OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT EMMERSON MNANGAGWA

The television, media, marketing and communication space is an arena where we mold minds, perceptions and cognition to ignite people’s reality and understanding of the world. We cultivate aspirations and dreams, while motivating the human imagination into action by telling people how to engage and respond to their world.

Due to this power that television, media , communication and marketing possess to give people the eyes and mind to view the world, black executives generally struggle to penetrate this space.

The reason being the protectiveness white business and think tanks maintain to keep the science of occupying the human mind and spirit, the domain of europeans, to maintain a dominant Eurocentric world view in the public psyche.

It’s almost as if there is a hidden council that determines that black thought or culture has no place in the mapping of the cognition of humanity. Be it in the digital or analogue space, television, media, marketing, communication and messaging is ubiquitously white or European culture.

Why? Because the world is a competition for resources in which whiteness needs to maintain control of resources by keeping the world seeing the world from its lenses. It’s important for Eurocentric survival for them to be seen as experts in all things and for them to be the go-to-people in the value chain of life. This is how they maintain their relevance, domination and groom our dependency on them, which in turn keeps them economically viable.

It’s this relevance and the need to survive that has them monopolizing mediums of communication, mental influence and cognitive mapping.

Sadly, because we as Africans have not understood the importance of motivating, capturing, inspiring and molding the human mind. We have given Europeans free reign in attaining full spectrum domination of our mental faculties to gain control of our actions and potential.

With this the world continues to turn in a way that is determined and controlled by westerncentric thought, at their advantage and the detriment of dark skinned people.

Not only do we develop in a mode of Eurocentric servitude, we are also taught to aggressively resist any idea tailored to advance and benefit us specifically and selectively as a race. This is one of the reasons why African nations and black communities the world over are renowned for working against their own interests, lacking racial cohesion and producing nothing of their own.

This lack of cohesion stems from our inability to socially engineer a psyche in our people to unashamedly work towards race/national interests and a common vision to contribute our own unique, amazing capabilities and spiritual manifestations to produce our own common weal.

This, I believe Mr President, is why you and your team in your first month in office have sent out a clear message for your preference of foreign investors, Rhodesians and those in the diaspora before expressing pride in the indomitable Zimbabweans who have remained at home, under sanctions, under the worst drought over the past 18yrs, under immense hardship but still managed to produce a bumper harvest last year.

Producing that bumper harvest without slave labor, huge capital from the fiscus of Zimbabwe as the Rhodesian farmers received and without exploiting the resources of the entire nation to just support a minority of farmers.

Instead they have kept a country whose enemies have conspired to destroy it, afloat. While the government has turned more than 160 000 families into farmers, against all odds, but not once have you expressed gratitude to these patriots in a way that says to them that they are the future builders of the nation.

Contrary to that Mr President, the message you and Mutsvangwa have subliminally sent is that your citizens who are left at home have failed. You have intimated that they lack capacity and skill to grow the nation, hence you are reaching out to the white farmer, white Rhodesian, foreign western investor and the diasporians trained by the west, to come and rescue the country.

Without realizing it, yours and your team’s communication and actions have said to our competitors, like Rhodes used to say: black Zimbabweans are the children of the white man because they need the parentage of whites to progress.

This is a message that western total spectrum domination media has been propagating about us since the white man encountered the black man, to destroy our human spirit for their advancement and you have unwittingly reaffirmed it.

Now, it’s easy to overlook this as a minor challenge, but sadly, it is a communication and social engineering disaster because the narrative we create in the public conscience, builds and molds the attitude that influences our people’s actions.

This is particularly more telling when dealing with a race that has been deliberately, systematically, physically, mentally and spiritually subjugated to weaken its spirit and set boundaries for its ascendancy.

With yours and Mutsvangwa’s statements, you have psychologically taken your people and thrown them in a box where you have said to them: “we don’t need you because you have failed your country, you have failed to produce and you are incapable of producing so the white man will come and do it for us”.

You have also sent the message that the end is more important than the means, in other words output by any means is more critical than having the patience to capacitate production in your own people.

I understand that that’s not what you said but that’s only because I’m a communicator, however, thats what the ordinary man on the street heard. The man on the street was bound to hear that because of the history and context in which the narrative was set: a contrary narrative that contradicts Mugabe’s message over the past 17yrs that said: we are capable. This perspective is what all other mediums of the European consent manufacture are articulating your utterances to mean.

