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Zvamaida Murwira
Senior Reporter
National festivals such as the Independence celebrations will no longer be held exclusively in cities and towns, but will be spread by Government to rural communities that bore the brunt of the liberation struggle resulting in the attainment of freedom in April 1980, President Mnangagwa has said.
The spirit and ethos of independence is not complete until all rural and remote areas are developed and can host national events and enjoy the attendant benefits that go with it, including a footprint of infrastructural upliftment.
Writing in his weekly column in The Sunday Mail yesterday, President Mnangagwa said a precedent had already been set when rural Mount Darwin in Mashonaland Central province successfully hosted the Children’s Party last Monday and the centrepiece national independence celebrations the following day.
“Going forward, we have no excuse to keep national festivities restricted to cities and towns. All communities must own and play host to our national events, so no one is left behind and uninvolved,” said the President.
“As we decentralise the hosting of these national events, we must also leave commemorative footprints in these communities by way of new structures and modern amenities, which will forever remind those communities that once upon a time, they hosted our whole nation as it remembered and celebrated.
“Again, thank you Mt Pfura and Mashonaland Central as a whole for hosting a resoundingly successful National Day.”
President Mnangagwa said it was critical to equally take Independence commemorations to places that endured the worst atrocities during the war of liberation.
“We owe it to our rural communities. Over those two happy days, we took commemorations of our hard-won Independence back to the province and to communities that had suffered longest and endured some of the worst atrocities for that glorious day to come.
“We owed it to them, and I am happy that this troubling debt has finally been symbolically paid, so many years into our independence.”
The President said the debt was too big to pay, and remains only partly paid until all rural communities which make up the nation, have had a chance to concretely own and physically host Independence Day celebrations.
Development would also become meaningful when it reached every nook and cranny of the remotest of rural areas, themselves theatres of the war of liberation.
The idea of decentralising the commemoration of national days, said President Mnangagwa, came about after he visited Uganda a few years ago, on the occasion of its national day.
“Unlike what had become a tradition for us here in Zimbabwe, the Ugandans, under President Yoweri Museveni and the governing National Resistance Movement, whose history of armed struggle echoes our own history, decided long before to decentralise and devolve commemorations of their national day, thus yearly taking them to different communities, including the remotest and the least developed,” he said.
“We thought this was a noble idea worth emulating. As a result, we began moving commemorations of our Independence away from the capital last year, when, for the first time, we held them in Bulawayo, our second largest city.”
President Mnangagwa noted that one of the reasons it took long to make a decision to decentralise national festivities was limited infrastructure in remote areas to host such mega events.
The shift to Bulawayo was still in an urban setting, where basic amenities are available, but to move further required more thought.
“How were we to take our Independence festivities to rural centres, whose limited infrastructure could not support a national gathering? While it was quite easy to determine the next host province for our National Day, we pondered long and hard the best venue which would send a clear statement of gratitude to communities that had sacrificed incomparably in the execution of the armed phase of our liberation struggle, itself largely a countryside affair.
“It was then that a decision was taken to move the celebrations to Mt Pfura/Darwin centre, which lay painfully close to Chibondo, itself a harrowing site of Rhodesian atrocities during our struggle,” he said.
Mt Darwin successfully hosted Independence Day commemorations and thousands of people were treated to entertainment displays.
A musical gala was also held on the evening of the celebrations, and it shook Mt Darwin with all-night entertainment.
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