Online Reporter
Engineer Tapuwa Justice Mashangwa
Once upon a time African land was truly free. The children could be heard laughing and others crying on their mothers backs as they attended to their household duties. The men at the sight of the glorious sun emerging from the horizon, would know it is time to leave home to go for their daily hunt.
The elders and those in leadership positions sat together periodically to discuss village matters and reported to a bureaucratic leader.
Everyone knew what they had to do, the land was ripe with abundance, filled with resources and they rarely lacked. These settlements were littered across our beautiful continent, our Africa.
Like any other civilisation, as the resources kept dwindling, they had to find other forms of survival, production systems more manageable, which then brought about the emergence of agriculture. Agriculture solved the issues regarding food shortages and with the watchful observance of the elements: wind, earth water and fire they attained knowledge of the seasons and also managed to determine which crop to plant in accordance with their observations.
A stable production system meant that societies could now grow fluidly and the survival was improved despite the in-village or outside village wars or misunderstandings. We had our very own diet and food that nourished us and gave us optimum health. We protected Mother Nature and she in turn protected us through the gods we served. We were knowledgeable, connected, unified and moved with selfless purpose.
Our utopia unfortunately was not long lived as the greatest evil that ever happened to our continent and world came to play: Slavery and colonisation. Colonisation at its core is self-serving. It is meant to rob its victims of freedom and steal everything they own.
The colonisers came, took our people, our resources, the knowledge we had accumulated, killed the leaders that rebelled against their agenda and in turn they gave their version of what society is which has caused more conflict than harm. They took away our Africanism to which we are paying dearly up to now.
They keep us divided unable to access the resources of our fellow neighbours instead through their self-serving systems they buy our agro-raw materials and sell it back to us at huge profits. As a continent on our own we are self-sustaining. We have all the resources we need, the intellectual engines to drive the processing industries and more than enough markets capable of buying the processed final products.
We need to go back to the start. For what our villages lacked they would send messengers to liaise with other villages. Between them they would then trade to satisfy their inadequacies.
As the older generations were wiped away and as developed country lifestyles were adapted and preferred, we are now at a point where we have rejected our cultures, our healthy food or core religions and have opted to believe in what our oppressors feed us. A toxic concoction of self-destructive existence and the saddest reality about it all is that we stand on the sidelines and do nothing about it and instead exist with the mantra, ‘if you cannot beat them, join them’, a mantra that spoiled and left our continent with corruption, wars, famine and under-development.
Africa needs the progressive conversations. We need to assess what we lack and trade among ourselves to fortify our food reserves and production systems. We also need to develop,create and support collaborative platforms to share ideas, innovations and technologies that would spur the growth of our continent.
Everything begins at the beginning and once those platforms are functional we can look at growing our industries producing more nationally, then regionally and finally internationally and then Africa can be the untamed giant as free as the sub-Saharan lions that look at an elephant and are not intimidated by its size, they do not care about that. They see a meal and they attack.
Let us remember the phrase “We are what we eat’ and with all sincerity, ‘Most times man begins to think of freedom and progress after his belly full’.
As we look at our continent today, there are many value chain opportunities available for agribusiness participants. Opportunities that can be turned into multibillion dollar businesses to capacitate the continent and spur its growth to greater heights.
The writer is Eng. Tapuwa Justice Mashangwa, GCEO Emerald Investments, CEO DataFarm and CEO Emerald Agribusiness. He can be contacted on +263771641714 and email: tjmashangwagmail.com
