The Sunday Mail
Tendai Chirau
UNITY is significant to us as young persons. Most of us were not yet born during the liberation struggle, which gifted us the independence we enjoy today.
The Unity Accord of 1987 also found most of us as young children, as young as two years old, already in the embrace of this independence.
From this powerful legacy of the coming together of revolutionary minds and hearts, we were privileged to learn from a tender age, about the values of the foundations of our national unity bequeathed to us by selfless cadres, heroes both departed and living.
Unity can only be best understood by, and meaningfully shared among people with a collective appreciation of the ideals they seek.
The liberation struggle saw the coming together of ZANLA and ZIPRA revolutionary militants under the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) banner, and political stalwarts from the parent ZANU and ZAPU as the Patriotic Front (PF), in solidarity to bring about independence from colonial hegemony, a common enemy.
This same convergence manifested itself in 1987, as the Unity Accord, to re-emphasise and re-dedicate the national revolutionary spirit in a logical escalation of the struggle, targeting national economic emancipation and development, and to underline the importance of the principle of “seeing with one eye and touching with one hand”.
As young people today, gifted with the blessing of being “born-free”, we embrace the responsibility of safeguarding the enduring benefits of this unity, and commit to making sure that the values and ethos of the nationalist movement preceding us are adhered to in letter and spirit, as we hold them sacrosanct.
We are alive to the truth that this key ingredient of our collective mindset should continuously make us a formidable bulwark against neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist machinations of all forms. For where there is no unity and peace, there can be no iota of development to speak of.
As zANU pf Youth League, and indeed, representing our generation, we are forever grateful to have a listening patron and President, His Excellency Cde Dr E.D. Mnangagwa, who is unwavering in his commitment to ensuring that the people-centred values of the revolution are carried forward unto posterity.
We interpret Cde Mnangagwa’s Vision 2030 as a call for Zimbabwean youths to carry forward the revolution towards national economic emancipation, which can only be achieved if the values of unity, peace and development are allowed to take root among us.
Under his astute stewardship, Cde Mnangagwa’s Government has already set the pace and tempo for this trajectory through various youth empowerment and education initiatives in the Second Republic.
These allow for patriotic cadres to take part in the generational mandate to ensure that national economic prosperity is made a reality. For this, we shall continue to work with, and receive guidance from our seniors in the revolution, in a process of generational blending.
As we commemorate this year’s National Unity Day, we draw strength and inspiration from His Excellency Cde Mnangagwa’s devolution concept, where all national developmental endeavours are configured to “leave no one and no place behind”, in pursuit of the overarching goal of collective national development, in unity and peace.
We are forever cognisant, and wish to remind fellow youths, that the Unity Accord was never a “tribal” unification endeavour, but was and remains grounded in, the coming together of nationalist movements who shared common values and goals, to ensure national cohesion in pursuit of lasting unity, peace and development.
At any ideological level, Unity Day serves as our local validation of the concept of Pan-Africanism.
As a philosophy, Pan-Africanism is a counter-response to the functions of imperialism in dividing our people through slavery, colonialism and the current tide of neo-colonialism. Via colonialism — which Zimbabwe directly experienced, our politics was polarised along ethnic terms to guarantee conflict after the territorial fall of colonialism.
On another important level, the Unity Day cements the historical legitimacy of ZANU PF as the legitimate institution of governance in Zimbabwe. This legitimacy is derived from the immortalisation of the old PF ZAPU and ZANU through the formation of ZANU pf.
Once again, the celebration of our national unity allows us to remember that the peace we enjoy today was produced by a protracted war of liberation fought by ZPRA and ZANLA forces which were aligned to the then ZANU and ZAPU respectively.
To this end, the solemnity of December 22 is not limited to the erstwhile polarity of our Zimbabwean politics.
Our Unity Day celebrations continentally resonate with the need for the African agenda to take up unity as a priority in our policy-making. Inevitably, this links the commemoration of our national unity to the concept of Pan-Africanism. As a socio-political vehicle, Pan-Africanism motions the global synergy of Africans and breaks the barriers of colonially defined binaries and impediments to unity.
Pan-Africanism is instructive of the clarion call for Africans to take charge of their destiny as a united race. Through the same spirit of Pan-Africanism, we ought to cherish December 22 as that day which harbours the ideological custom to our unity as a nation.
Cde Tendai Chirau is ZANU PF’s Acting Deputy Secretary for Youth Affairs.
