specialist Physician 

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