We must chart our own destiny as a people

Below is an excerpt of President Mnangagwa’s speech at ZANU PF’s Star Rally in Magunje, Mashonaland West Province, yesterday.

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President E.D. Mnangagwa

I am happy to see such a huge crowd attending this rally today here in Mashonaland West province.

Surely, those with eyes can see for themselves and those with ears should hear.

This crowd is surely a reflection of where we are coming from and where we are going.

Those who are not among us are lost sheep.

We began this journey of our campaign for the harmonised general elections in the east, in Chipinge.

I want you to know that the entire population of Zimbabwe who reside in the eastern part of our Republic, our motherland, came to Chipinge to witness the launch in their numbers.

We then shifted our campaign to the western part of our country, to Bulilima, where we were welcomed by the entirety of our people living in the west.

They said they identify themselves with the revolution of this country.

They identified themselves with the revolutionary party of this country; the only party in this country that liberated Zimbabwe — ZANU PF.

So, we realised that ZANU PF is loved in the east and it is loved in west.

We then asked where we should go next and we said we must go to the north.

This is why you see us here and we can see that, indeed, the party is loved in equal measure here.

Our people who live in the northern part of this country also want to identify themselves with the revolutionary party that brought about independence, freedom and sovereignty.

They say this is our party and today, we are assembled here to demonstrate your faith in the revolutionary party, ZANU PF . . .

Next week, we will be in Masvingo province.

We have gone to the east, the west and today, we are in the north, so next week on Saturday, we will be in the south.

We are confident that we will be welcomed equally well by the people there, who know their party that brought our sovereignty and dignity to our people.

From there, we will move to the central part of our country.

Then we move into Harare.

Our only task is to carry forward the legacy left to us by those who went ahead of us.

Here in Mashonaland West, there are so many heroes and heroines who fought for this country.

We are obliged to celebrate them.

Mashonaland West bequeathed us with a lot of freedom fighters who fought for our freedom

In 1966, the armed struggle started here when seven heroes died in Chinhoyi . . .

Our first President came from this side.

There are others like James Chikerema, who went into politics around 1956/1957; they came from this side.

Today, we are holding a rally in his honour.

Our first Chief Justice after independence, Enoch Dumbutshena, came from this side.

So, don’t look down upon yourselves because you played a huge role in the history of the revolution of this country.

Today, we should not find you failing to stand up to defend the legacy of those who have gone before us.

Mourning Guti

However, I have to acknowledge we are in a mourning week.

As we are gathered here in Mashonaland West province, our memories are with the Guti family, ZAOGA and the nation at large following the passing on of one of the generals and patriarchs of faith, Apostle Professor Archbishop Ezekiel Handinawangu Guti.

He died in South Africa at the age of 100.

For 75 years, he was working in God’s ministry.

We remember him because he preached love and unity.

Had he been a preacher of violence, I would not have acknowledged him.

Let us all observe a minute of silence in his honour.

Defending our heritage

Why are we here?

We are here to agree that on the 23rd of August, we shall all rise in our numbers to vote in defence of our heritage.

We are all responsible for safeguarding our heritage.

We welcome all those who are willing to help us safeguard this heritage of ours.

To those who are unwilling to walk hand-in-hand with us, we say go your separate way.

Mbuya Nehanda said her spirit shall rise and it has been fulfilled.

Young boys and girls from all corners of this country rose and went to war to fight for this country.

Many were left in unmarked graves in foreign lands and also here in our country.

We continue to pay our respect to them because they paid the ultimate price for our freedom.

We can only thank them by voting ZANU PF.

Let us unite under our flag and national anthem that were brought by ZANU PF.

On August 23, we must, across the board, go and vote for ZANU PF.

ZANU PF is unstoppable!

No one can stand in our way.

Since 1980, we continue marching on.

When we come, you either move away from our path because ZANU PF is unstoppable.

The best advice is for you to join us and be part of the great nation of Munhumutapa.

We, the people of Zimbabwe, are the descendants of the Munhumutapa empire.

So, on August 23, we want to defeat them resoundingly in peace and harmony.

A vote for ZANU PF is a vote for independence; it’s a vote for freedom; it’s a vote for dignity.

Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo; igotongwa nevene vayo; igonamatirwa nevene vayo.

I congratulate all successful candidates.

I believe you shall all be victorious.

When we had our primary election, some lost while others won.

I want all of us to know that none of you are the owners of ZANU PF.

You all came in long after the party had been founded.

