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Stephen Mpofu, Perspective

THEY tear up Zimbabwe’s improving image abroad and cast the shreds into sticky mud with potential investors out there raising barricades against their precious capital inflows to a country made by the criminals to resemble a bottomless pit.

This discourse is about two-legged viruses that compete with Covid-19 to threaten human lives and industrial security in our beloved motherland, Zimbabwe.

First, armed robbers terrorising Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s industrial hub, ahead of the country’s international trade fair — a window for the outside world to see what the country can offer investment wise are wont to make some foreign exhibitors and potential investors as well develop cold feet and stay home close with their forex, thereby depriving our economy of valuable capital to catalyse much-needed development for our nation.

Since the Zimbabwe National Army is fighting no foreign soldiers invading the country, the Government might wish to consider deploying some military units to deal a death knell to the marauding bandits some of whom — who knows — may have fled under military pursuit from crime-ridden neighbouring states to be among those outlaws now wreaking havoc in the City of Kings and Queens and probably elsewhere in the country as well.

Companies moving large amounts of cash from point to point in Bulawayo might wish to consider protection by crack police or military escorts with those companies that operate late into the evening after other businesses have shut down seeking the protection of armed police or soldiers for the safety of their money prior to the cash being taken for banking the following day.

Also, in the humble opinion of this scribe and uninverted patriot, the powers that be might wish to introduce mechanisms at appropriate places for companies and homes under siege by armed robbers to re-activate, or for neighbours to do so for quick responses to their rescue by security personnel.

Then there is this other, worrisome trend involving corruption — a growing concern that the Government has denounced and which must be stamped out without any further ado as it threatens to deal a fatal blow to the collective image of the Zimbabwean state abroad.

It is clear that success in combating corruption will require the close co-operation of loyal and patriotic employees at the workplace, every workplace, as the eyes and ears of the Government’s anti-corruption commission with promotion or a monetary award given as incentives to employees helping to rid their workplace, every type of workplace in the nation including Government employment, of the corruption cancer will also buttress Government’s open-investment policy.

Some workers no doubt co-operate with superiors involved in the corruption scam for a cut of the money or property looted by their corrupt supervisors or colleagues and a thank you by the employer, public or private, for a job well done in exposing the looters will deter co-operation in the graft by loyal employees of whatever rank.

The protection and overall security of Zimbabwe’s every asset, material or monetary, will make our national development tick.

In retrospect, therefore, the emancipation of our beloved country to higher levels of post-modern development must be seen as a ball in every Zimbabwean’s court as it were and which all Zimbabweans must play with both dexterity and an unflinching determination for other underdeveloped nations to emulate in order to free themselves from the dehumanising dependency syndrome.

But if most Zimbabweans choose to remain nailed to their blasted haunches while waving the begging bowl in the air must realise that they will help drive the country into a near colonial harness and make even those trying to emancipate all of us from underdevelopment wish that we never set foot on the face of this world.

Zimbabweans of all political, religious or other stripes should resolve and place themselves under the mercies of God the Almighty and Creator which are renewed every morning for those who fear Him as the beginning of wisdom so that every discontinuity will become mere proverbs of their previous lives.

It therefore, behoves on all unmitigated Zimbabwean patriots to fold sleeves, unite and demonstrate through hard work the bellyful and joyful derivatives of self-determination, the synonym of the independence that we boast today and for which gallant sons and daughters of the soil lost their precious lives with some still lying in unknown graves.

Those with literate eyes to read this article must immortalise, share with others the message that bares and above all live it.