We want to be masters of our destiny

WE reproduce excerpts of President Mnangagwa’s address to Zanu-PF supporters during yesterday’s star rally in Centenary, Mashonaland Central province.
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Salutations.
Dear comrades, I great you all who have come to join us from all corners of Mashonaland Central province. On our way here, Mai Mnangagwa said that we were going to have a bumper crowd in her home province. I told her that Midlands province would surpass the crowd here. But I am very happy with the sheer number of people attending this rally.

Indeed, you have fulfilled the dreams and desires of our great ancestor, Mbuya Nehanda. I thank you for that.

As you have heard, Mashonaland Central is where the second and most intense part of our liberation struggle began, at Altena Farm. Some of us were here around 1964 carrying out acts of sabotage against the colonisers, but that did not last for long. But when the first shots were fired at Altena Farm, the war had indeed started until the day of our independence. So, we thank you people of Mashonaland Central.

The democracy, independence and freedom which we enjoy today as a nation; the source and beginning is Mashonaland Central. This is why for the first time in our political history our Independence celebrations were held here in Mt Darwin.

This was to thank you for initiating our armed liberation struggle. For 40 years, Mashonaland Central has been solidly behind the party of our revolution. You have been giving us 100 percent of all the seats contested here. There is no other province that has done so well.

Last week, we were in Masvingo and I was wondering if any other province could surpass the number of people that had attended that rally. Masvingo is a massive province and has more people compared to Mashonaland Central. But you have matched them in terms of the numbers that have attended this rally. We are facing an election, but that election has not been imposed on us. As the ruling party, Zanu-PF, we are following what the law of the land says should be done.

We chose August 23 as our election date, where we will seek a new mandate to lead again for the next five years. We now have 43 years of independence and during all those years, Zanu-PF has been in power. Mashonaland Central is the backbone of the party. You are a one-party province. Therefore, I was discussing with your Minister (of State for Provincial Affairs and Devolution in Mashonaland Central, Monica Mavhunga) the projects that have been undertaken by the Second Republic here.

There are over 762 projects that have already been completed. I have been told that the Second Republic is also doing four major dam construction projects. So all the areas that had no water will now have water for irrigation and for their livestock. When we came to Mt Darwin for the independence celebrations, I said to Minister of Agriculture, (Anxious) Masuka that I wanted him to drill 40 boreholes around the district. That has been done in 40 villages around Mt Darwin. In addition, for all the villages around this place, we have sunk 46 boreholes as the Second Republic.

This election we know that there are many small parties in this country that go around asking for votes — that is permitted. But winning the election is a monumental task that they cannot accomplish. This year, we are going to resoundingly wallop them. There are some who are unhappy with land reform programme and they gave us sanctions. When they sanctioned us, they thought Zimbabwe would revolt against Zanu-PF so that they could replace us with their puppets. They wanted to exploit our resources at our expense. Down with them!

That will never happen under Zanu-PF. We are united as a nation and as the people of Zimbabwe, whatever the conditions we are under. We have the right of protecting our heritage. There is no one else who can do that except us as Zanu-PF. There is no other party that has the capacity of safeguarding our heritage except Zanu-PF. We have some amongst us who dream of being led by the colonisers.

We as Zanu-PF, we say no to that. We want to be the masters of our own destiny. Those from other countries can only come in to assist us to build our country but not to lead us. Nyika inovakwa, igotongwa, igonamatirwa nevene vayo.
Enough food

Turning to agriculture, the first thing we want as the Second Republic is food security. We want to comprehensively deal with food insecurity. We have put models of agriculture which address food security at the household level. We brought Pfumvudza, which ensures that every household is food secure. This wheat gives us bread and all manner of confectionary.

In the past, we used to import wheat from Ukraine, where there is war today. So, we sat as a team and asked ourselves why we were importing wheat when we have water for irrigation. I asked them what we could do in order to produce enough wheat for our annual consumption. They said we needed to put so much land under irrigation. We have all of that now.

We have so much land under irrigation to ensure that we produce enough wheat each winter. Last year, we produced more than our annual requirement. This year, we have even surpassed last year’s production record.

My Minister of Agriculture is saying that we must start planning to export our wheat because we have more than our needs. Imagine if we had insisted on importing grain from Ukraine where there is a war now? Surely we would suffer. (Nehanda) Nyakasikana inspired us to produce our own wheat and we did exactly that. Nyika inovakwa igotongwa nevene vayo.

Those who fought for the liberation of this country died; people got maimed, and they endured snake bites and lions in the bush where we were fighting. Even today, we have disabled people in the league of war veterans; they suffered to liberate this country. We know that as a country we are now food secure, but there are some pockets which did not get good harvests in the provinces. We don’t want to hear of any family that is starving because food is abundant. We have structures in place through our Ministry of Local Government led by Cde July Moyo, through the chiefs, headmen and kraal heads. All kraal heads know who among their people are starving. We also have structures in the party that tell us that. We have plenty of food that we will give for free because as a country we have the food.

Mining
Talking about mining, God smiled on Mashonaland Central because you have a lot of minerals including gold, nickel, lithium and copper. So what is needed is to give our boys mining claims because we want our people in the mining sector. They should exploit these minerals for the benefit of our people and our country. There are a lot of mines in this province. We have a programme in Zanu-PF for the mining sector to support artisanal miners. In Zanu-PF we don’t call them makorokoza but artisanal miners. Small artisanal miners are being supported by the Ministry of Mines to secure equipment. I have been advised of two places where Vice-President Chiwenga says they need help and we are going to do that.

