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Dr Utete

Zimbabweans of goodwill rose to the occasion yesterday, thronging the National Heroes’ Acre in Harare to bid farewell to an ultimate civil servant, Dr Charles Utete.

President Mugabe in his speech described Dr Utete as the symbol of simplicity, humility and love. He always strove for harmony.

One of the reasons Dr Utete earned the honour to be buried at the national shrine was his commitment to duty, his preparedness always to do more than he was paid to do, his ability to conceptualise and operationalise Government policy and programmes, said the President.

More than that, Dr Utete was always looking for solutions where others saw obstacles and problems. Every boss would love to have such an employee.

Fortunately, as the President noted, almost intuitively, Dr Utete seemed to always accurately read and interpret the thinking of Government, which must have made the burden of executing his multifaceted tasks a little lighter.

In that mould, he should be a role model for every top civil servant. That on its own should be enough to earn him the accolade he received from fellow Zimbabweans on his death.

But, as the President pointed out yesterday, Dr Utete was also keen on the fundamental matter of the empowerment of the black people. He fully supported the land reform programme.

The Government embarked on the fast-track land reform programme in 2000, three years before Dr Utete formerly retired from the Civil Service. He must have viewed it as the crowning achievement of his service to Government.

He must therefore have been disillusioned to discover, after chairing the Presidential Land Review Committee, that a lot of members of the party and Government he served had in fact deliberately violated policy on the one man, one farm principle.

President Mugabe adverted to this painful matter at the burial of Dr Charles Utete at the National Heroes’ Acre yesterday when he exhorted Zimbabweans to use the land productively.

He said after recovering the land stolen by white settlers, Zimbabwe should not be importing food, we should not be importing maize; we should not be starving as a country.

He said there were people who were content to be sitting on hundreds of hectares of farmland and felt they were somebody while the nation was starving. Only when you produce do you become somebody, the President said.

We believe that is a challenge thrown at this nation by Dr Charles Utete from beyond the grave. The biggest honour Zimbabweans can pay him is to use the land to produce and feed themselves.

There are thousands of Zimbabweans who today sit on hectares of farmland, but are not producing. They will manufacture as many excuses as there are stars in Heaven as to why they can’t produce, from illegal economic sanctions to lack of inputs to the drought.

What separates them from Dr Utete is that he looked for solutions to challenges he faced, he didn’t look for excuses why a policy of Government could not be implemented.

It is an indictment of the whole land reform programme that 16 years on there are people sitting on farms who want to be supplied with inputs. Most of them submitted business proposals to justify their acquisition of the farm.

Today instead of producing they want Government to supply them with diesel, seed, fertiliser, draught power, irrigation equipment and tractors.

Such people don’t deserve to be on the farms a day longer. They give a bad name to a noble Government empowerment policy, which must have been a huge disappointment to Dr Charles Utete.

It is a bigger disappointment to the region where Zimbabwe has been a trailblazer in conceiving and executing bold policy initiatives for post-colonial Africa that we are importing maize.

If for nothing else, let Zimbabwean farmers feed the nation in Utete’s name. It’s the final honour we can pay him for his sacrifices as the seedbed of Government policy initiatives for 23 years as the topmost Civil Service technocrat.