adminThe following is an abridged version of President Mugabe’s speech at the farewell party he hosted for Dr Charles Utete at State House in 2003. Dr Utete had retired after leading the civil service for 23 years.
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He was a man who performed manifold chores for my Office and for Government and was a thinker and shaper of the processes which have made our nation the way it is today.
To take liberties with the language, I would say that before me is plural man whose availability and contribution I had grown to take for granted, more or less the same way one expects without any tinge of anxiety that the same sun that sets today will rise tomorrow.
Armed with scholarships to study in America and Canada, rewarded with a doctorate in international relations and public administration by one of Canada’s foremost universities, he could have easily succumbed as did many of his contemporaries, to the blandishments of developed Western societies.
Instead he repatriated himself to Dar es Salaam where he combined lectureship with the chores of the struggle. Alongside other intellectuals, he was part of our seminal policy unit in exile which worked out policy documents that would translate into our transitional policy.
He was among the group of intellectuals which had to be taken from the academia so that they could serve the new Government in 1980. The formative years of independence were challenging because the minions of the Rhodesian regime sought to defend and perpetuate in offices, what the emperor and his army had lost on the battlefield.
The then Prime Minister’s Office was the hottest part of the battle where Dr Utete was tasked with making sure that the new order of independence and majority rule was consolidated and triumphed.
Apart from challenges of racism in the service, as the men at helm, he faced challenges of reshaping bureaucracy to make it serve not just the order, but numerous challenges that came with it. We had to use bureaucracy to rehabilitate and resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees and families displaced by war, reconstruct a war-battered economy and infrastructure, and restart agriculture.
Of course, we used the bureaucracy to mobilise our people to embark on one of the biggest and most successful education programmes ever embarked upon by a post-war, post-colonial society in the world.
To chronicle the many challenges of that time is to pay tribute to the man who helped us overcome them and turn them into resounding breakthroughs. I wish you well Mr Charles, and to remind you to please find some time to read a bit of Walter Scott, Chinua Achebe, Dambudzo Marechera and others, as you have always wished.
Online Reporter