DEAR President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Your Excellency, we have heard you speak with enthusiasm about yourself as a “servant leader”, “leaving no one behind” and as a “listening president”.
Yet it is always clear that you don’t know what you are saying.
Let’s be very clear, “servant leadership” doesn’t mean stopping your high-end, overpriced, over-fueled motor vehicle – surrounded by a multitude of heavily armed and intimidating security personnel – to greet a hungry little boy. and impoverished, clad in ragged clothes, and leaves him poorer.
Why would a “chief servant” live a life of opulence, while his “masters” live in abject poverty?
Do you even understand what this term means?
Your Excellency, being a “listening president” does not mean, by any stretch of the human imagination, issuing questionable mining permits to your friends with questionable business ethics and morals – which threaten to displace citizens. of the land of their ancestral homes, while desecrating their ancestors’ graves and heritage sites – and, then, when these villagers sound the alarm, you turn a deaf ear.
Why, in the first place, did you allow these inhuman and cruel friends to mine in areas inhabited by other people, knowing full well that their activities would undermine the dignity of citizens?
If the villagers had not threatened not to vote for your party – the region having been known as one of its strongholds – what would have become of them, as well as their lands?
I am referring to the Uzumba standoff in East Mashonaland Province, where your administration has just backed down and canceled the Chinese miner’s permit.
Your Excellency, there is no need to imagine the potential destructive outcome – the people of Marange and Chiadzwa can easily provide numerous testimonies of how their relatively normal livelihoods were cruelly ruined overnight, afterwards. the discovery of vast diamond deposits on their ancestral lands.
What is “servant leadership? What does it mean to be a “listening president?” “
Your Excellency, does the ruling elite of Zimbabwe even understand these basic concepts?
I remember a family I knew from my childhood – where children were always sent to buy a tiny piece of meat from a nearby butcher’s shop, which was supposed to be eaten by the father, while the rest of the family went to had to be satisfied with the soup derived from simmered meat, with a few vegetables.
I am sure that the father and his family were more than convinced that he was a loving man, who took good care of his family – and, sincerely believed that as a “head of the family” there was nothing wrong with this setup, in fact, considering it worthy.
As long as he was doing his family huge “favors” – providing them with food, putting a roof over their heads, sending his children to school, and buying some clothes here and there – then he was “a listening servant and father” who “left no one behind”.
In other words, he was the leader and his family was the caravan.
Your Excellency, this is precisely what we are witnessing in Zimbabwe – where we have the grave misfortune of leaders who see themselves as above everyone else, and are the only ones who deserve the best of the land, while the rest of the population wallows in extreme poverty and hunger.
Our elderly parents receive a meager pension of $ 45 per month, civil servants earn a monthly salary of less than $ 200, our children learn virtually nothing due to inadequate educational materials and lack of a suitable environment, people are dying in their homes due to unaffordable health services, and more than half of Zimbabweans are classified as “food insecure” or live in “extreme poverty”.
Your Excellency, you are a leader who has no qualms about chartering a gas guzzling private jet for US $ 1 million for a trip to the UK – ironically, for a climate change summit.
We have a ruling power that sees nothing wrong with owning vast tracts of arable land (while freely accessing inputs anyway), with the majority of the population doomed to ‘Pfumvudza’ – talk of suppressing a group of farmers. colonialists, and replace it with one of a different color.
Does it make sense when you’re passing us in the more expensive vehicles – even forcing us off the road to make way for you – when the majority of us can’t even afford a bicycle?
Where is “servant leadership?” Where is the “listening leadership” in there?
Your Excellency, let’s be clear – a leader who listens, who cannot hear, is a “deaf leader” – and that is exactly what we have in Zimbabwe.
A true “servant leader” suffers with his people. A true “listening president” puts the interests of the people before their own.
A father who truly understands what it means to be the “head of the family” ensures that his family is fed the best way the house has to offer, and he eats last.
A true “head of the family” sacrifices his life for his family.
