WE welcome you to the New Year with heartfelt love and hope that you had a good and restful festive season.
To the farmers we saw tilling their land, we say may the heavens continue opening up for us to be a nation of more and plenty.
The New Year normally brings a new spring of hope and prosperity.
It is usually laden with prospects for a new, bright start.
It is a season of redemption.
A season of new plans and new ideas.
A season of reshaping and re-adjusting our lives and goals.
It is a beautiful season this one, never of lamenting our failures of the year gone by.
We never massage our misfortunes of the previous year and we wake up with renewed hope, vigour and vibe.
We marvel at the months ahead and interlink them with our new dreams and aspirations.
This new season!
For children, it is a time to start a new journey in the academic world.
For those who completed their high school education it will be a time to launch a serious career path.
For the country, it is time to review policies, upgrade and consolidate them.
Everything and everyone will be busy during this time, but for others, nothing seems to change.
It will be the same old story, same old plans and ideas.
These people remain stuck in a time warp.
They never move an inch from their horrific ideas and plans.
They remain fixated in those gory ideas, never to flinch.
I am one who always celebrates the coming in of the new season, but when it starts the way it did, especially in Ghana at the inauguration of President Nana Nankwa Akufo-Addo, then we call it a season of darkness.
This season!
The season that has been so clouded by the Ghanaian debacle.
Is Kwame Nkrumah still ‘alive’ in Ghana?
A great orator he was; one of the brains behind pan-Africanism, yet incoming President Akufo-Addo embarrasses himself on his big day by plagiarising former US presidents’ speeches.
What a way to start a year!
But it will not dampen our hopes, our dreams and aspirations that have carried us to where we are thus far.
We are Zimbabwe, the ever respectful country.
We are Zimbabwe, the ever loving country.
We are Zimbabwe, a land of beautiful people.
But when a diplomatic faux pas has been committed, we naturally get worried.
Ghana is a very good ally of ours.
We have a solid friendship and great understanding.
Our relationship goes beyond mutual understanding.
They are more like family.
We have a shared history in virtually all aspects.
At least we thought we shared the same ideology.
This is why, before we let out what we are feeling right now, we need to understand why President Akufo-Addo chose to throw protocol and diplomacy out of the window.
Is it not throwing diplomacy under the bus, sidelining the Government in favour of the opposition, endorsing an opposition plotting to oust a legitimately elected Government through means outside the ballot?
This is a matter the African Union (AU) must seriously look into.
We hope it was one of those moments where President Akufo-Addo was just excited about taking over power and overlooked diplomacy.
So excited he ended up plagiarising speeches from former US presidents in this cradle of mankind called Africa.
We hope it will end with the plagiarising and we will not see a United State of America in Africa.
We leave it there.