If you want to stay in ZANU PF, abide by its rules.

Some of us have spent over 65 years in the revolutionary party but we continue to abide by its rules and customs.

You have never heard me say that I own ZANU PF.

So, we must remain united.

If you are a sincere member of ZANU PF, you get deployed.

You don’t deploy yourself.

Voting in peace

We shall have foreign observers coming into the country from SADC, the AU, the United Nations and the European Union, coming in to witness our polls.

They will look to see whether our elections are violent-free.

But regardless of their presence, it is us who want our elections to be violent-free.

We do not call for free and fair elections to please outsiders.

As ZANU PF, we say no to violence; we want peace.

It must be understood that it is our desire as the people of Zimbabwe, in particular we of ZANU PF, we want peace and unity, before, during and after elections.

Last time in 2018, we achieved two of the three.

There was peace before the elections, there was peace during the elections, but after the elections the malcontents among us disrupted our peace. We, of ZANU PF, say no to violence.

We will continue to preach peace and we will continue to preach unity; we shall preach respect, love and harmony.

I commend all my fellow countrymen and women, as well as the youth in both urban and rural areas, for preserving peace and unity.

I want to thank you all because, up to now, there has been no violence.

Let us keep this up; it is good for us.

We do not need to please anybody; it is in the DNA of the people of Zimbabwe to be peaceful.

To all the chiefs and headmen, I implore you to preach peace and unity in communities.

I know our detractors and their puppets would love to see our elections marred by violence to discredit the polls.

We must put to shame their desires as we reject their interference in our domestic affairs and political space.

We have never requested to monitor elections in the US or France.

Surprisingly, they always request to monitor our elections.

Recently, I was speaking to this European official whom I told that we wanted to observe their election since they had requested to monitor ours.

ZANU PF is the people’s party; by the people and for the people.

A party with a very rich history.

The people are the ones with real power, and not us.

ZANU has a vision.

Looking inward

When the Second Republic came in, given that we are under economic sanctions imposed on us by the Western countries, we said our policy would be that of engagement and re-engagement.

We are a friend to all and enemy to none.

That is the basic principle of our policy.

However, we shall look inwards at our natural resources, our inheritance bequeathed to us by our ancestors, to develop our country.

What we only need is sufficient rainfall, because we have the land and the people.

We have the land that we took from our former colonisers to become a food-secure people.

That is why we introduced Pfumvudza so that every single household in the rural areas is food- secure.

However, our detractors were not happy with this because it meant that sanctions that were meant to cause hunger and result in regime change would not work.

For three years now, we have been food-secure.

We used to get our wheat from Ukraine and fertiliser from Russia.

A few years back, we decided to start producing our own food and for the past three years, we have been having surpluses.

We have a surplus of wheat and we are going to export. If we had not made such plans, we were going to have bread shortages because of the Russia- Ukraine conflict.

We also did the same planning on fertilisers; and we are already producing our own fertilisers.

We anticipate that in the next two years, we will now be producing our own fertilisers for winter and summer crops.

There are those who think that land will be given back to our colonisers. That will never happen as long as ZANU PF is in power.

Our land reform is irreversible.

Our land and us are inseparable.

If you want to die, just talk of reversing our land reform.

Mashonaland West is the food basket of the country.

I come from the Midlands . . . I used to see ministers from this province bragging in Cabinet about your production.

Last year, out of the eight provinces, you contributed 23 percent of the total volume of maize in the country.

The balance was shared by the remaining seven provinces.

Coming to tobacco, we have the highest number of tobacco growers; 35 percent of tobacco growers in the country come from Mashonaland West.

Here in Hurungwe alone, we have 31 000 tobacco growers . . .

We have the biggest tobacco harvest recorded in the last 129 years.

However, when we talk of tobacco farming in Mashonaland West, Hurungwe brought in 67 percent of the total produce.

In livestock production, the ZANU PF Government, under the Second Republic, has rolled out the Presidential Livestock Recovery and Growth Plan, the Presidential Heifer Scheme and the Presidential Tick Grease Programme.

These three programmes have reduced the number of deaths caused by the January disease. We will continue to empower families; we want every household to have access to livestock vaccines.

So, over here in Mashonaland West, your herd grew by 5 percent in terms of volumes.

We are now embarking on a project to provide every chief’s homestead with solar boreholes for easy access to water.

We have a programme to drill boreholes in all the 35 000 villages in Zimbabwe.

We also have fisheries programmes for these villages.

