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Stephen Mpofu Correspondent
It bore the brunt of the long and often brutal bush war before a racist, foreign ruling culture was subdued by a revolution that ushered in a brave new future for Zimbabwe.

Yet nearly four decades since independence in April 1980 the periphery, or countryside where the majority of Zimbabweans, live remain Cinderella-ed with as many as 42 percent of its children there unable to access education because of long distances that they must travel to receive their alienable right as free citizens of an independent and sovereign state led by a revolutionary Government.

A recent report by the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZimVAC) also said 7 percent of other children were afflicted by different diseases that prevented them from attending school and called for priority to be given to allocation of resources towards the strengthening of the school feeding and school health programmes.

The ZimVAC report is not only a sad commentary on a country that at more than 95 percent boasts the highest literacy rating on the African continent.

It should, in fact, be read as a challenge to spur the Government and other stakeholders to seriously consider allocating adequate resources for the construction of more schools in rural communities to empower rural folk with functional literacy and with that improve lives.

This suggests a departure from loading up urban centres, or the haves, which enjoyed the best of schools, hospitals, banks et al in the days of the colonial ruler, with our own black ruling elite taking them over as their bequest.

Not only that. The Government should mobilise resources to harness the sun to provide solar energy to rural schools and communities, a move that will also spare woodlands now being decimated for firewood by villagers or the so-called have-nots.

An exciting new start in making rural life more attractive to reverse the urban drift has already begun with the introduction of Command Agriculture under which a bumper maize crop has been realised to bring back Zimbabwe to an even keel as the breadbasket of Southern Africa, anchored by the new Command Livestock and Command Fisheries initiatives.

The Command initiatives should now be accompanied with an introduction of food technology among the youth as a way of opening up new job opportunities in rural areas for them to process, preserve and export the foods to earn foreign exchange for the country.

If solar energy becomes the new thing, the initiative will have the potential to transform development zones or growth points into manufacturing zones with bottle stores and their juke boxes giving way to small business initiatives by rural communities to improve lives that decidedly remain dour.

In fact, these new initiatives could put Zimbabwe in the frontline of other countries in reversing the urban drift while at the same time giving the motherland a brave new future.

In this regard, political parties are challenged to come up with exciting new initiatives if the parties have to find their way into the hearts and minds of the Zimbabwean masses in next year’s harmonised elections.

Shadow-boxers, or running dogs of imperialism, should be shoved in the shade where they belong to allow those with genuine interests of the country at heart to lead the way as our nation’s torch- bearers.