Thabo Mbeki has a story to tell

15 May, 2016 - 00:05 0 Views
Thabo Mbeki  has a story to tell Thabo Mbeki

The Sunday Mail

Zimbabwe is in a conversation whose import is clearly economic. We are at that critical point in our journey when we must ask, “Where to with our economy?”

Do we turn back, or forge ahead to a summit we might not see just around the corner?
Within those conversations, we must ask about the politics of our economic endeavour; how have we mobilised politically to drive and achieve our economic agenda?
Sadly, we have allowed that entire conversation to solely centre on journalists, some of them of questionable intent.
Much like gossip columnists, such characters are far removed from telling the real story about Zimbabwe’s undercurrents.
They only see as far as they are told by social media, subsequently embarking on “dig-deeper” wild goose chases, never gaining the good sense to use their own investigative initiative to understand what the conversation is really about.
We are a people that suffers the tragedy of content-less conversation, stirred by story-tellers far removed from our common endeavour, aspiration.
And so the fickle political gossip-oriented pens of our media would rather be taken to stories of conflicts between youth and war veterans that only fuel a generational fracture that must otherwise find common economic purpose to further a new economic revolution.
The same journalists would rather write about a “burning” and “dying” economy, never about the consensus that will remedy and grow a new indigenous economy.
Their narrative is totally lost to the reality that it is about the transition that must have our political independence evolve into economic independence and prosperity.
All we have are journalists misdirected to “dig deeper” — blindly so — for a fool’s gold because they want the selling pull of a scandalous “scoop” for headlines.
“Zimbabwe Yes for Investment” seeks to unlock and awaken the economic force lying dormant within the country’s young people.
Zimbabwe will come 2017 surely take the lead in actioning the African Union’s theme, “Harnessing the Demographic Dividend Through Investment in Youth”.
Zimbabwe’s young people must define and tell our economic story.
But before we tell it, former South African President Thabo Mbeki also has a good story to tell about five Africans.
The story has the five Africans convincing a farmer to give them land that he had written off as unproductive.
The five, on being given the land, most likely sceptical about their intended endeavours, had a simple remedy of applying manure from the same farmer’s cattle.
President Mbeki says the land is now thriving, and the five Africans have since emerged as South Africa’s farmers of the year in Western Cape province.
This story was in the South Africa media. It was not in Zimbabwe’s media where some journalists chase their politically-disoriented tails.
And yet it is a story that should have certainly been reported in Zimbabwe’s media. Why?
Let me put it in Cde Mbeki’s exact words: “Now, it’s a good story to tell, because it’s Africans. But it’s Zimbabweans. Because Zimbabweans have got a very different attitude to land from what our people have.”
He goes on, “So, I wasn’t at all surprised to read the story that in Mumsbury in the Western Cape, you’ve got five Zimbabweans. Incidentally, I should have said this, all of them are University graduates in mathematics, in physics, in sciences. They are teaching at schools there and they do the farming over weekends.”
That is Cde Mbeki’s good story to tell in his and South African media’s, a conversation with South Africans on the matter of their land question and how exemplary innovative and resilient young Zimbabweans are.
Cde Mbeki prefers to call them Africans to signify our value, that our story is now that of a continental stature.
Why must we find ourselves importing the very tomatoes and onions our young people are growing in South Africa when they can do it here?
Why must we import processed produce when our university students can become empowerment hubs to harness their innovation and technical skills towards agro-processing and industrialisation?
We have proved ourselves an educated, innovative and resilient lot of young people.
While our media would have us in panic over a “dying” economy, we remain resilient and become innovative.
That is the national interest of economic liberators.
That is the platform for the heart-to-heart between young Zimbabweans and war veterans as suggested by the Secretary for Welfare Services for War Veterans, War Collaborators, Former Political Detainees and Restrictees, Brigadier-General (Retired) Asher Walter Tapfumaneyi.
In Zimbabwe’s economic endeavour, our historical experience must be a mirror to our ideological objective, to our national cause for total independence that began with the First Chimurenga.
President Mugabe represents that cause and its history, yet he has demanded that we, young Zimbabweans, look into the windscreen and take up our place in the driver’s seat in Zimbabwe’s journey to economic independence.
His is a vision drawn from political experience, underpinned by an economic outlook.
We too have a good story to tell. Let’s tell it.

Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and indigenisation and economic empowerment consultant. His views do not necessarily reflect those of any institution he is associated with

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