Come back home scattered, foreign-trodden Zimbabweans and smile
Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
ZIMBABWEANS scattered abroad — and those waiting on their toes to follow suit — from an economy illegally embargoed by Western imperialists hell bent on installing a puppet regime in Harare must have realised by now that West, North, East and Zim — home here in the South is best; otherwise they/we, God’s proud black beauty creation of His image and likeness, are bound to spend lifetimes paupering those who clandestinely believe that their white skin is a symbol of God’s purity.
Three days ago the Voice Of America radio broadcast to the world in isiNdebele, Shona and English information that should make Zimbabweans dispersed in foreign lands and those back here at home realise that the mantra “Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo/Ilizwe lakhiwa ngabaninilo/A country is developed by its owners”, is a must exhortation by our president, Cde Emmerson Mnangagwa for Zimbabweans to put their minds and heads together from wherever they are in these difficult days in our lives to build our own country, helped by genuinely friendly souls abroad so that our present and future generations will walk wherever they are with heads and shoulders thrust high for being in an economically successful country that God created for us.
VOA’s broadcaster, Mr Jonga Kandemiri, a Zimbabwean himself interviewed by Radio Two fellow Zimbabweans based and practicing their craft in the United Kingdom and identified only as Dr Munatsi and Dr Guri about the plight of Zimbabwean economic refugees there, in a country that previously colonised our motherland before independence in April 1980.
The two professionals spoke at length about Zimbabweans recruited for social care work, among other jobs, in the UK.
(It is known that Zimbabweans seeking greener pastures elsewhere in southern Africa to care for their families back home in the wake of jobs gobbled up by the sanctions imposed by the United States and her allies, have ended up going overseas in search of better things on discovering that they are not very welcome in sister, Sadc states that whinge about foreigners depriving their own nationals of social benefits due to them.)
Dr Guri and Dr Munatsi said the Zimbabweans recruited for social care work were not prior-educated about adverse conditions that the foreigners were bound to encounter in the UK namely extreme cold winters as well as exotic foods upon which they would subsist but which were either too expensive for the foreigners or non-compliant with their natural dietary states back here at home.
As a result some of them ended up seeking medical care, apparently shocked by the strange living conditions encountered in the host country.
(Back here in Zimbabwe people not earning big salaries to afford expensive foods including beef, do subsist comfortably with their families on, say, sadza/isitshwala accompanied with matemba/kapenta fish, delele/derere, amacimbi/madora/mopane worms and sour milk as relish, et cetera et cetera.)
You (yes, you) may also compare living conditions of the generality of Zimbabwean urban dwellers with pathetic — for lack of better terminology — dwelling conditions of descendants of African slaves for instance, in the United States, a country to which some Zimbabweans desperately wish to go in search of employment.
This writer spent a fortnight working on the then — and probably even now — biggest newspaper, the Amsterdam News in New York’s Harlem ghetto while on a study tour of the US when working as a senior journalist on the Times of Zambia just before Zimbabwe’s independence and was shocked by sights of black descendants of African slaves sleeping literally packed like sardines on balconies of multi-storey buildings, not to mention the general treatment of blacks there by whites still thumbing their noses on black people, all blacks, regarded as descendants of slaves.
In the circumstances cited above in this discourse, and in light of our Second Republic Government’s commitments to ‘‘leave no one and no place behind’’ in its national development programmes now seriously and openly under way, it therefore, becomes only logical for Zimbabwean nationals living, and being treated like sub-humans in foreign lands to come back home and enjoy their dignified human status in their proud motherland where no foreigner flaunting a different skin colour will say pwe, pwe, pwe.
If former diasporans and permanent Zim-stayers link arms and hearts together as was the case during the struggle for independence we will recall the retired but still indefatigable revolutionary spirit and restore the economy to its pre-sanctions era when Zimbabwe was hailed by other states on our continent as the breadbasket of southern Africa with surplus agricultural produce going north through Zambia to as far as Cairo in Egypt.
Yes, we CAN, not may, do it with God’s great operating grace as our portion for his acknowledgement of our lifetime praises of His incomparable greatness and lifetime of worshipping Him until the great sound of the trumpet blown by his angel brings down the curtain on this temporary world of trials and tribulations for His children to enter permanent season of profound joy with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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