WE, in the village, are fully behind His Excellency President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Under his astute leadership we have recorded many victories on many fronts.
However, we are fully aware that we are not yet out of the woods as the nation continues to grapple with the various challenges wrought by the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by our erstwhile colonisers.
Our victory, the people’s victory, does not bode well with those who want us to collapse.
It is a fact that Government has put in place policies that will empower the innovative and hardworking among us.
Government has created opportunities for those willing to create employment.
I appeal to those graduating from our tertiary institutions to be actively involved in our discourses and be part of the agenda of shaping our nation.
Zimbabwe must become a force to reckon with.
We still have a lot of work to do.
We have rekindled the Zimbabwean spirit, and have restored confidence in ourselves.
I implore our youths leaving higher institutions of learning to have a strong sense of purpose and patriotism.
Our education has been revamped to speak to our ‘socio-economic transformation’.
We sincerely hope that our education will speak to the global, continental, regional and national visions; and in particular the nation’s development blueprints, schemes and proposals.
Unity and peace have been the recurring themes for the Second Republic.
Let us take a leaf from the then youths who joined the liberation struggle.
The capacity to solve our problems lies within us.
It is time we set aside our differences and work for the motherland with the same patriotic fervour exhibited by the youth in the struggle.
The thousands who yearly graduate from our universities and colleges make a formidable force that will accelerate development.
We have let this precious resource of Zimbabwe go unharnessed and it is time we fully harness it by giving it all the necessary support.
We have millions of youngsters and the Second Republic is providing them with resources to educate them not just to work for the highest bidder, but for their people.
If children in the struggle could persevere and remain resolute about their mission under brutal and harsh conditions, what more can our youths do in a peaceful environment.
It is a lie that our children cannot thrive in their country; a country full of resources and opportunities.
The problem is when people do not work for what is theirs.
The capitalist formula; ‘Each man for himself and God for us all’ does not work in Zimbabwe because it is not the formula that liberated Zimbabwe.
The people of Zimbabwe are equal to the task of building a prosperous Zimbabwe for all, just as we were equal to the task of liberating our country from imperialism.
The science we do back in the laboratory must work out on the farm, otherwise all our efforts are worthless.
We can publish a lot of scholarly papers, but if they do not help to improve productivity and profitability of the farm enterprise, they are all useless science.
Our people, especially our youths, must know that they remain the ultimate determinant of their fate.
And we do not need anybody’s endorsement.
We do not need anybody’s validation
We should not be defined by others.
We must define ourselves.
The letter from King Leopold II to the first missionaries in Africa in the Belgian Congo in 1883 is quite revealing:
“Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already.
They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know.
They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad.
Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already.
Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world.
For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty in their underground.
Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like: ‘Happier are the poor because they will inherit heaven’, and, ‘It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God’.
Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent’s teachings.”
It is such information that our former colonisers do not want black people to know because their deceit would have been exposed.
Up to today, they continue to lie about who we are and who we should become.
Today, many blacks, and Zimbabweans in particular, have abandoned their indigenous ways.
They dismiss their culture, values and norms as archaic.
Sadly, in this era of social media we have forgotten who our fathers, mothers, grandparents and ancestors are.
In the Second Republic, let us continue to dig deeper into our history as black people in order to understand who we really are.
Only then can we raise a generation that defends our culture as black people; a generation that knows that being black is a blessing and not a punishment from God.
