Online Reporter
BUILDING a nation is not a static exercise. A nation is built in response to the changes and the requirements of the time. Careful consideration must be given to the wishes and aspirations of the people.
The people are, after all, a nation’s building blocks. The people as they exist in a nation have dreams and aspirations, some shared, and some not so much. All the same, the nation’s dream is the people’s dream.
Aspirations are based on a basic dream. Nations do have dreams. They dream of a prosperous future where their people live in abundance and lack nothing. They dream of peace, unity, and development. They strive each day to see such dreams come to fruition. Many dreamed of an independent Zimbabwe.
Some had no idea that such a dream would ever be realised, and some paid the ultimate price towards realising it. Dreams are the stuff that nations are made of. They set out the nation’s values and determine the path to be taken in the endeavour of self-determination.
Martin Luther King himself had a dream, and he paid the ultimate price. We had a dream of liberating our nation when we lived under the subjugation of colonial rule.
This goes to show that achieving a nation’s dream is easier said than done. There is an immense sacrifice that is made towards making such dreams a reality.
Many have no clue that nations are a living thing. They rely on the individual people who constitute them to move forward. The social contract is what binds us all. Without it, entire nations and societies would crumble into oblivion.
Each generation is always accorded the chance and opportunity to shape the nation in the manner in which they see it. After all, no one can claim exclusive rights to Zimbabwe. We are all custodians of this nation.
They have the task of pursuing their generation’s goals and making their dreams come true. Ours was to free this nation from the jaws of colonialism. This is a dream we but only wished that one day would come true, and that it did.
The very thought of freeing this nation started off as a whisper, perhaps a dream, from where no one quite knows. What I know is that one day, the sons and daughters of the soil made a bold declaration that enough was enough.
They then sought to fetch their lost land and bring it back to its rightful owners.
As I mentioned earlier, the very task of building a nation is not a static one. The endeavour is complex and turns to morph and change with the seasons. After freeing the country, the dream was to possess our most valuable resource, land, and then came the next phase of ensuring that people had access to the land.
We made the conditions necessary for our people to till and mine the land towards prosperity. But that was not enough; in order to fully safeguard our people’s possession of the land, came the notion of according them real rights and not usufructuary rights to the land.
Again, this new exercise spearheaded by President Mnangagwa has brought us to the realisation that the journey we have to travel is one that will require careful consideration as to how we will meet the needs of the people.
The lesson in all this is that you can never do too much for your people. There is a lot that we have done at this point to ensure that our people are empowered, and there is a lot more we still need to do. The journey to fully liberating our people continues.
The Zimbabwean dream is premised on the land. All our hopes for a brighter future are hinged on our access to our land and how we will use it.
The land question is the most pertinent question in Zimbabwe. Our people have often aspired and still dream of the land. Those without the land dream of one day owning it; those with it dream of working wonders and fully deriving their livelihoods from the land.
Indeed, without land, our people would perish. They are so tied to the land that it is all that they ever dream of. Even those who have at some point in time left the country in search of greener pastures in the diaspora often find their way back home, drawn by the allure of owning the land. Land to the Zimbabwean is like what water is to fish.
There is no other group on planet earth that has a deep yearning and unbreakable bond to the land as the Zimbabwean. It is all we have known, and we take pride in it; it is all we ever dream of.
The Zimbabwean dream is thus a dream of how we will best utilise and make use of the land for the benefit of all our people.
As we move forward in shaping the new Zimbabwean dream, the lessons and experiences of the past should guide us so that our dream becomes reality. For now, the dream is to attain an upper-middle-income society by 2030. After reaching this milestone, we will reshape our aspiration in more ways that are beneficial to our people and nation as a whole.
Dr Obert Moses Mpofu is an academic and the Secretary-General of Zanu-PF. He writes in his own capacity.
