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President Mugabe

Hildegarde The Arena

A nation that is seeking solutions to economic problems can ill afford to waste valuable time on party squabbles. Unity and singleness of purpose will add value to the peace that we enjoy today.

HOME is always best, but like the character Phileas Fogg, in Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days” we will breeze around, but get back to Zanu-PF and ask some of them what they are doing to the revolutionary tenets that built this great house of stone.

It was not coincidental that this country was called Zimbabwe, and those bent on relegating it to the dustbin of history are fighting a losing battle. The minority will never win against the collective mind of the majority.

Take former Cuban president Fidel Castro Ruz for example. This larger- than-life figure is basking in the sunshine of glory because his political star keeps rising. The Castro they “killed” so many times astounds even his enemies.

Such a feat can only come from a revolutionary who has been at the epicentre of global politics for more than five decades.

Fidel Castro

When the “Who is who” in world affairs travel to Cuba, one of the personalities on their must-see itinerary is Commandant Fidel. We have also seen it in Zimbabwe. There is no need to belabour the point, as we say in Shona: “Chiri mumusakasaka chinozvinzwira.”

The curiosity is such that you start asking yourself stupid questions like: “Are they trying to prove that Fidel Castro is for real or what?” This is because the Castro brand is getting better with age, and that rebranding is good for Cuba.

Soon, they will reap huge rewards from the Fidel legacy. Cubans have to thank him for that resolute stance and refusal to capitulate and compromise to Western demands, thereby selling off the revolution he fought with his comrades-in-arms like Che Guevara.

It has taken 10 United States presidents: John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama to realise what the biblical writer of the book of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 1: 1-10, “Everything is meaningless”.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labour at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises . . . To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

As relations between Cuba and the United States, and other Western nations thaw, we see how utterly “meaningless” the more than half a century of punishing the Cuban people have been, an exercise in futility. Why? Just to prove that military and financial might should rule small nations, especially those that do not want to tow the line?

But they remain glued to the Castro theatre! French president Francois Hollande has become the first Western leader this Monday to make an official visit to Cuba since the United States and Cuba started re-engaging and working on normalising relations.

According to a BBC report, before leaving Paris, Hollande declared that his country would “be the first among European nations, and the first among Western nations, to be able to say to the Cubans that we will be at their side if they decide themselves to take needed steps toward opening up”.

Please, give us a break! More than 50 years of making people suffer and you make it look like it’s a race to see who will get to Cuba first!

The visit would have been incomplete without meeting Fidel Castro. The 50-minute meeting was historic for the French leader who was quoted by Agence-France Presse saying: “I had before me a man who made history,” who had “a lot to say.” This summarised the Castro brand.

It took this plunge by Obama in the April deal with Cuba for Europe to realise that they have to follow suit, and in some cases make announcements that should have been made decades ago.

During Hollande’s visit, the Western media wanted to impress on us to “see or hear no evil”. How absurd that Hollande called on the United States to lift its 50-plus years of embargo against Cuba: “The measures which have so badly harmed Cuba’s development can finally be repealed,” he announced.

The irony is: Is it only the US that imposed those sanctions on Cuba? Why can’t France take the first step and demonstrate to the US and the EU that this evil cannot be allowed to continue?

The Castro theatre did not end with the French leader. President Raul Castro met Pope Francis on his way from Russia’s 70th Victory Celebration of World War II.

What a show, and what exceptionalism that Russia put up! One of those tankers cannot fit into the street in this writer’s neighbourhood. It was military power and much more — the redefinition of the geo-political sphere.

President Mugabe as African Union chair was among those leaders who have refused to have history revised in order to suit Western interests.

But what should we call the state of the world we are now, because “the new world order” seems redundant? It cannot also be a free-for-all!

After meeting with the Pope, the media was awash with President Raul’s admiration of the Pope before his Cuban pilgrimage in September: “I told the (Italian) Prime Minister if the Pope continues to talk as he does, sooner or later I will start praying again and return to the Catholic Church, and I am not kidding,” he told a Press conference.

But, we hope that the West looks at its “perceived enemies” in a holistic manner and show that they believe in civilisation, independence and self-determination of nation states.

Dialogue and not confrontation are the basis of civility, and it should not be done willy-nilly because we are all a community of nations, and no country can claim to have lived to the letter and spirit of the international bill of rights.

Are these the end times?

If you read the book of Matthew, chapters 24 and 25 in the Bible and other cross-references, even if you are not a Christian, you would not doubt that the weird events taking place across the globe, including in Zimbabwe are what is normally referred as the “end-time” messages: wars, rumours of war, nations rising against each other, famines and earthquakes in various places. (Matthew 24:6-7). All this is now common-place, whether you are in the First and/or Third World.

Nepal is well known for being part of the habitat of the world’s highest mountain — Mt Everest, but disasters are striking the small nation of about 27 million in a devastating manner.

On April 25, Nepal was hit by an earthquake whose magnitude was 7,8 on the Richter scale. It was a quake that affected the capital Kathmandu and neighbouring countries: India, Bhutan, China, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Obviously, the figures given are conservative, but the April 25 quake is believed to have killed about 8 000 people and wounded 19 000 others, and millions have been displaced.

As the survivors were picking up pieces, another quake, whose magnitude was 7,3, hit Nepal again on May 12. The destruction is beyond imagination, causing more deaths, injuries and damage to the infrastructure that survived on April 25.

Dear readers, for a moment imagine that this could have happened in eastern and western Harare in a space of a fortnight.

No harm in just imagining. Although there might not be correlations, these are moments that the people of Zimbabwe should reflect on the beauty of life and the peaceful of environment that they enjoy. We might lack this and that but to have peace, is to have the totality of life!

This peace is not of our own making, but within us, we resolved that we have to learn to co-exist and respect each other.

Under such a peaceful environment, we should feel that in as much as we get humanitarian assistance when we have problems, we should also extend a hand of assistance to those in need. Just like we did when we sent specialists to some of West African states ravaged by the Ebola virus.

The few that were brave enough to go are our heroes and Zimbabwe is now counted among nations that lent a hand to brothers in need.

We can still do that to countries like Nepal, instead of the political party in-fighting that have become a part of us. A nation that is seeking solutions to economic problems can ill afford to waste valuable time on party squabbles. Unity and singleness of purpose will add value to the peace that we enjoy today.

On May 25 we celebrate Africa Day. With President Mugabe chairing the organisation whose founding he witnessed on May 25 1963, and with Zimbabwe also assisting its brothers and sisters on the continent to attain independence after 1980, we should rise above petty differences, revisit the nation’s and Africa’s principles and start working toward the attainment of Agenda 2063.

Today’s generation owes it to future generations. It’s not too late to continue to rebrand the Mugabe brand and that of freedom fighters that paid the supreme price to have this nation free from colonial bondage.