PresidentialYouth Interface series: A renaissance of our nationalism?

AFRICA is awakening to a new-fangled era of ideological reformation vistas principally inclined to auditing the decolonisation project’s successes and its inhibitions to the continent’s development.

The Rhodes and Fees Must Fall rapture encapsulates Africa’s introspection on what nationalism has achieved and the prospects it has to bid for the youth to contribute towards the continent’s development.

Zimbabwe is not exempted from this tide of renaissance that Africa has to be vigorously involved in to redress the vestiges of colonialism. The nationalist movement across the entire continent is being coercively compelled by this post-colonial tide to reorganise and reinvent its commissariat base to be all inclusive in appealing to the diverse needs of the polity.

This follows a background of superimposed castigations on the nationalist movement for its exclusive appeal to the veterans of the decolonisation project.

In this process, this has posed as a threat to the nationalist movement’s appeal to the youth demographic. As such, many youths across the continent have been lost to the superficial democracy advocacy agenda which is voluminous neo-colonial than it is concerned with producing youthful cadres of pan-African ardent resilience to colonial interests.

On the other hand, due to the alleged marginal character of the nationalist project and its bias to the “veterans” most youths have found asylum in civil society ideological habitats. In the process, this asylum to neo-liberal leaning has nurtured a sophisticated disconnect of the youth from their rightful patriotic values embedded in liberation ideological values.

Consequently, most youths have found more logic in the magniloquence of antiestablishment activism guised as political participation and building ecosystems of viable democracy.

This is because they align the establishment to the nationalist source of their exclusion in political participation. This is why the call for a functioning “national youth service” structure has lost traction to the urgency of the abundant sponsored democracy fellowships which are targeting the youth to be at the fore of changing the systems of governance across the continent.

This means that the longevity of nationalism is already threatened as there are meagre prospects of a custodianship transition of nationalism from the old guard to the youth.

It is in this context that the ongoing episodes of the nationwide Youth Presidential Interface become critical in addressing this gap. This is because Zanu-PF’s popularity in the past decade has been hinged on reviving the liberation legacy in a bid to incentivise the quest for Africa’s self-determination and challenging the residues of imperialism.

Therefore, the President’s assent to the call to engage the youth across the country is crucial as it engages the inept capacity of the nationalist movement to be an all-inclusive front of challenging neo-colonialism.

Excuse the gamut of factional discourses which have ensued the nationwide dialogue between the youth and the Head of the Republic, President Mugabe. What remains transcendent of the topical factional issues is the fact that the party is moving towards a new mode of power consolidation aimed at bringing to the fore an accelerated participation of the youth in the country contemporary political space.

At the same time, the Youth Presidential Interface inaugurates a new era of harbouring youth engagement in the debate about values of the party’s continuity beyond the constricted propensities of succession which have robbed the party from its fundamental mandate to be ideological staunch than being degenerated to sustain interests of some personality cults.

Through the Presidential Youth Interfaces, the party must be able to win more supporters to be able to topple its opposition as usual. At the same time, the party must consolidate its far-reaching ideological values which it has rightfully defended since it took charge of the anti-imperialist agenda to date.

On the other hand, the Presidential Youth Interface programmes must be able to address the nationwide youth’s demands for inclusion in policy provisions aimed at lobbying economic empowerment, indigenisation and sanguine political participation which is informed by panAfricanist thinking.

This way the party will be able to expunge the relevance of the neo-liberal propaganda and its entrapments targeting the youths and misdirecting their patriotic duty to be custodians of true love for the country.

This comes at a time regime change neocolonialism interlocutors are exploiting the youthful demographic density to digress the virgin vote for the overthrow of Zanu-PF in a bid to obliterate the relevance of African nationalism in the 21st century. Lately, this has been substantiated by the regime change meta-narrative embodied in the #ThisFlag and #Tajamuka. Since 2016 these initiatives have targeted the virgin voter in a well-orchestrated falsely apolitical plan to dismantle the legitimacy that Zanu-PF accrued through the landmark outcomes of the 2013 elections. Therefore, it is essential for the Presidential Youth Interface space to be a conduit of reviving the will of the majority who have defiantly remained loyal to what the party stands for in relation to permanent sovereignty interests of this country.

