It is embarrassing that entrepreneurs will come all the way from Europe and create a fried chicken business using the same cockerel which black people are regarding as an alarm clock to wake them up in the morning, writes Andrew Wutawunashe in his book Dear Africa – The Call of The African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

WE keenly await the rise of new cities, created and built in rural areas by a new generation of free black people with an understanding of the value and potential of land.
This is why the white colonisers of Africa targeted land above anything else and forcibly removed black indigenous owners from large fertile and mineral rich tracts of land, resettling them in barren and semi-arid areas.
This assured a solid economic foundation for white people for generations to come. Simultaneously it built revulsion towards land within black people, as their only understanding of land was the barren tracts into which they were crowded by force. This explains the urban myth in the minds of black people in which the thinking is that the only way to get money or wealth is to migrate to the cities and compete, most of the time in dire poverty and heart breaking living conditions, for scant and unrewarding employment opportunities.
Ironically, this employment will come from people who built financial empires using resources from land.
African governments must put at the top of their agendas the issue of empowering the formerly dispossessed black people by programmes of meaningful land redistribution in which fertile and mineral rich land is restored to the black people. Simultaneously, young black minds need to be empowered by being taught the value of land ownership and the skills to extract mineral, agricultural and other forms of wealth from the land.
Every black person must seek to own and develop a piece of rural land—even land in the barren rural areas must not be abandoned.
In lands like Israel the Jews have converted the desert into incredible orchards and farm land.
Africa must prioritise training black people in modern technologies that make land productive.
The young black person must be inspired to go back to the land-to develop, farm and mine it.
Future genuinely African cities will be developed through rural development.
This is a more strategic path than continuing directing our young people into urban areas which have already been over exploited.
Through engaging the land, black young people will create employment, rather than continue to live in the frustration of seeking it.
The second message which needs to be emphasised in the economic education and re-training of black young people is the message of ‘aggressive creativity and initiative’.
Regaining economic space is going to require unfettered creativity, initiative and aggressiveness.
Young black people must be woken up to the fact that the culture of the global village is that resources, wealth and space to build wealth must be fiercely competed for or fought for.
Although during the season of black people’s struggles for political liberation, armed aggression was at times necessary to liberate black people, the aggression needed in the battle for wealth and resources is no longer physical aggression.
It is mental creativity, innovation and initiative.
These are the weapons needed for the second liberation struggle of black people—an economic liberation struggle.
This struggle is far harder than the political one, and the truth is that black national leaders are under unbearable pressure to shy away from this struggle and succumb to the forces of world economic domination of Africa.
During the long season of oppression, black people lost their power to dream, to initiate and to create.
You see, dreams are for free people—oppressed people’s power to dream was drowned in a flood of nightmare realities.
As their raw materials were shipped out to be processed in the lands of their colonisers, the concept of value addition to their own raw materials through local processing and manufacturing was erased from the minds of black people. Simultaneously, the culture of creativity and initiative was destroyed as dispossession rendered these concepts irrelevant, and servitude gave birth to a deep inferiority complex which made black people look down on anything of their own creation.
Even tasty and nutritious indigenous foods were discarded in favour of the ‘prestige’ of often unhealthy and tasteless Western foods.
The pervasive portrait of the white person as the business owner made the vision of himself as the initiator of business faint in the mind of the black person.
The young black person must now be taught and trained to a new understanding that he or she must become the leader and initiator in wealth creation through dreams, ideas and innovation of his own creation.
The young black person must embrace his or her new role as combatant on behalf of all black people on the battlefield of wealth creation. This must start with the embracing of a new culture in which black people believe in their own products and process and add value through manufacturing and other industries and technologies to their own resources and raw materials.
It is embarrassing that entrepreneurs will come all the way from Europe and create a fried chicken business using the same cockerel which black people are regarding as an alarm clock to wake them up in the morning.
They will sell it to the Portuguese owner of a Nandos outlet, who will add value to it simply by cutting it into pieces and spicing and grilling it, then selling small pieces of it to the very same black people he bought it from at a higher price per piece than the whole cockerel!
The black man is employed by a whiteman who comes and starts a furniture business by cutting and milling the same tree which the black man saw only as the source of a shade to sit under.
African diamonds don’t have to be cut in Brussels or abroad, neither do African people have to import from Europe garments made from their own exports of cotton.
The African tantalite can be used to make micro-chips and cell phones in black countries rather than be exported raw to the world.
Knowledge and information coupled to amazingly simple and available technologies have become the most powerful tools of trade and wealth creation in the global village. Black governments and communities must spare no resource or effort in building up the most modern communication highway infrastructures possible.
Nor should they spare energy and resources in training black children all the way down to the village school in the use of such technologies as the internet, and especially their use in trade and business.
All the time an awareness must be aggressively built in young black people that international trade, wealth creation and economic achievement is accessible to them and must be aggressively embraced as a challenge.