Chronicle Editor
MORE than 7 000 development projects across the country over five short years, the bulk of which have been completed.
Irrigation schemes, roads, clinics, hospitals, schools, innovation hubs, rural electrification, piped water in rural areas, power plants, airports and many more have been built or are being built. Millions of people are benefitting from the projects, which, most importantly are being executed using internally-generated resources.
The agriculture, mining, tourism and other industries are beating targets well in advance. For example, the Government sought to have built a US$8,2 billion agriculture industry by 2023 from a US$2 billion sector around 2017 but achieved that target two years in advance.
Mineral exports reached US$5,62 billion in 2022 when compared to about US$2,7 billion in 2017, with as many as 30 000 jobs having been created as new mines were built and existing ones expanded.
These are genuine, life-changing projects which are on the ground for everyone to see, not on some glossy piece of paper.
With this impressive record, which party would want to stress itself compiling it into some document to present to the people as a basis for electioneering?
“In the past we used to concentrate on writing beautiful manifestos,” we cited Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Ziyambi Ziyambi as saying on Monday. “In 2018, our President said let’s start writing our manifesto now by our deeds. We started by looking at our infrastructure; we have done a lot of infrastructure development and we are still doing it; the Beitbridge Border Post, our roads. In fact, in the past we used to look for outsiders to do infrastructure development for us and we said to ourselves in 2018, why are we doing this?
“Let us build our country, let’s look inside and he (the President) coined the philosophy, ‘Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo’. Look at the agriculture sector, we have turned it around from a US$2 billion industry to US$8 billion. That’s our manifesto. We decided against having a manifesto written where people criticise saying ‘this is mere talk’, we are moving with a practical manifesto. So, Zanu-PF is not producing any document; we are talking of the deeds and we are saying this is a man of action (President Mnangagwa) who is saying ‘let’s go on and do it ourselves as Zimbabweans’.”
That record is the strongest campaign message, the most eloquent appeal to the electorate for them to hand Zanu-PF a fresh five-year mandate.
Apart from it being the strongest campaign message, the delivery of the past five years is enough assurance that the next five years would be no different. The only difference will be an intensification of the delivery, the delivery going up another level.
We note that none of the opposition parties has published their manifestos yet they have absolutely no record of any delivery to vouch for them. They have no structures and no constitution. Having not delivered anything, they cannot have a manifesto worth the paper it is written on. They have no message, they have nothing, just their mouths to speechify. They, therefore, don’t deserve any vote.
The party which has a record of delivering is the one that deserves the resounding vote on August 23.
Online Reporter