ONCE again we are getting into that exciting season of graduations.
We believe that when a person receives an education, that person has been empowered.
The whole essence of education is to transform one into a better citizen.
Zimbabwe will do well and emerge victorious because her children, the boy-child and girl-child, have received and continue to receive equal opportunities.
We have not been afraid to embark on the various programmes of empowerment, such as indigenisation, because we believe in the capabilities of our people.
We have not shied from building our country using our own resources under very difficult conditions. Our children, leaving our institutions of higher learning, have a duty, an obligation to their country.
The country needs them.
Their brilliant minds must proffer solutions and innovations to improve our livelihoods.
Knowledge is power that has to be exercised.
Woe unto those in the habit of influencing our graduates to rebel and ‘fight’ the Government for not creating opportunities for them.
Government has created an environment that lets them get an education and valuable skills.
Government has committed to supporting every viable innovation.
Government has availed opportunities in all sectors of the economy — in mining, agriculture and other services.
In the past, on this platform, we have said that we are a self-sufficient people lacking nothing and we repeat it again.
Our people can run existing technologies and create new ones.
There are opportunities in mining, agriculture and technology.
We are a nation that has so much that still needs to be done.
The thousands being churned out of tertiary institutions cannot only be good and designed to be employees.
The thousands of acres that have minerals await to be exploited, not by outsiders but by our people.
In agriculture and related fields, graduates must bring new innovations to curb the rampant effects of climate change.
Crop scientists must establish more advanced drought-resistant seeds, while the engineers develop more irrigation technology and modernise our approach to agriculture.
Those who have finished business studies should meet, head-on, the challenges as well as craft strategies to solve the problems suffocating the economy.
There are also loads of opportunities in the small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) sector.
This engine, presently driving the economy, needs to be perfected to take the economy to the next level.
With fresh knowledge from our graduates, the SMEs sector can leap where other nations have crawled.
Already, a number of youths have taken up farming and mining, providing a clear example that this is no fantasy or wishful thinking.
Our misfortune has been that of people who want to place Europe and the US at the centre of human experience, human existence and human development.
Dubai, not so many years ago, was a desert.
Our graduates must believe in themselves and not carry the illusions and delusions that have been foisted on us throughout years of colonial bondage.
We do not need the whiteman to come from some foreign land to give our graduates jobs.
Let us take a leaf from the Asians and Arabs who have learnt to be themselves throughout the ages.
They, in a short space of time, made huge technological strides.
We must stop weeping and expending energy crafting not so funny messages and videos about our graduates. President Emmerson Mnangagwa has given support to brilliant innovations and is waiting for more.