With this Mr President, you are bound to see that it will be difficult to shake off our people’s lack of nationalism, initiative, home biased investment, cohesion, cooperation, tax contribution, responsibility, patriotism and return on investment that your nation desperately needs to change in its citizens. A consequence of you saying to their hearts: only white men are the tax payers, creators, farmers, inventors, investors, producers and job creators.

You have simply reinforced the established racist stereotype that has enslaved the black mind over the centuries to stop us from achieving the potential our ancestors achieved.

Basically, with your well intended but colonized words you have just smothered your own vision in the cradle. The good book says: “for as he thinketh so shall he be”. A man who is told and believes that he is unproductive shall never produce. You have just put your own people’s hearts in diametric opposition to your vision and their nation interests, unintentionally.

It is critically important that a concerted effort by your office, government, public communication platforms, schools and the ruling party be embarked on to change this.

This can only be achieved by cultivating the consistent message that Zimbabwe will be built by Zimbabweans before any foreigner will develop it because Zimbabweans are able.

That message must be reinforced by the facts that no nation on earth has ever been developed by foreign investment but by domestic skills development, citizens learning to exploit their own resources, home biased investment and reinvestment.

The world is a life and death competition in which resource rich nations like Zimbabwe are targets of parasitic western nation’s that seek to control, possess, process and market our resources monopolistically to gain the triple rent.

In as much as Zimbabwe needs re-engagement with the international community, no strategy is bound to work in Zimbabwe without an acknowledgement of the importance of greater local investment to balance the threat of the domination by foreign investment monopoly.

Gladly, I can say without fear, that Europeans are a parasite upon trusting, poor, resource rich nations because I am not a diplomat but a molder of minds. Our nation was under sanctions for 17yrs to bring it in line with this neo-liberal suzerainty and we have resisted thus far.

I appeal to you sir, that it is critical that you mold the minds of your people with a narrative motivated by our rich history. Our nation is a nation that was but one of six empires on the continent: the Mutapa and Rozvi empire.

It is a nation named Dzimba Dzemabwe. It spread from Beira to the Zambezi escarpment in the west and Zambezi to Mapungubwe in the South, all because our ancestors were architects and builders of empire and houses [and an empire] of stone.

They cut granite seamlessly into perfect geometric shapes, then they placed the granite on top of each other to form unique, formidable twenty five feet walls of Great Zimbabwe, Khami and 32 other stone cities across Zimbabwe, without mortar.

They mined so much gold that traders came from as far afield as India, Israel, Portugal and China and named Beira The Port of Gold. This abundance gave rise to the mythical land of Ophir where King Solomon’s mines were acclaimed to be, as written in European folklore about this great nation.

Our forefathers carved out a nation and works of art that intrigued our oppressor, Rhodes, such that he was consumed by the Zimbabwe bird to such an extent that he made it his talisman, symbol for the Rhodes Foundation and the Rhodesian flag. So powerful are the works of our ancestors that an entire nation of racists was built around a symbol that is the product of the hands of our ancestors and spirits.

While you our leaders say we are incapable, the Zimbabwe bird on the Rhodes Foundation and Rhodesian flag, the burial of Rhodes alongside our ancestors in Matopos, all affirm that we are the oracles from whom the Europeans were inspired to maintain the colonies of Southern Africa. This same spirit of our fore fathers was evident in the hands of virtuosos like Vernon Mwamuka, Nicholas Mukomberanwa and Dominque Benhura. Voices such as Stella Chiweshe, Oliver Mutukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo. Writers like Novoilet Bulawayo, while it resonated with you our freedom fighters.

It is now in your hands to take this history and draw from it the inspiration to build the minds, hearts and spirits of our people to awaken their nation building spirit. You now are the leader of the nation of kings, kings who had architectural and geometric understanding that aligned our cities to ley lines, the lay out of the stars, the pyramids, Inca and other sacred acheological creations of the world.

Your message and the message of the social engineers that shall shape the minds of our nation will be to tell the sons and daughters of Kings, the sons of Nyatsime Mutota to rise, grasp the septor, take their places on the thrown as the Kings and Queens of Ophir once again because they have come of age. We were Kings & Queens, we are Kings & Queens, we will be Kings & Queens again but we need you to awaken the spirits that are sleeping, once again....... Our nation shall only rise through the spirit and not foreign men.....Yours is a divine calling.

Rutendo Matinyarare #MwanaWaMutapa is a Marketing and Brand Strategist for Frontline Strat Marketing and Frontline Studio.