The Sunday Mail
You have to give it to President Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
He has a way of drawing to him those presumed to be against him. He establishes common identity founded upon historical perspective with its shared experience and anticipated common future.
By Rangu Nyamurundira
It becomes a disarming moment against any malice, one that reasserts comradeship.
Incoming Sadc Chair and Botswana President Ian Khama was caught in that moment, as his predecessor in the regional bloc reminded him of the relationship that he had with his late father, Seretse Khama, one founded on a shared experience of historic prejudice and a united struggle to overcome it.
President Khama responded, paying tribute to President Mugabe’s Chairmanship, which “reshaped the pace and course of our region”, advocating for the industrialisation of Sadc’s national economies and beneficiation of the region’s natural resources.
More personally, Ian Khama was “humbled” by the elderly maestro’s “recollection of our history as a country (Botswana) and of that of my parents”.
It was Robert Gabriel Mugabe in his charm, a subtle fatherly gesture, reminding the new Sadc Chair of the common history that has shaped Sadc into Africa’s “strongest regional bloc” and forged Sadc’s common pursuit that must be guarded by Botswana’s assumed leadership of the region.
If only Zimbabwe listened to be enlightened as well.
President Mugabe has consistently reminded us of our shared history, our common identity and aspirations as he did recently at the Heroes Day commemorations.
He reminded us of our heroes’ sacrifices. That we must, in our political independence, be master of our economic independence and make use of our natural resources in their fullest.
With the call to economic revolution underlined, President Mugabe reminded us of our shared capacitating attribute, that we are a literate people and nation, Africa’s finest.
It reminds me of a clip that used to be played on CNN, or was it BBC, in which President Mugabe was briefly shown impressing upon his people, that “You must think, Zimbabwe”.
But do we “think” in this moment of our economic revolution? We, who are armed with the power of only a learned and informed?
Cry beloved Zimbabwe.
The past decade-and-a half in our struggle for total independence has found learned people being weighed and found wanting.
We have put ourselves into a state of paralysis, when education and all its assumed power becomes a handicap to stifle us from doing what was demanded by the revolutions.
We have failed to move our pieces from well written strategies to the battle field. We are a nation of professors, doctors, and many more, always in pursuit of higher learning; but not of a nation of “doers”.
What has been the tangible value of our learning in post political independence?
Have we mastered our economy with all its natural resources, no matter the sanctions which a people so enlightened as we are must surely unite to devise strategies that cushion and counter the sanctions effect?
Have we, despite all the enlightenment, been blinded in the distraction of fruitless discussions at this Sapes Trust indaba or that Crisis Coalition gathering, where constructive insight becomes shadowed by egos of learned fools really?
It becomes shallow analysis by the learned, that dwells on the person of Robert Mugabe, his age, how he stumbles here or shuts his eyes there.
Such overpaid consultancy, by donor funds, never cares to reflect upon the man’s worth in history, his experience, his institutional memory and ideology so critical to a nation engaged in economic revolution against those that have paid our learned minds to reflect so negatively against our own cause.
We are converted into intellectual mercenaries to sabotage the national agenda, distort and confuse it, so a nation prone to be lost in its own learnedness is put in a paralysis of analysis.
And the media, its private arm, dis-empowers further. All they will have our minds reflect upon from Heroes Day is how the President spoke for “only” thirty minutes.
Their journalism will focus so scholarly a nation on the perseverance of its leader’s legs, never to discuss and reflect the worth of what enlightenment he spoke to his people.
Our private media consistently dis-empowers and seeks to contaminate learned minds.
Not to be outdone by the News Day, the Daily News sought to fixate our minds upon the First Lady’s facial gestures at the Heroes Day celebrations, to have us share in its hallucination of a cat fight, distract us from the essence of the day of our Heroes and the purpose of their sacrifice.
This is the same private media that will solicit the words of a spent political man — Didymus Mutasa — to disparage the celebration of half a century of life, a day that the First Lady chose to share with charity.
You can be certain that had it been Michelle Obama sojourning in Zimbabwe to raise money for “children suffering under Robert Mugabe’s misrule”, the same journalists and media houses would clamour for seats at that dinner table, pay heftily from the dues of its unpaid workers.
Despite all that, hats off to the undeterred First Lady.
Undistracted by all that, she has proved herself a “doer” in a nation that is demanding action instead of philosophies.
One can ask the underprivileged children attaining education through her or the Binga women and youth who are set to benefit from the 16 000-hectare irrigation scheme that had been idle for a decade.
She will not have inaction and failure when an empowered society beckons, even when the rest of her beloved and learned fellow Zimbabweans will procrastinate so much into a state of inaction and developmental confusion.
Ordinary citizens suffer as those appointed to Government frown upon the ‘doers’ within Government, maybe due to fear they will be outdone and their idle dull minds exposed.
Take for example Wezhira, a young man who is barely thirty.
For years, he has managed to raise local funds to educate disadvantaged children in Masvingo and beyond.
When he seeks to achieve more in this noble initiative, the responsible institutions frustrate him despite the fact that he seeks to compliment a national agenda for an empowered society.
Instead, such institutions would rather grin from ear-to-ear, shaking the hand of this foreign donor or the next. It’s the crippling effect that has affected the learned minds. They are infected by the foreign investor or donor syndrome.
What now, we hear of the BEAM funds being slashed and withdrawn, rejecting our own local initiatives?
Who monitors this institutional handicap in Government and corrects it?
Certainly not Parliament or its monitoring committees that seem to be lost in a plot towards the empowered society?
Cry beloved Zimbabwe, this august House representing a learned people!
Take the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment for example. For two years, that Committee has kept an entire nation fixated upon its Marange-Zimunya Community Trust boogieman. Our otherwise discerning minds are made to believe that the boogieman does actually lurk in the shadows.
For a whole two years following the resounding endorsement of indigenisation and empowerment, we are distracted by a Marange-Zimunya and Brain Works saga which by the way is never concluded. How then will recommendations and the legislative intent for empowerment be adopted so that we can moved forward by parliamentary insight and guidance?
Where such a critical Portfolio Committee is chaired more effectively and becomes relevant to our greater national agenda, it would enquire the impact of its line Ministry’s framework in the indigenisation policy compliance, or how special economic zones in their proposed form will affect our agenda for an empowered society.
But no, we are made to wait patiently, we learned people who are never in a hurry.
Wither the economic revolution of an educated people yet to master and reign over their natural resources. Does God not grow weary of those that disregard their blessed inheritance? We pray not.
Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and advocate of Government’s indigenisation programme and its establishing of a new indigenous economy that empowers our indigenous majority.
