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Bernard Bwoni
IT is leaders like President Robert Mugabe who are often carelessly undermined, under-valued and under-appreciated, recklessly misrepresented and misunderstood in their own time and their vision deliberately downplayed and ridiculed for fear of the results to be achieved. It is only history that will judge them fairly and then only then are they appreciated and their long-term vision realised and respected, long after they are gone. President Mugabe has risked his personal and political stature to push past and see through the vision of an empowered black majority in Zimbabwe and the non-negotiable notion of entrusting ownership of Zimbabwe’s resources and future in the hands of the previously marginalised majority.
His long-term predictive instincts of lasting prosperity and genuine ownership are the hallmarks of his visionary leadership. It is because of this perceptive leadership that Zimbabwe will inevitably get over the current challenges to turn around the economy and if that is to be simplified to “activism” then so be it.
The term visionary entails original ideas and the idea of a future, about what the future will be or could be like and not some empty proclamations meant only to prop up big business, the bankers and the big multinationals of this world who pull the strings and decide statuses of world economies.
Slavery, colonisation and racial segregation are part and parcel of the Zimbabwean and African history and there should never be any shame in victims narrating their own and the ordeals of their forebears.
The only people who should feel contrition when it comes to these narratives are the authors and architect of the deeds, not the real victims themselves and their equally affected and disaffected offspring. It is like urging the victim of a traumatic rape to keep the baby of her rapist and forget that the ordeal ever happened for fear of hurting the feelings of the rapist. The excessively submissive, substandard and subservient arguments from those who want people to remain quiet about colonisation, apartheid and slavery for fear of inconveniencing the doers of the deed who now leverage power around us is disturbingly naïve. We have scholars coaxing the victims to grovel, submit and admit, “we know that slavery, racial segregation and colonisation happened, let us all forget about it and kowtow before the former masters for us to get ahead in this world”.
Well, if that is what it takes to build harmony to see Africans moving forward then it will be on very shaky foundations. It is a case of trying to convince survivors of the Holocaust that because it happened a long time ago, let us forget about it just in case we might upset the Germans in so remembering about it.
Colonisation happened, slavery happened, segregation was until very recently a reality and we will talk and shout about it, mbira, rap and hip-hop artistes will sell platinum millions records about it and that is something the world will have to deal with. There is no one who can provide guarantees that not talking about slavery, racial segregation or colonisation is going to bring economic fortunes to Africa and there is no evidence to suggest so either.
In fact there is evidence to suggest that those who suffered the ravages of slavery and colonisation remain largely marginalised the world over and their prospects for the future do not look very promising either. I have never been to America but news headlines often portray evident cases of disadvantaged and disenchanted black Americans whose prospects do not exactly point to the positive.
In the Caribbean countries, the situation is not any better. The convenient narrative is that every black-run country is failing because blacks cannot run efficient societies and only the simple-minded will buy into that. The major problems Zimbabwe and many other African countries face today are a direct result of the after-effects of colonisation, racial segregation and slavery and hence the evidently arrested prospects for development.
That is the real black man’s burden and only the uninformed will brand this continued struggle for recognition as activism. It is not a victims’ mentality because the victims do have the evidence of their trauma. If these past wrongs did not have such a direct bearing on those directly and indirectly affected then why have the issues remained contentious.
Whichever way you decide to look at it, President Mugabe’s policies as unpopular to the outsider as they seem today, have in fact positively impacted on the future of the black indigenous people of Zimbabwe. Like most African countries Zimbabwe, suffered a traumatic history of colonisation, segregation and apartheid and this I utter without fear or favour, for if we fall into the trap of labelling our historical struggles as mere activism it will all be consigned to the back pages of history if at all and with it our future. It is because of this “1950s, 1960s and 1970s activism” that we even have a vision to talk about today! The reason why President Mugabe intrigues the world, scholar or layman alike, is because he is a shrewd strategist, an uncompromising risk-taker, an excellent communicator with insight, foresight and the grit required, all pre-requisites for a visionary.
Here is a man who risked it all with the land reform to economically empower the people of Zimbabwe amid adverse offensives from all angles and now the gamble is slowly but surely paying off and that is what visionaries do. His passion for the economic empowerment of the previously deprived is the fuel that ignites national engagement and international intrigue with the policies.
President Mugabe has been upfront and pragmatic in creating a positive and inspirational vision for the future of Zimbabwe and the manner he has conveyed his message is what separates him from the chaff and those who brand this tangible vision as activism. Visionary is not about instant gratification, but the long-term, today’s trauma and tribulations translating into future fulfilment is what it is all about. How can it be a vision if it is seeded today and bears fruits tomorrow?
The Japanese, the British, the Germans, the Americans and many other developed nations of today did not start by harvesting and then planting later. The seed has to be nurtured from planting, germinating and all the way through to harvesting.
l From Page 5
Land is important to any country in this world from a social, political and economic point of view.
In Zimbabwe, agriculture contributes roughly 20 percent towards the country’s gross domestic product and of that tobacco farming is the country’s biggest revenue generator. Let me give an example — before the year 2000 tobacco production figures were in excess of the 200 million kilogrammes mark. The majority of that production was from large-scale commercial farms that were predominantly owned by a handful of mostly white commercial farmers.
The land redistribution exercise started from around 2000 and following that in the 2008/2009 season tobacco figures fell drastically to below the 50 million kilogrammes mark.
Many were quick to label the land reform a dismal failure but fast-forward to the 2014 season tobacco, the figures were over the 200 million kilogramme mark again and revenue generated in excess of $600 million.
Today, in excess of 60,000 indigenous black farmers have had their chance and are participating in the lucrative tobacco sector whereas before these profits would silently have been shared among less than 2,000 white large-scale farmers.
This is the Robert Mugabe vision of collective gain as opposed to minority acquisition.
A country like Zimbabwe has a just cause just like Africa has a cause, and trying to downplay colonialism and slavery to enlist favours from the architects of the deed itself is not going to address the assorted and multiplex problems but will merely mask them for future generations to repeatedly try and deal with.
Any right thinking person, lay person or scholar, should know that President Mugabe, Zimbabwe or Africa makes no excuses, we all have shortcomings but equating colonialism to excuses and accusing those talking about it and about redressing inequalities as being stuck in a time warp is just downright malleable and low-down. — bernardbwoni.blogspot.com
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