Zimpapers Logo

Perspective Stephen Mpofu
IT was the young men and young women who waged the armed revolution to recover  land – this country – seized and christened  Rhodesia by a foreign ruling culture to celebrate Cecil John Rhodes,  a British imperialist hero after whom Zimbabwe was previously named. But many of those gallant sons and daughters did not live to celebrate uhuru a value they worked so selflessly to bring to the motherland on the warm ashes of a supremacist regime that had sworn never to give the country back to the native population.

Yet the revolution for which they shed their precious blood, a worthy sacrifice to give posterity a better future, remained a road without end.

While the revolutionary road the guerillas walked may have been littered with impediments, the continuing stretch, the agrarian revolution, is tarmacked to carry the country along a bold forward march agriculturally, thereby restoring Zimbabwe to her previous status as the bread basket of Southern Africa — a proud record but one that now remains a virtual proverb.

Yet not  all of the sons and daughters of the soil who survived the protracted liberation struggle did not automatically benefit from the soil that they freed under the land reform programme, with efforts now being made to rope them in whenever farms are acquired for resettlement purposes. Perhaps the former combatants would have been leading beneficiaries of the land reform scheme had an organisation existed to cater primarily to their needs in the absence of alternative employment opportunities.

Yet it is not too late for the country to harness the vibrant energy of born frees by organising them into productive users of land, an asset that Zimbabwe and Africa as a whole boast as God’s supreme endowment, with rich minerals pulsating, as it were, beneath the earth.

A launch earlier this week of an organisation for young farmers by the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union should be celebrated by all as a giant step forward in efforts to give an added fillip to the agrarian revolution that has by and large benefited older people.

ZCFU says farming should be passed on to young farmers as they are the future, hence the formation of the Young Farmers’ Association of Zimbabwe.

The timing of that move could not have been better, considering many closures of companies that have left thousands of workers  among them young people, tramping the streets and with any prospective new jobs an ever receding  mirage.

Zimbabwe’s high literacy rate should put the young farmers in good stead to adapt to technical  support and advice that the ZCFU says it will ask Agritex to provide.

Farming in postmodern Zimbabwe calls for more sophisticated methods, to yield better dividends as opposed to old traditional farming methods in the villages, for instance, where mixed cropping was mostly used as a method to confuse pests so they did not know which crop to attack.

The new, Young Farmers Association of Zimbabwe will certainly provide continuity in the future productive use of land and this behoves on the authorities concerned to ensure that agricultural colleges enrol more young men and women to give them the prerequisite know-how in farming as a profitable, occupational alternative to erratic employment opportunities in urban areas to which many young people flock after graduating from school in search of white-collar jobs.

The young farmers who will carry Zimbabwe on their shoulders, food wise, will obviously need support with inputs such as various types of seed as well as fertilisers and tillage to empower them in their new but tricky occupation, especially with climate change playing hide and seek with food producers.

Zimbabwe’s future in the area of food production might have remained opaque without young farmers being groomed to replace older ones in the autumn of the latter’s lives.

Thus, catching them still young and bursting with energy and with an unflinching determination to succeed is a virtue for which the ZCFU deserves commendation, while any potential young farmers need to be psyched into a realisation that a work-suit and calloused hands on  a farm are  not necessarily inferior to a Seville suit in an air-conditioned  office in town since the latter cannot  survive without food from the farmers labours.

Before urbanisation and industrialisation people in this country lived off the soil, were much healthier without junk food and experienced long lives. One can imagine what impact agricultural and industrialisation running neck and neck will have on Zimbabwe’s economy as more and more young people go back to the land.