World-class infrastructure
Then we come to the issue of infrastructure development. Here we have the Harare-Mahuwe-Kanyemba road.

The roads are being constructed. There is a place like Kanyemba, which we knew little about until the First Lady went there and advised me about their situation. She said there were no schools, clinics and roads.

So now, as I speak, we have built clinics, primary schools and secondary schools. We are constructing a state-of-the-art road to Kanyemba and also developing it to into a town. Three to four years from now, all of you will be migrating to Kanyemba. So development is spreading; clinics are being built; schools are being built.

On the issue of electricity, at national level, you know there was a time when we faced acute power shortages in the country.

We went to China in 2018; President of China Xi Jinping is my friend. He asked me what help I need and he gave me a grant to build a new Parliament. I can see the Speaker of Parliament Cde (Jacob) Mudenda is here smiling because of the new Parliament built by the Chinese. They also gave us the Harare International Airport. I was there last week commissioning it, it’s a state-of-the-art structure.

We were also given funds to the tune of US$3 billion again by President Xi Jinping to refurbish our power stations. From now onwards, we are getting 600 MW and load-shedding has eased because of the increased power generation. Some of our power generation projects are yet to be completed, but they are due for completion. We also experienced long queues for fuel in the country and that is now a thing of the past.

In education, we revamped our education system.
It’s now being called Education 5.0, which means we now have an education of science, technology and innovation. Our education now empowers graduates to leave university and produce a product or a service.

Let me tell you that universities in all provinces were challenged to produce products using resources found in that province.

The pioneers are Great Zimbabwe supported by Midlands State University. They are producing marula drinks. I went there with VP-Chiwenga and witnessed it. They advised us that they want to distil whiskey.

In this province, you have masawu fruit, and at Bindura University of Science Education, they are producing three types of soft drinks, bathing soaps, body lotions from the fruits. Every month and every week, I receive reports of breakthroughs of an invention which would have been done by our boys and girls.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, you heard the Minister of State here, Cde Monica Mavhunga, thanking me for managing Covid-19. No, it’s you whom we should thank because you never panicked. When Covid-19 hit the world, other countries were given funds to fight it by the West. We were given nothing and they predicted that Zimbabweans will die like flies; about 3 million Zimbabweans, they said, were going to die. Those who projected that, it’s in their countries where people died in numbers, and Zimbabweans did not face that fate.

We then asked our boys and girls in universities to produce the medical oxygen they denied us and it’s now being produced in Mutare, Manicaland. The one we produce is 99 percent pure, but internationally the standard of medical oxygen purity stands at 96 percent. However, one thing which has given women headaches, and men to some extent, is drug abuse. We are building this country, but we are afraid of leaving this legacy in your hands. How do you protect this legacy when you are always high on drugs? There is no child who is involved in drug abuse who doesn’t have a guardian; let’s advise them that there is no future in drugs.

Stop drug abuse!
There is no country which can prosper when its young people are on drugs. A country is built by its own people and for that reason we introduced science and technology in our education. That’s why in our schools we are teaching that. We have brought a lot of computers which will be distributed to all schools in Muzarabani so that they learn science and ICT … so that they are be able to connect with people from across the world from here in Muzarabani. The future and success of all countries depends on science and technology to create services which people use. The Bible says if you are lazy, you will die of hunger. Go and tell people who don’t want to work that I have said you should not go against the Bible.

Services to the people
A long time ago, you used to travel from Muzarabani to faraway place to apply for vital civic documents, but now you can apply for your biometric passport here in the rural areas. The man behind this is KK (Home Affairs Minister Kazembe Kazembe) who’s building registry offices across the country. You no longer need to go to Harare to apply for passports. We now have more than 20 passport centres. We started with Murewa in Mashonaland East to make life easier for the elderly to take their passports.

They can be able to go to any country in the world because of the work that is being done by the Second Republic. We now have more than 70 election observers in the country; they think that we will have violence during our election. We the people of Great Zimbabwe, the children of Munhumutapa, are a peaceful people who are against violence. We want peace, we promote peace, and the people of Zimbabwe are humble and loving people.

So those countries who wish us to be violent, we will shame you, we will never promote violence in Zimbabwe.
We want peace before, during and after elections. Those elements in the country who are planning violence, we want to warn them: We won’t tolerate mischief from all those who are bent on causing violence. If they are being given money from other countries, they should use that money in a peaceful manner.

Once you start using that money to cause violence, we will lock you up. The long arm of the law will take its course against all those who promote violence; we want peace. We are a humble and peace-loving people.

Peace is our signature
In years gone by, they would be writing that there is violence in Zimbabwe. Now that we are gathered here has anyone been beaten? But we respect each other and that’s what we should do every time. No country is built on hate speech or violence. A country is built when people are united. We don’t want violence; I repeat, we need peace. We love our country, we love each other, we want to develop our country. When your brother or sister says they want to go to beautiful countries abroad, tell them that it was the people of that country who made it that beautiful.

The French built their country; the same as the Germans and the Britons. We in Zimbabwe should make our Zimbabwe great. No one is going to come and do it for us. This is our responsibility, which will never be given to anybody else.