A believers’ journey in the offing

Stephen Mpofu

Zimbabweans have for a long time now been perambulating, perambulating and perambulating on a journey of non-believers with a beautiful motherland, rescued with the sacrifice of blood by the gallant sons and daughters of the soil a captive of polarised  trust between organised business and labour on the one hand and organised government on the other.

If a week ago or earlier someone were to declare through a mighty horn — call it a microphone — from the summit of Mount Inyangani that Zimbabweans were so lamentably ignorant that they could not learn something from their own lesson written in crimson red, angry listeners unable to pull down the mountain might clamber up to its top to bring the “lun” down to earth.

Today, Saturday, June 8, 2019, this pen, not a lunatic, can declare from the summit of this mass communication medium that our people appear certainly to have failed to grasp the lesson written in blood, in some cases, by our own patriotic fighters who laid down their own precious lives in bringing the freedom that we enjoy today that the racists from a foreign ruling culture with their oppressive rule and us, their subjects, could never ever embark together successfully on a journey of believers  into the future.

By the same token, today, organised business with its escalating, oppressive prices and labour along with general povo at large on the one hand and infuriated government on the other cannot and should never ever be expected by any sane person to embark on believers’ journey together with a bleeding economy under their noses.

But thanks to God’s grace, a breakthrough in the polarised relations stated above the Tripartite Negotiating Forum Bill signed into law by President Mnangagwa this week appears to be the legal magic wand to ameliorate relations between business and labour on the one hand and the state on the other to put our country onto the path to a brave new future for all with the workers and the generality of our people loosening their belts by a notch or more to allow their bellies to grow again and with their faces radiating joy.

But, of course, the supposition is that when going to the negotiating table Tripartite Negotiating Forum (TNF) members will disabuse themselves of any winner-takes-all notion, something that hitherto appears to have been THE fly in the ointment with, for instance, Government justifiably suspecting that businesses rocketed the prices of their goods under influence by some renegade political organisations to try to enrage the workers and the public at large to turn against the Government and bring it down for not protecting them.

Actually, any belief, whether true or false, by Government that dirty politicking was at play in the rocketing of prices with workers not getting pay increases seems justified in the sense that the enemy without working with the enemy within are always wont to use disaffection among workers and the public at large as back doors through which to change governments against which they have axes to grind.

The new law should be read as a statement reminding Zimbabweans of the need for patriotism in order to nurse and safeguard our hard won independence.

The beauty of it is that it will also be a stone used to kill another bird, corruption, which is like birds that are a menace to food crops.

This suggests that employers, public or private, should regard workers as their eyes and ears on corruption and not remain insular to reports brought to them by employees about any nefarious activity by anyone senior or junior so that remedial action is taken timeously to safeguard companies, public or private.

But not only that. Workers must redouble their efforts to increase productivity and avoid work stoppages, taking their grievances to the TNF instead for solutions to be worked out.

If all concerned take the joint negotiating forum seriously it may not take long before our beleaguered economy turns a bend and we shall privately or in public  shout: “Hurray! Hurray!”