President’s speech at Senator Georgias’ burial President Mugabe

Address by His Excellency the president, Cde RG Mugabe, on the occasion of the burial of Senator Aguy Georgias, at the National Heroes’ Acre in Harare yesterday.The Bereaved Georgias Family, Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Amai,
Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko and Amai,
Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku and Amai,
President of the Senate, Amai Edna Madzongwe,
Speaker of the House of Assembly, Advocate Jacob Mudenda,
Politburo and Central Committee Members, Cabinet Ministers, Senior Government officials, Service Chiefs, War Veterans, Detainees, Collaborators and Restrictees, Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Friends. 

Ordinarily, 22nd December is our National Unity Day. It should have been a happy day for all of us, a time for celebrations. Little did we know that while we were, as mortals, proposing celebrations, our Maker would dispose those proposals, replacing the joys of celebration with tears of grief and bereavement.

Senator Aguy Georgias is no more, whisked from us by an untimely death. We lost him in the early hours of last Friday. He had been unwell for quite some time, and it was a real pain watching him wasting away slowly.

The family tried many avenues, many doctors, many institutions, both inside and outside the country. His latest treatment in South Africa gave us some modicum of hope. He appeared to be on the mend, and was even able to rise and walk on his own .We all became hopeful. Little did we know we were witnessing his last days with us.

On behalf of Zanu-PF, Aguy Georgias’ Party, Government, which he served so well, our nation, to whose well-being and prosperity he was oversold, and on behalf of my family, I want to convey my deepest condolences to Amai Georgias and the entire Georgias family, on this their saddest loss.

I know this to be a very difficult moment for all of you, having lost a dear husband, a loving father, a warm grandfather, and a guardian. But such is the fate of our mortal life; we are born to die, placed on this earth to leave it when God wills it.

Today Aguy has settled his account for this life; he has left for another life which is beyond the human ken. And because we don’t know what happens beyond the grave, beyond this life, we relate to death bitterly, wishing we lived together forever in this only life we know and have experienced. But it’s only a wish, a wish never granted to mortal man.

While we bury Senator Aguy Georgias today, the great deeds he accomplished in his very busy and purposeful life, make his life larger, longer, than his physical demise. Or, as the great English bard, William Shakespeare, puts it, his great deeds will live after him.

In the affairs of our Nation, we had Aguy Georgias as a Senator. We also had him as a Minister of Government, a politician who worked for the growth and glory of his people through his party, Zanu-PF. From all this vantage point, he made a mark on his nation, wrote himself into eternity through a myriad of meritorious deeds, under each functional role.

The record is there for the Georgias family to read, to find and derive comfort from. Georgias has left a record which today chides you, and all of us, as we grieve over his death; a record which exhorts you to celebrate a life well lived, to exalt a life lived for others, for a broader community. Aguy was thus a great man.

He took all Zimbabweans as his immediate family. He was one of us, and we were one with him. At 80, he had lived through contrasting and contradicting epochs: Southern Rhodesia, the Central African Federation, UDI Rhodesia, and then in Zimbabwean Independence from 1980.

To survive a colour-coded world, to keep a sense of oneness of humanity when one has lived through such a racially truncated world, takes great personality.

He rejected the pull of this graduated racial privileges, racial pecking order, all the time seeking a new world, a new order in which men, all women, would be the same, embracing a non-racial communion, in seamless humanity.

Aguy belonged to the league of men and women, who rejected transient privileges preferring to embrace the lasting value of common humanity. It’s a great legacy which this Nation gains and reads from his great life. It’s a great legacy, which cooled leaping tempers of war and conflict in the early eighties. We could have easily gone for each other, but we chose to forgive each other, to embrace and to reconcile.

Still our world remained imperfect. In large measure, at Independence, forgiveness and reconciliation, became a black man’s and black woman’s burden, hardly the white oppressor’s expiating responsibility for the heinous sins and wrongs committed against the majority, for nearly a century. And that showed openly: peace born out of reconciliation, yes. Non-racial equality and social justice needed to underpin that reconciliation so it could last.

We proceeded to take the land, and went further and declared that our sense of sovereignty went beyond politics and governance. It extended to total control and ownership of our resources. Then a vicious war began, a racial war led by the West, who supported white farmers in resisting land reforms.

The country was slapped with illegal sanctions, its leadership put on a sanctions list, which exists to this day. Aguy Georgias was among those of us on the list for Western sanctions, persons who were not supposed to visit Britain, Europe and America. It was as if Europe and America were stopovers to heaven!

Senator Georgias suffered personal losses through his company, Trinity Engineering. His family suffered too. They sacrificed a great deal. Georgias always stood firm on the issue of our rights. He stood firm on the side of an injured majority. He stood on the side of history.

He refused to submit to western retribution. He never took it lying. He fought indefatigably, took the fight to the white man’s court literally. He challenged sanctions, using British and European court systems. He sought compensation for himself and his people, and used his title resources to seek justice the West never gives, never grants to us, the small peoples of this world.

He won that fight. Won it not by way of material compensation or restitution, but by way of exposing the hypocrisy at the heart of western legal systems. They are never for justice; they are for the preservation of western interests and hegemony. No white court serves real justice to an African. Instead of restitution, the white world does worse things: hauling Africans to unjust courts, murdering them even. When the story of Zimbabwe’s resistance to sanctions is eventually written, Senator Georgias’ name will rank high.

A good number of Zimbabweans will remember the late departed as a shrewd businessman. They will remember Trinity Engineering, that quality builder of coaches and trailers which Aguy built from nothing. It challenged established businesses in the same field, clinched major deals at home and abroad. He supported the fleet of our security establishment. He exported to different parts of Africa, as far afield as East Africa.

And all this was well before we spoke about black empowerment, well before we spoke about beneficiation and value addition. Aguy built a strong indigenous brand, grew it to amazing levels. He transformed the iron we mined at Buchwa into coaches and trailers, in the process anticipating a key facet of Zim-Asset: Value Addition and Beneficiation. A great visionary indeed he was!

It was while in the middle of doing business that he ran into the unfairness of our financial systems, our banks. Armed with astronomical interest rates, banks were in the habit, in fact still are, of charging interests well beyond the principal sum borrowed. Aguy would not have it. He successfully challenged such practices in our courts, in the process securing a judgment that promised relief to many. But there has been lots of resistance to operationalising the tenets of that judgment, to great detriment of our economy.

True, this economy faces many challenges, wrought mainly by sanctions. But there is a way in which the banking sector has not made matters any easier. Banks seem to pass their own sanctions package against us, including those who deposit with them. It is only in banks where time reduces deposited savings, instead of growing them. One gets punished for depositing savings with banks, it seems. One gets less one’s deposits, but pays more for borrowing.

How do we ever hope to grow this economy when we undermine the propensity to save, punish borrowers? I am happy the Minister of Finance and the Reserve Bank Governor are looking at other strategies of reforming the banking sector, and injecting liquidity into the market. The acceptance of the yuan into the world currency basket should offer new possibilities for us.

Today this Nation requites Senator Aguy Georgias by granting him the highest honour of national hero. It is its small way of acknowledging his services, a modest tribute to this great man, which his surviving family must accept as a modest recompense. We lay our hero to rest on this Sacred Acre where he joins other great fighters, his peers. Let him travel to a new life in the full knowledge that the one he left behind holds him in high esteem. May this wipe his family’s tears, wipe them dry.

Go well Aguy. Go well Senator. An indomitable fighter.

I thank you.

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