Chronicle Editor
Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
”BETTER late than never.”
The four words above should be taken as a fitting exhortation for the pending formation of a war veterans league, belated and regretted though this is, 42 years on.
Regretted because in this communicologist’s belief and in no doubt also in other people’s thinking, many cadres who participated in the armed revolution to liberate the motherland from the hands of racist foreign colonial rulers may no longer be alive to provide valuable contributions in ideological terms as a revolutionary campus for born-frees now serving as ruling party cadres.
Indeed, even those veterans of the revolution still alive today may have succumbed to imperialists, call it neo-colonialists hoodwinking, in the absence of an ideological durawall protecting their minds against mental pollution by imperialists or imperialist stooges with whom they rub shoulders in their walks of life.
Which puts Zimbabwean historians under censure for their lamentable failure to capture and immortalise with their pens or on film the indefatigable roles played by the gallant sons and daughters of the soil with some of whom sacrificed their precious lives in the process of freeing the motherland from colonial captivity.
Books containing authentic accounts by war veterans about their trials and tribulations and final victory in the liberation struggle would have come handy in providing the all-important ideological grounding for today’s and future party cadres so that post-modern generations are ever warned never to let go of their rights whether the weather be good, whether the weather be bad.
But just what on earth does ”ideological grounding” which president Mnangagwa has described as something important which the new war veterans league will inculcate to provide the right direction for born-free political party cadres?
The Oxford English dictionary describes the concepts in point above as: ”doctrine, philosophy, body of beliefs or principles belonging to an individual or group.”
When still in power, the late president of Zimbabwe, Cde Robert Mugabe, once announced that a Cabinet committee will be set up to lay the groundwork for the writing of Zimbabwe’s liberation history, he was obviously persuaded by the knowledge that the historical accounts would continually serve as wake-up calls for future generations to not let go of Zimbabwe’s hard-won independence and freedom.
But, alas! No such authentic historical books exist to provide ideological grounding to present and future political party cadres to remain as watchdogs of the independence and freedom that our country boasts today.
If this state of affairs is not an indictment of the very high literacy rating that Zimbabweans boast on the African continent, then what does it portend when so-called highly learned people fail to rechart, for the benefit of future generations, the route previously taken in exiting the woods where hungry predators of human rights and freedoms roamed?
It is therefore to be hoped that when the awaited war veterans league finally comes into existence there will be no procrastination by its leaders in providing the all-important ideological ethos for future cadres of the party as guardians of the armed revolution.
Perhaps what William Shakespeare, the iconic playwright and English guru said in one of his writings should serve as a warning to Zimbabweans to not let war veterans still alive today depart this world without imparting to young cadres the wherewithal with which they freed this country from its seizure by foreigners.
”The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones,” so he said.
The quotation above must therefore serve as a warning that Zimbabweans as a nation SHALL be poorer should war veterans with whom we all rub shoulders with today die along with the good that they did for the motherland but with whatever misdemeanor attributed to them remaining bequest, as it were, to existing and future generations.
”Procrastination is the thief of time,” so goes a well-known saying which, in the discourse above in point, is imperative for liberation war veterans and other patriotic, progressive political leaders in our country to use the good deeds, sacrifices and the like by our departed fellow Zimbabweans as a strong foundation on which to continue to build solid political structures that will sustain the motherland against any and all forms of foreign adversities ad infitum.
Online Reporter