The Sunday Mail
Dr Obert Mpofu
It is with sadness that this inordinate meeting is being convened at a time the continent and the rest of the world are mourning Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s elevation to glory.
His untimely departure has offered the world an opportunity to appreciate how he was an effigy of every voice and institution opposed to the asymmetrical global order.
In his lifetime, Cde Mugabe became an ideological mantle of our centuries of resistance to colonial hegemony, plunder and exploitation.
After independence, he gave a nod to`Africa’s inaugural land reform programme.
This substantiates the magnitude of loyalty, he submitted to the liberation creed of this region and Africa at large.
Therefore, the doyen pan-Africanist Mugabe here is not the person, but he is now an idea representing perennial aspirations to remodel Africa’s decolonisation project.
While his realistic response to sanctions and a neo-colonial sponsored opposition falsely and narrowly projects him as a dictator, to those of us, who saw the golden age he was preparing for Zimbabwe, Mugabe remains the illustrious Founding Father.
Mugabe rises to the celestial as the bedrock of pan-African memory; as a champion and think-tank of reframing the ontological density of blackness.
Today, Mugabe is the African force of ideological retention.
He is the reclaimer of the unifying virtues of the late Julius Nyerere, Augustino Neto, Samora Machel, Oliver Tambo and Sir Seretse Khama.
He is the embodiment of the African legacy and African heritage which slavery, apartheid and imperialism thought they had dismembered for good.
His elevation to glory renders a permanent scar to the body of the pan-Africanist movement.
May his dear soul rest in power.
The best service we can offer to Mugabe and other grandfathers of the African anti-colonial movement is to strengthen our return to the past in a bid to lay a solid philo-praxis foundation to our hallmark neo-colonial fight.
As the people of Zimbabwe, we are greatly honoured to have been led by this notable liberation stalwart and giant pan-Africanist.
It is the credence of his revolutionary leadership, which informs our affiliation to the fraternity of former liberation movements (FLMs).
Furthermore, the convening of this meeting in Zimbabwe fortifies the mandate of the Second-Republic under His Excellency President Emmerson Mnangagwa to engage and re-engage the international community.
Zimbabwe’s mandate to host this meeting symbolically articulates two policy pillars of envisaged national and continental development, which are capsuled in the country’s Vision 2030 and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.
Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030 offers a preliminary foundation for re-crafting our domestic policy to guarantee sustainable multi-dimensional foreign policy interests emanating from the Sadc region, the African Union (AU) and the world at large.
Our Second Republic’s Vision 2030 will be of no essence if it is not set in tandem with the AU’s Agenda 2063 – aimed at enriching the socio-economic and political instruments of Africa’s development.
This comes at a time, we are also calling for the widening of foreign direct investment opportunities in our country, so as to further activate our subscription to the African Continental Free-Trade Area (AfCFTA) protocol.
Our zeal to contribute to initiatives which advance the unification of Africa such as the FLMs is grounded on the Julius Nyerere’s “Uhuru na Ujamaah” (freedom and socialism) doctrine.
This very same creed has been revitalised and redesigned in Thabo Mbeki’s call for African renaissance.
Therefore, I ride on the shoulders of the successive merits of critical African thought to invite a reasoning amongst ourselves, which is embedded in ‘African Solutions for African Problems’.
The uninterrupted dialectic premise to understanding the personality of liberation movements is dissected by Amilcar Cabral (1966) who notes that: “Although the colonial and neo-colonial situations are identical in essence, and the main aspect of the struggle against imperialism is neo-colonialist, we feel it is vital to distinguish in practice these two situations. In fact, the horizontal structure, however, it may differ from the native society, and the absence of a political power composed of national elements in the colonial situation, make possible the creation of a wide front of unity and struggle, which is vital to the success of the national liberation movement.”
Cabral benchmarks the inter-generational motive of the FLMs, which is anchored on the true aspirations of the founding fathers.
From the founding nationalists to the millennials, the FLMs institution is an inter-generational confluence between the aspirations of yesterday and those of today.
In full acknowledgement of the need for posterity of the liberation movement, the late Cde Robert Mugabe’s wisdom still echoes the need for regional integration, as he once said: “Unity is in fact more than mere harmony. It is an active bond of aspirants who share common given political beliefs. Unity is integrative of constructive or progressive or revolutionary forces in the direction of set goals. Unity is equally disintegrative of destructive or retrogressive or counter-revolutionary forces that operate against progress and against unity itself.”
The words of these two revolutionaries validate the theme of this gathering as our critical mass must be perpetually biased towards “Uniting Former Liberation Movements Against Neo-colonialism Through Total Economic Cooperation, Development and Independence”.
Therefore, it is my hope that our deliberations will redirect our thoughts to the shared burden of collectively grappling with neo-colonialism.
The neo-colonial project has fastened its levers through championing subtle means of subjugating Africa through neo-liberal expediencies.
Frantz Fanon in his seminal publication “The Wretched of the Earth” warns today’s FLMs not to be ideologically incomplete and lifeless in order to debunk a dismembered past characterised by Africans’ deprivation of the means to provide either capital and refined economic leadership to the new republic.
Consequently, this has subjected many of our member-states investing faith in colonial bankers’ loans, their counsel and aid. This systematic tragedy of dependency has forced the new nation to remain hooked on its former coloniser just as it was during the colonial period.
Cde Obert Mpofu, Zanu-PF’s Secretary for Administration, made this speech at the 10th Conference of the Former Liberation Movements (FLMs) in Victoria Falls last week.
