EDITOR — ZIMBABWE has adopted Africa’s aspirations of self-determination through the ‘Nyika inovakwa nekutongwa nevene vayo/Ilizwe liyakhiwa ngabanikhazi’ philosophy and is open to foreigners coming in as partners to assist in the country’s development agenda.
Indeed it is time for Africa to define its own development agenda in this century as espoused in Agenda 63 and the African Continental Free Trade Area. President Emmerson Mnangagwa is right and is setting a good example for the rest of Africa.
Truly we must build our continent driven by self-belief and belief in the resources and capacities of Africa. And since Africa has expressed all this in her continental blueprints, in Agenda 63, and the call for African continental integration, predicated on African resources, on African agency, partnership and trade has already been made, what is left is for us to walk the path like our country is doing. “Here in Zimbabwe, we have domesticated this continental thinking and aspiration through our philosophy, ‘Nyika inovakwa nekutongwa nevene vayo’, We govern ourselves, eschewing anything that derogates from our full sovereignty, we build our own country, brick-by-brick, stone-upon-stone and step-by-step, with outsiders coming in to support, to participate through skills, capital and technologies, in development options we will have freely chosen, and we will have set for ourselves,” said President Mnangagwa.
These words should be a source of inspiration to all right thinking and progressive Zimbabweans. Indeed, our country and Africa are rich in natural resources and it is time that Zimbabwe, in particular, and Africa, in general, use them for their own development.
Our President is right that we must develop our country and continent on the strength of our resources and many of these resources are yet to be exploited and should be exploited by us Africans, for the benefit of our continent and her posterity.
“Africa is its own frontier, and is ready to claim its century on the basis of its God-given resources. This is what Agenda 63 means and entails. It rests on a country-to-country sub-region-to-sub-region African nexus, indeed, on the combined strength and ingenuity of Africa’s billion plus population,” said President Mnangagwa.
We must indeed harness, as a continent, our historic victory over entrenched multinational colonial imperialism and set on a new course leading to an African century building on the legacy of our resistance as a continent to catapult ourselves forward towards a new destiny in which the African is his/her own master.
Bennie Chade, Bulawayo.