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Richard Runyararo Mahomva
National Introspection
Last week, the colourful unveiling ceremony of the Brand Zimbabwe initiative signalled a re-commitment of the Second Republic’s promise to re-curate and repaint the national image.
There is consensus that while many milestones were recorded, the past retrogressive vestiges of the First Republic’s pitfalls which gave issue to the ‘New Dispensation’ needed to be thoroughly swabbed out to oblivion. That aseptic rebranding invites new opportunities for partnership, without a decorous outlook we are prone to isolation. Claiming a new identity also means we need to collectively agree on how we would want to be called.
Apart from our self-earned challenges as a nation, we became victims to the neo-colonial onslaught that has attempted with little to no success to disfigure the reputation of our national sovereignty emanating from our national liberation. So the Brand Zimbabwe initiative is an outgrowth of the Second Republic’s genius to project a new Zimbabwe under a new political culture and industrious workmanship.
Mining deep on our social re-engineering in the Second Republic, all of us have a role in calling out the Government to set into motion policies that are inspired by our common identity and shared national interest. That is only possible when we collectively spell out what constitutes our national interest and what threatens its actualisation.
Doing it for ourselves and not anyone else
This project is jointly marshalled by the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) and the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services.
Besides the need for a counter-response to the post-land reform neo-colonial demonisation propaganda machinery, we owe it to ourselves to define who we are. Beyond the partisan polarities that have kept us divided and exiled from the interconnected merits of our diversity, shared memory and hopes for a prosperous future; we have never made it a national policy position to ask ourselves: who we are, where we come from and where we poised to be within the community of nations?
This could even explain why many of our development impediments are caused by our excessively oppositional politics. To this end, we continue to struggle to build strong foundations of cohesion and national interest anchored public policy architecture. Our deplorable urgency to self-definition is brought to the fore by our debate on whether we need to have the Patriotic Act in place or not? We have even trivialised matters of accountability to discussing whether Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) must be regulated or not through the impending Public Voluntary Organisations Act?
I am citing these ongoing legislative debates to expose how our slow simmering course of democratic maturation is preoccupying us in asking wrong national questions and consequently failing to create sustainable answers/solutions to our generational economic and political problems.
In all these enquiries, we use external benchmarks to assert what it means to be a patriot or not. We are fixated on drawing external values moral lenses to determine what is right or wrong for ourselves. Therefore, the launch of the Brand Zimbabwe consultative programme expedites that structurally muted conversation to help us define ourselves. A well Branded Zimbabwe naturally silences the many adverse agendas which have perennially undermined our national aspirations for unity, prosperity, peace and stability. The failure to term and name the Zimbabwe we want and the Zimbabweans we should be, explains our misplaced ideological priorities in defining the course of our national development.
Inventing being Zimbabwe/an?
This identity crisis brings to mind Professor Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s book, The Invention of Africa.
Mudimbe, a Congolese philosophical historian explains that before the advent of colonialism, Africans were a self-defined peoples. However, the clash of civilisations presented by colonialism philosophically, culturally, politically and economically adulterated how we relate with each other and the rest of the world.
Against that backdrop, the decolonisation project would be remiss if the post-colonial state is not seized with the mandate of self-rebranding. The path to rebranding at a national scale exorcises us from the deep-rooted demons of self-hate and self-invalidations.
Zimbabwe’s first step to eradicating self-invalidation came to life through our affirmative land repossession exercise.
We were the first country to dismantle the bedrock of colonial capital monopoly. It will take centuries for Rhodesians and their Western kith and kin to forgive us for the land reform. Remember, this was hardly less than two decades before the West could forgive us for defeating the British imperial army through guerrilla warfare. The land reform demolished the comforts that came with our surrogate status to the Western world. That way, we radically redefined ourselves in economic terms.
This made already established and long self-redefined imperialist forces to ride on their opportunistic leverage on the human and property rights narrative to portray Zimbabwe as a pariah state.
They used various intelligentsia weaponry to decimate our anti-colonial reputation; in the process, they made any idea about national sovereignty, national independence and national economy preservation so blemished and closely associated with ZANU PF’s “desperate’ power consolidation strategies.
Our late former president and pan-Africanist icon, Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe became a subject of international disparagement for his role in reclaiming our national dignity. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Brand Zimbabwe project is being directly unleashed from the desk of the first citizen himself in joint collaboration with his Government arm for Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services.
This ministry plays a crucial role not only in defining important and novel national moments, but it educates and re-educates the nation to introspect and redefine what it means to be Zimbabwean.
Telling our untold greatness
Likewise, industry and commerce should be taken to task through this exercise. This way, they will effectively exert their outputs in a manner that makes everyone home and abroad to want to “Buy Zimbabwe”.
This is very important considering that every crop and mineral from our soil also creates employment outside our borders. As a result, the collapse of our agriculture and mining sectors threatens the livelihoods and value chains of many other nations in the world including those nations that have placed us under illegal sanctions.
Within our multi-currency basket we have by default made the US dollar popular in our country to the point that when it’s no longer in circulation in Dotito, Mutorashanga the stock market in New York will sneeze. The Zimbabwean diaspora are a representative sample of our industrious attributes and competitive skills in the world market as a people. Therefore, it is surprising that this greatness was allowed to remain unbranded for decades. This is the greatness that the New York Times, BBC and CNN will never tell about our country – Zimbabwe.
In any case, they have no obligation to tell the world how great we are. This is why the Brand Zimbabwe initiative is critical at this point than never before.
When President met Tony Blair
In all this, President Mnangagwa should be hailed for being Zimbabwe’s Chief Diplomat. While his engagement and re-engagement proposition initially suffered hyper-nationalist sabotages, it is now clear that the decolonial refocusing of our foreign policy remains grounded on solid principles.
Just last week, the President rubbed shoulders with one of the stubborn imperialist anti-land reform champions Tony Blair at the 12th African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) held on Kigali Rwanda. This was hardly a week after the convening of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Show. Symbolically, President Mnangagwa is boldly illustrating his bona fide allegiance to the defence of the land reform programme.
Second, his administration is merely using the engagement and re-engagement policy to market the outputs of the colonially despised land reform programme. Now President Mnangagwa is going back to those who thought that our people would not succeed on the land and demonstrating that we have been able to take full charge of the benefits of the agrarian reform. Zimbabwe’s courteous reach out to those that colonised us and never thought that our nationalist realignment of property rights will be a success amplifies a significantly ignored aspect of our national political culture rebranding.
We are now a nation that is no longer focused on confrontational gallery grandstanding. Of course, some sections of the media saw this as a colonial conformity gesture. This is because Tony Blair is still viewed by many as a symbol of Western resistance to African economic liberation. Surely, there is everything insane about comparing his exchange with Tony Blair with that of politicians in the opposition who have used their international influence to call for illegal sanctions to be imposed on Zimbabwe.
Therefore, the call to Brand Zimbabwe is much bigger than our fixated polarised inclinations to nation building. We must all be part of Branding the Zimbabwe we want next generations to be associated with.
Pamberi neZimbabwe!
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is Director for International Communication Services in the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services. He writes in his personal capacity. Feedback: Twitter: @richardrmahomva; Email [email protected].
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