The President’s exchange with youth across the country is by no means an anecdote for drawing theatrical political relevance for Zanu-PF. Instead, the Presidential Youth Interface fora should provide an opportunity for youth to locate their needs in central government policy making. At the same time, those co-ordinating the programming of the Presidential Youth Interface conventions must be exclusively grounded on beneficiation of the youth in the contemporary national development matters.

This nationwide programme must not by any means be diverted from its normative core objective of consolidating the lost youths demographic.

The series of the Presidential Youth Interface legs should by all means be primarily focused on paving the path for the inclusion of youths in the economic prospects that the country warehouses through unexplored economic innovations and exploitation of natural resources. It would be futile if this nationwide youth reach-out exercise does not produce a 2018 manifesto which will add gravitas to the invaluable achievements of our liberation struggle and what it envisaged in terms of developing the lives of the majority.

The President’s “meet the youths” overdrive must by no means omit conversations about the abundant socio-economic transformation mandate that the Government has and how the young generation are a relevant locomotives of driving that agenda.

This is because the youths are the future of the country and they have the potential to create sustainable social-economic development if policies which favour their inclusion to participate are put in place. As such, by the time the party draws towards the tenth leg of the Presidential Youth Interface it must have successfully resolved its intentions in terms of locating the role of youths in reviving the country’s industry, commerce and all social amenities relevant to national development.

In the process, the Presidential Interface rallies must provide the roadmap for informed participation in the 2018 election. This is because this forthcoming election must be all inclusive of the party’s constituencies such that every vote would count as the supreme source of political legitimacy to govern Zimbabwe to substantiate the definitive failure of neo-colonial opposition. This is because the relevance of the country’s opposition is inevitably facing degeneration as a result of people of Zimbabwe cherished memory of nationhood under Zanu-PF leadership.

In this respect, the Presidential Youth Interface symbolises a reclamation and a reassertion of the legacy of an African revolutionary stalwart whose life has only been committed to rewriting the lies of Rhodes’ conquest of the land of Kaguvi and Mzilikazi.

Therefore, those of us who are loyal to the values of this country’s birth must be at the fore of making sure that we are part of the makers of the constructive post-Mugabe memory. As such, the Youth Interface dialogues must be situated within that spectrum of engaging loyalty to the country and the legacy that the President has carved in the memory of the future which we must emulate.

According to the mainstream, the Presidential Youth Interface is nothing more than the party’s interface with its internal feuds. In their incapability to dichotomize real issues from tradition of smoke screen delusions they have dismally failed to capture the fundamental essence of the Presidential Youth Interface programmes. As a result, they have rendered the Presidential Youth Interfaces a failure to negotiate the party unity owing to its factional dismemberment.

Contrary to that misguided notion, the anticolonial projects across the entirety of Africa and Zimbabwe in particular substantiates how the youth are catalysts of political change in any given context. As a result, today the youths are better bequeathed to fight the struggles of our time and add the ultimate input to the pitfalls of nationalism.

This is because as Africa strives to be decolonial there are systems which have exposed the continent to the grotesquely burgeoning force of coloniality which surfaces in pretentious undertones of mass democracy participation, peace-building, and national healing.

Therefore, we will be remiss if we do not embrace the significance of this important time which the President has committed to engaging the nation’s sovereignty defenders. We are privileged to be partaking from the unfailing fountain in the ideological personhood of President Mugabe as indicated by Dr. Tafataona Mahoso:

“Mugabe is now every African who is opposed to the British and North American plunder and exploitation . . . So, old Mugabe here is not the person of Robert Mugabe. Rather it is that powerful, elemental African memory going back to the first Nehanda and even to the ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians who are now reclaiming Africa in history as the cradle of humankind.

“Zimbabwean opposition and their British, European and North American sponsors have exposed themselves as forces opposed to Mugabe as Pan-African memory, Mugabe as the reclaimer of African space, Mugabe as the African power of remembering the African legacy and African heritage which slavery, apartheid and imperialism thought they had dismembered for good. “

As such, we must embrace the historical and philosophical engagement of the youth by the President to be able to challenge the fortitudes of imperialism at all costs. Dr. Mahoso goes further to caution us, “It is not accidental that both the opposition to Mugabe and its sponsors sought to denigrate African liberation history as outmoded and undemocratic traditions.”

Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in pan-Africanism, decoloniality and Afrocentricity. He is the project co-ordinator of Leaders for Africa Network. Feedback: rasmkhonto@gmail. com