The Sunday Mail
Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri
The President’s message since he took over in November has been consistent.
These are the messages that have informed this manifesto.
We are building on from the 100 days cycle and the projects that the President has prioritised.
In looking at the road ahead, for the next five years, we also looked back at the 2013 manifesto and evaluated or introspected to see where we had failed as a party.
We consulted very widely in coming up with this manifesto.
We held meetings at cell level to get input from the people on the ground in line with our President’s message that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Our consultative process also reached out to stakeholders such as women, the youth, the workers themselves, farmers and also civil servants.
We also interacted with community leaders such as traditional chiefs to appreciate their concerns.
Our outreach programme also involved interface with the Diaspora community, who will continue to be important players in shaping the future of our country.
Opinion leaders, captains of industry and academics were also part of the process.
Agriculture is the mainstay of our economy so we spent quiet a lot of time on it.
This was done to see what we were able to deliver during the last five years in all sectors, including agriculture and what was of major highlight was the command agriculture which he, the President himself, initiated.
Yes we had redistributed land but we wanted the land to be productive so that was high on our agenda.
We need to mechanise and modernise our farming and that was the major message that was in the manifesto, building on programs he had already started.
In the mining sector, we looked at identifying what we already have and minerals such as lithium which we have not been able to take advantage of.
Lithium is a good example of one major resource which is much sought throughout the whole world so this is a plus on our part that we are going to pursue this rigorously, while also giving attention to our traditional success stories such as platinum and gold.
On the infrastructure side, we were looking at road networks, we said a lot of contracts and tenders were issued during the old regime, but they were never implemented so we are saying we now need to build on this using the available resources.
We looked at it and said how best can we address this. We are looking at how we can also involve the Diaspora community.
Yes we want investors from outside Zimbabwe, but we need to appreciate that the first opportunity should also accrue to our own children because we cannot claim to be independent if we are not in control of our own resources.
So our message is that yes we did well in education, but most of our children are abroad, they have acquired so much experience, we want to tap on that experience now.
All the resources we have managed to mobilise outside the country, we should now embrace it back in Zimbabwe and we should be our own liberators.
On education, we are saying we have not been investing a lot of resources into research.
China has developed because they consider research as very critical to development.
We are still importing tractors, all the implements and we are asking ourselves how can we develop in agriculture like this?
Now the new thrust of our universities should be research.
We need a student who should be in a position to address our challenges.
As a country, we need to produce our own technology, and we need people with skills, not just graduates who are theoretical in approach.
We have to change our mind-set, we cannot continuously emphasise on social arts.
Emphasis should now be on STEM; we had started, but the speed at which we were going did not address some of these issues that I’m talking about.
So you will see now in our manifesto that we are emphasising on those areas.
Then women’s concerns, for a long time now we have been talking about women’s bank for us to address the issue of financial resources that women require for them to be empowered economically.
So what we are saying is that we need to resource a new bank, we need to launch it so that women can start benefiting, it’s one thing that we talk about an idea, it’s another for us to be able to say let’s launch the bank and resource it.
Then also we are looking at employment in as far as graduates are concerned.
There are too many graduates doing nothing. Most of the problems that we are facing are because we have people who cannot be employed anywhere.
So we are saying now, those countries that require our nurses, those countries that require our teachers, we should be able, through bilateral relations, to negotiate so that we are able to export our human capital in those areas, but for others, they can be re-trained in other areas because we are opening up the economy.
I have mentioned mining, I have mentioned agriculture, we require people with relevant skills so for them to be helpful we need to re-engage them in another way so the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education is going to be very busy in terms of changing the thrust of that ministry.
Then the other issue is the youth. We have been talking about them going into housing projects, but we also want them to learn from China and we are saying it’s not just an issue of handing out stands as was the case in the past.
With our population expanding, we need to be strategic as we address the issue of accommodation, there will be cheap accommodation which can be afforded by any citizen in Zimbabwe.
Same for the youth, because this was a targeted group if you remember the interface rallies. They were promised stands, but do we have that land?
What about the future generation?
We are changing our strategy and we are saying, yes, housing for the youth, but we are also going to be putting together projects, fishing projects, at a commercial level.
We are saying now we have to commercialise just like other countries like Zambia.
This is what you find in the manifesto.
Cde Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri is the Zanu-PF chairperson. She shared these views with The Sunday Mail’s Chief Reporter Kuda Bwititi soon after the launch of Zanu PF’s manifesto and election campaign on Friday May 4 at the Harare International Conference Centre.
