Zimpapers Logo

Stephen Mpofu

In the play Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, unarguably Britain’s greatest playwright, pens lines that must serve as humankind’s guidelines while still in this carnal world.

In his eulogy at the burial of Julius Caesar, the world’s greatest military leader in the Roman Empire, Mark Antony, his ally says: “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.”

Tomorrow as Zimbabwe lays to rest her son of unflinching revolutionary intrepidity and founder of our independent state, the Zimbabwean nation should reverse the bromide in Mark Antony’s speech and instead immortalise the iconic political, social and economic deeds of Robert Mugabe, this country’s former executive president and revolutionary par excellence as a legacy for generations to come as pre-purposed by God’s powerful creative word, until the Second Coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Indeed, it was Cde Mugabe’s passionate desire to have a panel of expert historians assemble to write the history of the armed revolution that won back the motherland from a foreign ruling culture with those gallant sons and daughters of the soil who bore arms in the freedom struggle providing salient information for a history to serve as a guiding star for a reborn nation and into a brave new future. 

Let us go back to infant Zimbabwe after Uhuru. This communicologist and others who served closely with the new government will recall how as Prime Minister then, Cde Mugabe tried to reformulate the path our new nation was to take from a racist capitalist system that saw colonial rulers and their stooges continually surfeiting their potbellies while the impoverished black majority tightened their belts on shrunken bellies to the last knot with their cheeks shrinking to expose the outlines of their jaw bones, and to a socialist state where equality prevailed to a large extent.

Cde Mugabe lambasted some among his new leaders of preaching socialism by day and capitalism by night in a bid nicodemously to accumulate wealth for themselves while those they led trudged on in abject poverty.

He described the inconsistent leaders as “creatures at the top”, which formed the title of a book by this writer, published in 2012 in the United Kingdom by Spiderwize and distributed worldwide over the years by Amazon.com and with a local edition by Zimbabwe Publishing House (ZPH) last year and telling the world about a Zimbabwe of Cde Mugabe’s dream.

Today Zimbabwe is touted for having one of the highest literacy ratings on the African continent, thanks to Cde Mugabe whose Presidential Scholarship programme has helped considerably in promoting education in our nation.

It obviously behoves on the Government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Cde Mugabe’s former Vice President, to continue to maintain our educational track record.

Which means that no child of school-going age should drop out as a result of rocketing school fees that parents are unable to meet in an economy on a limp. This necessarily means that the Government should come up with measures to make the Zimbabwean child, particularly in the rural areas where drought aggravates poverty, pursue their education well beyond the functional literacy stage, as a foundation for a better future.

Cde Mugabe also demonstrated a political will that future generations must copy for their survival.

He taught this nation an important lesson with his critical will for national unity with the formation in 2008 of an inclusive government between Zanu-PF and the two MDCs to overcome the economic difficulties that the country faced.

The moral of that national political unity is that when people pursuing different political persuasions come to a roaring river in flood, they must link arms as a nation to cross the flooded river in single file as that unity guarantees their safety.

However, as ill luck would have it, some of the people throw away their political carcasses when overcome with joy after crossing the flooded river.

Unfortunately, they forget that when they approach another flooded political river in their lives after their loin skins are gone with the wind they will have nothing with which to gird their waists in order to safely cross another swollen river on their own in future.

This is an apt warning to those political actors who unliterary decide to go it alone rather than in unity with others in paving a better future for all in our motherland. 

Land, our nation’s natural endowment from God – on which the imperialist West has laid siege with its illegal economic sanctions – must stand as a strong army with farms acquired from whites under land reform for re-distribution to blacks who needed those assets the most, and other farmlands must position themselves as battalions of the national army heavily armed with different varieties of crops to defeat the enemy and live happily ever afterwards.

Aware that Zimbabwe’s economy is agriculturally based, President Mugabe’s government introduced the land reform programme to take the nation into a straight path and into a brave new future.

As such there must be no going back on that life-or-death economic decision which ought to serve as a bridge into the future since agriculture is the bedrock of Zimbabwe’s economy.

Revolutionaries do not die, it is said, but live on with their good deeds bearing their footmarks.

So let it also be with Robert Gabriel Mugabe.