We want every village to have a solar-powered borehole.

We bought 80 borehole drilling rigs, which we are deploying to the provinces.

We want our women to start nutrition gardens for the health of our children in the villages.

We have a contract with the Chinese; they want to buy our horticultural products. That is why we are having this programme.

As you can see, the Second Republic is addressing basic issues at the village level.

We have a policy of leaving no one and no place behind.

This is why we are targeting development at the village level going forward.

When the Second Republic came in, revenue from the mining sector was at US$2,8 billion.

As I speak, we are close to US$12 billion in spite of the sanctions imposed on us.

Here in Mashonaland West, you are very rich.

I see you have platinum, gold, chrome, nickel, copper and many other base metals.

In terms of mining investments, you have the Great Dyke, Karo, Bravura, RioZim, Ngezi Platinum, Dinson, and the Manhize Steel Plant, and we are setting up the Mapinga Mines Energy Industrial Park.

This Mapinga industrial park is a US$13 billion industrial park, which is being built here in Mashonaland West.

I want to advise our artisanal miners that we are supporting you as you are now well-organised.

The Government will continue empowering you because we don’t want your activities to destroy the environment.

In the manufacturing sector, when the Second Republic came to office, supermarkets had only 35 percent to 37 percent of local products on their shelves.

However, after five years of the Second Republic, we are now at 80 percent.

If you go to any supermarket, you will discover that 80 percent of the products on the shelves are made in Zimbabwe.

However, there are some unscrupulous businesspeople who hiked prices after proclamation of the election date, manipulating the exchange rates and fighting our local currency.

Last time, I named and shamed them.

Today, I have new names, but I will only announce them when we are in Zaka.

But I warn them that what they are doing is evil.

We give you only seven days to sort out your mess.

Those in industry who are working against Government policies will be punished.

We must go forward charting our own destiny as a people.

Modernising

In terms of infrastructure development, what has been done by ZANU PF in the last five years?

We have modernised infrastructure in all provinces and no place will be left behind.

Yesterday, I was at the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport, which is now complete.

I will commission it on July 14.

I have never seen such a beautiful airport.

We have modernised the Beitbridge Border Post.

We have the most modern border post in our region and possibly on the entire continent.

We have been busy building roads from the Beitbridge Border Post to Harare and now from Harare to Chirundu.

We used to think roads are constructed through international tenders and we lost out.

We have our own engineers, our young talented boys and girls who are engineers.

We gathered them around and created a group of five companies which we sponsor.

They are constructing modern highways in our country and we shall continue to empower them; we will empower them to construct infrastructure, be they dams, roads or houses, electricity generation; we are now doing it on our own.

Before the Second Republic, we used to have problems.

We used to have petrol shortages.

We then sat down and asked ourselves what needed to be done.

Now everyone sleeps at home and not in fuel queues.

No more queues, thanks to the Second Republic.

On electricity, we realised that for a country to modernise and industrialise, one of the enablers is energy.

Now, we have Hwange Units 7 and 8 on stream and this has brought 600 megawatts.

In Kariba, we have Kariba South, which we opened and we are now in the third or fourth week with enough electricity for the country.

We have other electricity projects which are underway.

We want to reach a stage where, whether in winter or summer, you simply switch on electricity.

Mashonaland West is endowed with a lot.

It has Kariba, Chirorodziva and many other attractive tourist destinations.

In agriculture, you are excelling.

Your Chinhoyi University of Technology is producing and coming up with many breakthroughs in science and technology.

In the past, we used to import semen for insemination from other countries.

Now, we are exporting to other countries.

Congratulations, nyika inovakwa nevene vayo.

On devolution, I am told that in Mashonaland West, 110 schools are now connected to the internet and the programme is ongoing.

We believe that in 18 months, every school which has electricity will be connected.

My team that specialises in network base stations told me that they have covered a lot of areas.

Only a few areas are yet to be provided with sufficient base stations.

On devolution funds, you were given about $23 billion for you to use at the local level to address some of the problems that you have.

We in Harare cannot know the challenges that you have at ward level.

More rural health centres are being built under the supervision of the Vice President (Dr Constantino Chiwenga).

I am told about two clinics are already complete here.

In conclusion, my friends and comrades, I have said, as demonstrated by you coming here, it is evidence that ZANU PF is the revolutionary party that will safeguard the legacy and history of this country.

There is no other party like ZANU PF.

ZANU PF is unstoppable and will rule forever from one generation to another.