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Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
AS Zimbabwe celebrates its 36th Independence anniversary, it is appropriate to look at social economic and political successes it has made and challenges it has met during that period. The country’s independence was achieved literally through sweat, blood and tears of a large number of black people who took up arms after peaceful persuasion to free their motherland had failed.
Descendants of British colonial settlers were adamant that the land was their inheritance and that they would never ever allow the indigenous people to rule it. That decision was practically expressed by the white colonial settlers led by Ian Douglas Smith on November 11, 1965 when they announced the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), a brazen defiance of the opinion of the whole world.
Other international organisations that had repeatedly warned Smith and his fellow racialists not to defy the world included the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) the Commonwealth and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Credit must be given to the late Vice President Joshua Nyongolo Nkomo for appealing to the UN and the rest of the progressive nations to give material and moral support to the oppressed black people of Zimbabwe.
It was not strange that Britain refused to use military force to remove Smith and his colleagues from power although they had committed high treason by declaring UDI.
The then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced that his government would not use force against Smith and his colleagues because “they’re our kith and kin”. That statement should not be forgotten by any normal Zimbabwean as it exposed the British government’s blatant racial bias against black people.
Not that colonialism was itself not a practical application of racialism against non-British people whose countries Britain had seized as colonies down the anals of history, but that a new era had dawned on the word and colonialism was totally discredited and condemned globally.
It was in that universal anti-colonial environment that Smith et al made their UDI, Britain playing the racialist card and the people of Zimbabwe taking up the cudgels leading to a free and independent Zimbabwe on April, 18, 1980, some 36 years ago, today.
The nation was born with a dream to be a haven of happiness based on social security, economic prosperity, political freedoms, cultural diversity and tolerance. On the social field, Zimbabwe has been a whale of success, particularly in education, an area where it has produced hundreds of thousands of university graduates, a much larger figure than any of the regional countries, some of which became independent a couple of decades earlier.
Education is the basis of human development, hence we can claim the regional record in human development. Human development is a social process that targets ignorance, disease and hunger. Education equips people to fight and eliminate these three enemies of humanity.
Zimbabwe’s national economy was and is still agricultural based. At Independence that sector was in the hands of the minority white colonial settlers. They owned most of the productive fertile land, the major cause of the liberation war.
Restoring the land to its rightful owners caused unavoidable dislocations in the country’s colonial orientated agricultural-based economic system. That reduced the land’s productivity, employment capacity and adversely affected the government image in Western Europe whose economic ideology and political history have always been hostile to the African liberation struggle.
Other factors such as drought have contributed to the poor performance of the Zimbabwe’s national economy. For it to recover, the country needs to look at the whole issue holistically, that is economically, culturally and socially.
There is also the issue of governance. This means looking at the national political records since independence, a record marred with smudges of the bloody six-year long gukurahundi period.
It is necessary to discuss the unfortunate political-military happening frankly and come to a conclusion that will bring about genuine national reconciliation based on truth and justice. Hard on the heels of the gukurahundi period followed that of free and open multi-partyism, a development that resulted in the crafting of a national constitution.
That fundamental law of the nation of Zimbabwe is a consensus of divergent political opinions, an example in product of political pluralism.
Like every man-made document it can and should be improved so that democratic freedoms and authority should be enjoyed practically by villagers of Zimbabwe everywhere and concomitantly so that every citizen of this country can shoulder their responsibilities in all fields of human endeavour.
In the delivery of justice, meanwhile Zimbabwe has one of the most independent judiciaries in the world. It would be a peace of injustice to describe our judiciary as anything but independent.
Zimbabwe’s national culture has experienced much development since independence, especially in the religious sphere where Christians have grown from strength to strength.
During the first 36 years of Independence Zimbabwe has become more and more of a Christian nation. That development gives the country an identity and belonging in the world’s cultural communities. Finally, the Presidential succession race is an inevitable part of the country’s political motivation process.
However, it would be much better to all presidential aspirants to follow their political party’s constitutional procedure and leave it to the party’s membership to elect their preferred candidates in free and unfettered circumstances.
Online Reporter