Online Reporter
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
YESTERDAY the global Pan-Africanist community celebrated the 102nd celestial birthday of Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial stalwart and former President, the late Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
To those of us inclined to the cognitive liberation of the African, this day enunciates a remembrance of an anti-colonial messiah who once walked and lived among us.
As his disciples, it would be remiss not to celebrate his birthday as a reimagined form of Christmas to honour a man who created the anti-imperialist fortunes we are enjoying today.
In keeping up with Mugabe’s eternal iconic revolutionary stature, the Second Republic declared February 21 the National Youth Day.
Symbolically, this demonstrates that the memory of any nation never forgets those who give their lives for their people’s freedom from oppression.
This is also instructive to the youth to fight for the preservation, promotion, consolidation and continuity of the key tenets of our national question.
As emphasised in my writings elsewhere, the national question is defined in terms of national liberation, national sovereignty and national prosperity.
Candid pages of our nation’s biography give evidence to Robert Mugabe’s role as an embodiment of the Zimbabwean national question as defined above.
Therefore, the conversion of his birthday into national holiday explicitly affirms the role of the youth as the contemporary custodians of our liberation, sovereignty and innovation master-builders of our national prosperity.
Such are the transferred attributes of Robert Mugabe to our generation.
As an ideologue, armed struggle revolutionary leader, post-colonial statesman and an unflinching defender of Pan-Africanism, Mugabe’s life was a mirror to which all must gaze and draw inspiration to be of great service to the motherland.
Therefore, February 21 presents an opportunity for reflection/contemplation on the inter-generational mandates which guide the evolution of nations, particularly post-colonial administrations.
“This exactly how nations evolve. There are those who fight for independence; in other words, those who struggle for independence. They bring a nation to a certain stage. Then there are others who bring a different input by way of democratising that liberation project and you should not see that as alien. It is in fact part of the repertoire of values that are enabling people to move forward,” Mr George Charamba, the Presidential spokesperson, was quoted as saying in an interview on the sidelines of Morgan Tsvangirai’s burial.
Put differently, a nation’s prosperity and demise of its aspirations is influenced by methods of how mandates are transferred from one generation to another.
This means that today’s burdens should nudge us to create fresh innovations which are carried over by future generations in nurturing our national development.
In so doing, integrity must be the guiding precept to leadership in every strata of society.
Borrowing from the dividends of the anti-colonial generation, today’s youth must ensure that neocolonialism has no place in issues of public interest.
Our service to the nation must jealously protect liberation gains.
Our diplomatic posture must induce that nationalist revolt which shredded the remnants of the condescending Rhodesian supremacy.
True to this point, a colleague scholar and senior lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, Lawrence Mhandara, in our forthcoming publication, writes: “The historical corridor between 1940 and 1964 represents far more than a mere chronological sequence of colonial retreat; it marks the ontological awakening of a continent. During these 24 years, the African soil birthed a revolutionary generation that refused the status of subject and demanded the dignity of citizens. This era was characterised by an epistemic rupture from the Eurocentric world order that had sought to reduce the African person to a peripheral resource. “The historiography of liberation must therefore treat this period as a sacred archive of resistance where the intellectual, the freedom fighter and the ordinary citizen merged into a singular force of historical agency.”
Likewise, Mugabe the nationalist was a key figure in this defining moment of our history — not just as a nationalist, but as a global anti-colonial statesman.
After the attainment of our independence, Mugabe was at the centre of advancing the democratisation of the economy.
He spearheaded the heroic Land Reform Programme against the odds of Western retaliation.
Consequently, our economy was haemorrhaged by illegal sanctions for a protracted two-and-a-half decades.
However, in the last 26 years we have been self-taught to build an economy outside the prescriptions of Western capitalist benchmarks.
Under the Second Republic, we boast of a growing mining, agricultural and industrial economy.
The youth have occupied their space in those key sectors.
Young people are leading in designing initiatives which support digital innovations.
In an era where national economic growth is technologically determined, increased access to connectivity would mean giving tech-fluency to the extractive sectors of our economy, resulting sustained inflationary collapse.
Today, Zimbabwe brags of a 15 percent inflation rate miles away from our past six-digit inflation rates.
We are in our lowest since 1997 — the year we started the revolutionary land repossession process (Third Chimurenga).
This means that Mugabe’s plan to have the land returned to its rightful owners was never in vain.
Further to this, the youth in various sectors of the economy have since used this revolutionary policy step to salvage the economy and sovereign dignity from the jaws of neo-colonialism.
Zimbabwean young men and women are leading the fight against sanctions through infrastructure development, young Zimbabwean big-brains are making lifechanging decisions in international corporations, some of them are helming huge diplomatic assignments in multilateral institutions.
Our university graduates are skillfully bypassing traditional financial flows and creating new markets for the wealth beneath and above our soil.
Their toil is our nation’s hope for survival. Their patriotic endeavors immortalise the values of national liberation, national sovereignty and prosperity personified by the life and times of the late former President, Cde R.G Mugabe.
Until February 21 next year, the struggle continues.
_*Richard Runyararo Mahomva is a political science scholar with extensive experience in strategic political communication and Afro-centred policy advocacy. His research interests include Global-South Liberation Memory, Politics of Elections and Transitions in Zimbabwe, Political Philosophy, Governance and Decolonial Studies._
