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Ranga Mataire Group Political Editor
PRESIDENT Mnangagwa is today expected to address a bumper crowd of ZANU PF supporters as he officially launches the revolutionary party’s 2023 election campaign in Chipinge district, in a development that is in tandem with the New Dispensation’s rallying call of “leaving no one and no place behind.”
The choice of Chipinge as a rendezvous for the launch of the effective commencement of election campaigns by the President and First Secretary of ZANU PF, Cde Mnangagwa, bears a lot of significance in that it is the ancestral birthplace of national hero and founding president of the revolutionary party, Cde Ndabaningi Sithole.
Cde Sithole was the founding president of ZANU in its first decade (1964-1974).
Although Cde Sithole was born on 21 July 1920 in Nyamandlovu, Matabeleland North, his father, Jim Chandiwana Sithole, was from Chipinge while his mother Siyapu Tshuma was from Nyamandlovu.
He was a typical hybrid first born in a family nine children.
He was conversant in both Shona and Ndebele including his Ndau dialect. At 15, he was admitted to Dadaya Mission, a New Zealand Church of Christ School run by Garfield and Grace Todd, who recognised his intelligence and sponsored his education. Garfield Todd was later to become Prime Minister of Rhodesia between 1953 and 1958.
Despite being well-travelled, Chipinge remained Cde Sithole’s lifetime home where he was later buried at his Freedom Farm following his death on 12 December 2000.
The launch of the ZANU-PF campaign in Chipinge is therefore a revolutionary endeavour meant to revitalise, re-align and resurrect for posterity the national memory of one of its founding members who was a son of Manicaland.
National memory is a form of collective memory largely defined by shared experiences and culture.
It is an integral part of national identity and makes an essential contribution to national group cohesion.
The New Dispensation led by President Mnangagwa has been instrumental in supporting all efforts meant to preserve our national memory.
Bestowing national hero status on Cde Ndabaningi Sithole and General Mtshana Khumalo- the military tactician who outfoxed Allan Wilson’s invading party, are all efforts meant to preserve national memory including the support being rendered to the Museum of African Liberation located in Warren Park suburb of Harare.
The venue of Mutema Secondary School in Manicaland is important in that it is located in a province that bears historical scars of the war of liberation as one of the provinces that had a large number of young cadres crossing the border into neighbouring Mozambique to join the liberation forces.
But most fundamental is the fact that the New Dispensation is seeking a broad based economic emancipation agenda that seeks to bring the rural communities into modernisation in line with Vision 2030 of attaining an Upper Middle Income Economy.
The choice of Mutema Secondary School bodes well for a grassroots-based revolutionary political party whose relationship with the masses has remained unshakeable.
With its history as a former liberation movement, which cultivated and bonded with the masses in rural communities for the efficient execution of the war, holding the launch in Chipinge offers a reflective opportunity for the party to audit its modernisation agenda, which it had been pushing through various economic policy interventions.
Unlike other parties that ride on infemeral discontent of the urbanites, ZANU-PF is moving away from the superficial optics of an inherited modernity by connecting with experiences of the struggles that conceived Zimbabwe’s freedom from a village standpoint.
The official launch of the campaign in Chipinge is a return to the centre and re-assertion of the party into the future because the manifesto itself is a prospectus of that future.
As a province, Manicaland has received more than $1.2 billion in devolution funds that has gone towards funding more than 200 developmental projects.
Provincial and Devolution Affairs Minister, Cde Nokuthula Matsikinyere, recently told the media that the 200 projects under implementation cover road construction, water and sanitation, health facilities, rehabilitation of schools and construction of social amenities such as building market stalls and capacity building of local authorities.
“We have managed to see through capacity building of local authorities such as the digitisation of the Chipinge Rural District Council offices and acquire service vehicles,” Minister Matsikinyere said, adding that the digitisation programme is part of President’s Mnangagwa’s thrust of modernising all national institutions particularly those that provide essential services to the public.
In her assessment, the devolution programme was improving the lives of people in remote areas who are now able to access basic services.
The ZANU-PF government is indeed living up to its promise of “leaving no one and no place behind.” While it values the importance of all citizens including those in urban areas, the governing party is always conscious of the need to remain in liaison with rural communities who constitute the majority.
And by an oddity of history, rural Zimbabwe has always had the highest number of voters, which has consistently voted for the revolutionary ZANU-PF party.
The tight social control structures in rural communities ring-fence the populace from manufactured dissent.
As one analyst said, any sensible voter needs to understand that while the future might be debated in the city, its fate is decided in the village.
Political common sense tells us that the road to State House passes through the village.
Online Reporter