By Trevor Shiri- The heavens have dealt a deadly blow to the jecha politics that characterises the MDC Alliance’s body politik. The heavens have opened up admirably this summer cropping season, nurturing and sustaining the well-planned twin-pronged Government-driven Pfumvudza and Smart Agriculture Programme (SAP).
This has not boded well with the toxic MDC Alliance, together with their minions, who have of late taken to social media to discourage people from farming as the #ZimAgricRising has taken over Twitter. The Team Pachedu, has been on a blitz, telling Zimbabweans not to be pressured to venture into agriculture, which is doing well and on the rise, saying they should venture into other sectors of the economy.
A self-confessed and ardent MDC Alliance activist and key member of Team Pachedu, Freeman Chari, unashamedly parroted the anti-agriculture stance, tweeting that “don’t feel pressured to be a farmer. Do what you are good at, be patient and persistent. Usatorwa nemhepo.”
The foregoing tweet is instructive and encapsulates all that is wrong with the MDC Alliance and its minions. As a puppet party, especially formed and funded by white monopoly capital to fight the Land Reform Programme (LRP) and label black people as incapable of farming, the puppets must fight the LRP.
The MDC narrative since 2000 has been that Zimbabwe was no longer the bread basket of Southern Africa because of the LRP, which reclaimed stolen land by whites. Blacks are incapable of farming. Blacks are lazy. Blacks are unproductive.
Cheeky, yet distorted comparisons were being made that Zambia, which absorbed some of the former white commercial farmers from Zimbabwe, had a booming agricultural sector as a result of the presence of white farmers. What nonsense.
What was lost, and still is lost on such hare-brained thinking is that, agriculture is dependent on funding. White people were accessing agricultural loans at subsidised rates. Enter black people in 2000, sanctions were imposed on the country to incapacitate it from financing the LRP. To this day, British-owned companies such as Mashonaland Tobacco Company, do not fund beneficiaries of the LRP because it is “disputed land,” but funds all white farmers who retained their farms, and the few opposition-oriented blacks that bought stolen land.
Noting the incapacitation wrought by sanctions, Government set up Agri-Bank to fund the LRP, but the bank was immediately placed on sanctions. The sanctions themselves hamstrung Government from accessing lines of credit from the Bretton Woods Institutions. All this was tailor-made to sustain the silly narrative that blacks cannot farm. It is sickening that white people who had a whole century to horn their agricultural skills with considerable funding curiously labelled a nascent LRP, barely 20 years old, a failure!
Cognisant of the stakes against it, Government has engaged in various funding models, among them, Operation Maguta, Farm Mechanisation, Presidential-Well Wishers Scheme, Command Agriculture – and of late, the highly successful Pfumvudza and SAPs, the source of gripe from the MDC Alliance. Dear reader, all these programmes were funded using locally-generated resources.
It has been an arduous and tortuous journey, especially on the back of climate change-induced extreme weather phenomena, characterised either by torrential rains, resulting in floods and destruction, or incessant droughts.
It is against this background and efforts that youth have taken the initiative to transform Zimbabwe’s agriculture. Social media, in particular, Twitter, the citadel of the opposition’s jecha politics, is now awash with success stories of the transforming agricultural sector. This has not boded well with the opposition which is now at sixes and sevens and fulminating and cursing the Lord for opening up the heavens, which has showered blessings of seed and success on hard-working farmers.
The National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1) is poised to be a success on the back of a strong agricultural sector, anchored by new farmers, mainly the youth, paving way for the attainment of an Upper Middle Income Economy by 2030.
The opposition’s jecha politics are dead in the water as no sane person will ever support a party that gets angry over good rains and good harvests. It is not normal.