OPINION: President Mugabe vindicated on land reform

18 Jan, 2015 - 00:01 0 Views
OPINION: President Mugabe vindicated on land reform Thank you Bill Gates; Where are you Strive Masiyiwa?

The Sunday Mail

Thank you Bill Gates; Where are you Strive Masiyiwa?

Thank you Bill Gates; Where are you Strive Masiyiwa?

Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa

There is no greater feeling of parental success than to be pleasantly surprised by nuggets of wisdom thrown at one from an observant offspring.

On Friday, both Monica and I arrived back home after a holiday-cum-business visit to the Far East.

I switched on my cellphone to see an email message flicker: “Robert Mugabe is Right about Land Redistribution”.

Tendai, my second born son (we have four boys) who is a graduate in agro-electronic engineering from Australia’s La Trobe University in Melbourne, had sent it over.

Tendai is passionate about how solar power can finally help address a 4 000-year-old problem of ubiquitously available energy to all and sundry at the most affordable of costs.

On graduation in 2006, he made a decision to leave the mature market that is Australia for Mainland China just as I was leaving my ambassadorial post.

Clearing the tanking economy of Zimbabwe buffeted by the regime change twin onslaught of an engendered capital flight and hyper-inflation offered no home return prospects.

Through connections of a rising friendly official of the Hebei Government, Ye Changching, Tendai joined the fledgling Great Wall Motor Company-GWM of semi-rural Baoding town.

He was their first English or indeed, any foreign language speaking engineer.

Now GWM has legions of them as it focuses on competing with the global auto majors.

Great Wall has since emerged as China’s largest maker of sport utility vehicles at a time when the Chinese vehicle market at 22 million has long toppled America at 16 million as the world’s leading market.

GWM, whose pick-up vehicles are doing well in the local Zimbabwe market, is the only home-grown Chinese auto maker with credible global ambitions in a sector dominated by American, German, Japanese, French and South Korean auto giants.

While working for the auto company, Tendai watched another Chinese brand emerge as a global player.

Nearby Yingli Green Energy Holdings Co rose phenomenally to become a leader in the global photovoltaic industry.

Zimbabweans, you may have recently watched Jack Ma’s dazzled Wall Street with his Alibaba $25 billion initial public offer of the e-commerce global giant signalling the arrival of Chinese brand names onto the global market place.

You will not be surprised that Yingli was the sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2014, is sponsor of both men and women’s USA soccer teams just as it is the sponsor of Bayern Munich.

As a nation, we really need to wake up as more such brand tremors will continue to shake the seismic shifting global market place.

This is not the time for the self-stupefying if suicidal disparages of “zhingzhongs” made in China as peddled by rustic-minded ex-Rhodies and their crestfallen MDC local African acolytes.

International commerce has no time for sulking moribund racist ideologies and their stock in trade of gripes by degenerate egos.

Tendai in 2012 came back to Zimbabwe.

He has been busy on an innovative technological solution so the rural populace can never again have to wait out the long dry season months watching the cloudless blue sky.

The plummeting price of solar panels and the ever-improving technical proficiency of affordable solar pumps are now on the verge of delivering the manna of potable water to rural kindred.

Even sweeter is that drip-line technology can now allow all-year-round 365 day/24 hour farming.

Food security is now within the grasp of four millennia abandoned rural folks.

Green vegetables on demand means more dried leaves mufushwa or salted nuts mutetenerwa for relish.

And an all-year-round tilling of rotational crops ensures a constant stream of earnings from bountiful markets.

Zesa and other electricity grid network players watch the space.

Solar is leap-frogging society to a bold new future.

What the mobile phone did to human communication by obviating the need for costly and cumbersome fixed-line phone investment is about to visit the arcane world of the electricity grid at least at the basic consumer level.

Only factories and other heavy power users may remain clients of the mammoth thermal, hydro and nuclear power-generating stations who need steady and reliable power.

Governments preoccupied with Millennium Development Goals and betterment of rural livelihoods for up to 80 percent of the Emergent and Frontier Market population can now look forward to something really exciting.

Their bankers long haunted by the risk and cost which has been the bane of extending their much-needed service to rural customers can finally heave a sigh of ultimate relief.

For, come end of the month, the rural customer will surely dispatch his/her energy consumption bill to none other than the ever-generous Great Living God.

I have dwelt at length on how the mind harnesses nature as it seeks a better life for human kind.

Bill Gates is the epitome of success in that mundane but very important socio-economic endeavour.

At $65 billion net worth, he is the world’s richest man.

Yes, all that wealth that is the equivalent of more than five times our nation Zimbabwe, residing in one individual.

And here is the beauty if it; none of it was inherited. He invented Microsoft software at the dawn of the digital era.

He led in giving the human mind of that freedom of the tedium and drudgery of mental calculations that direct all sorts of tasks at hand. Thus, productivity attained new game-changing levels.

And money from ever-eager customers flowed to his coffers in Redmont as the computer became a must-have tool of all human endeavour.

The opinion of such an achiever in the globalising village does matter on any subject his mind chooses to address.

Seizing on Joe Studwell’s book on Asia and that populous continent’s modern hike to break-neck socio-economic development.

He opined as to how Africa could also join the escalator of growing global prosperity.

He ended up with his fantastic endorsement of Robert Mugabe and the land reform of Zimbabwe.

A good and fair-minded scientist has to eventually address the issue of fair access to the means of producing wealth as the bedrock to all progress.

His judgment of Mugabe and Zimbabwe shall prove seminal.

Since 2000, every calumny has been hurled on Zimbabwe, its iconic leader and its courageous people for daring to redress the skewed land ownership pattern that celebrated the racism of a settler colonial minority.

A relentless onslaught on Zimbabwe touched every aspect of international global discourse.

From national parliaments to the United Nations system, including its Security Council; from churches to synagogues; from boardrooms to non-governmental organisations, all was marshalled to the cause of vilification.

To paraphrase former South African President Thabo Mbeki, even generals were cajoled to vain attempts at waging a war by the “masters of the universe” that would have burnt Zimbabwe to toast for this valiant land restitution.

Local puppets were moulded into an opposition that would accord a veneer of national legitimacy to the nefarious and diabolical goal of regime change.

Along the way, a new tribe, the ex-Rhodesian white farmer, became a new species of human evolution.

This owed its origin to a new-found genetic bond with the soils of the Zimbabwe plateau that had ephemerally jettisoned their affinity for the indigenous people who had worked on them for millennia.

The grassland of Zimbabwe acquired a geo-strategic attribute dwarfing the Canadian prairies, the plains of the US Midwest, the pampas of Argentina, the steppes of Central Asia, the loess of China and the Downs of Australia.

Rivers of ink flowed in incantations to the righteousness of this tribe that was being threatened by the primordial savages reminiscent of the bigoted fiction Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness.

Thank you so much, Bill Gates, you have finally brought that debate to rest.

Your dispassionate glob stemming from unaffected engagement has vindicated my countrymen, its leader and even the African people.

 

Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa is the Minister of Welfare Services for War Veterans, War Collaborators, former Political Detainees and Restrictees. He also enjoyed a lengthy stint in diplomatic service.

 

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