Nathan Banana launches party in Johannesburg

Nathan Banana, the son of the late first president of Zimbabwe Cannan Banana has launched his political party Freedom Justice Coalition Zimbabwe in Johannesburg which he said will contest the 2018 elections.

Speaking to journalists and Zimbabweans in South Africa Banana said Zimbabweans must chose servant leadership not dictators.

"To get the servant leadership Zimbabweans crave, we must become servant citizens ourselves, and to get incorruptible leaders we rightly demand, we must become no less incorruptible ourselves," he said.  

"In this spirit, I stand here, not as a hero but a servant leader dedicated and committed to honour my social contract with every Zimbabwean, who will put their heart and soul on the dotted line, that I will always listen, learn and work as hard as my body and mind will permit me, to make our collective dreams a reality."

Banana said  right from its inception Freedom Justice Coalition Zimbabwe it has been a party that shunned elitism.

"We do not believe that to have order in society you necessarily need to have repression of descent or to silence voices of those who hold opinions different to yours. To put it in simple terms, we are not obsessed with being seen to be right always," he said.  

"We believe in a collective approach, based on the idea of politics being broader than party and career politics. We believe that citizens have a role to play in politics, not only in holding politicians accountable but also in contributing to the effective running of societal institutions - from government departments, financial institutions, community corporations to our homes and families. "

He said in this regard, FJCZ pledges to work, in government or outside government, for the people and with the people.

"Our motivation is not winning power for the sake of power, but rather to be an instrument of meaningful efforts to progress our country by distributing that power so it is used across the country more effectively to ensure service standards are raised and developmental targets achieved. We intend to be an example in Zimbabwe and Africa of what politics can be and should be like. An example of how to transform words to action, and promises to deliverable and visible outcomes," he said.

"We advocate for the values of solidarity, of compassion, of social justice, fighting for the under-privileged, and of working for people at home and in the diaspora. Whilst at the same time we value and protect the rights that we have in this country enshrined in our national constitution."

Banana said they also appreciate the need to stand in solidarity with opposition political parties all over the country, which advocate for a better Zimbabwe.

"However, we caution that in the determination to achieve change, Opposition political parties must desist from replicating the oversight of the ruling party by alienating sections of society on the basis of partisanship," he said.

"FJCZ has always been clear that even though we may disagree on many issues with Zanu PF, they too need to be part of the national conversation, as they still represent a large number of Zimbabweans."

"We believe we can bring together Zimbabweans of diverse backgrounds to work together for the Zimbabwe we can all be proud of. What can bring us together is a sense of shared responsibility, a sense of the way things can be done despite the way things have been always done in politics in Zimbabwe," he added.

Banana said therefore, for the people values come first before party identity cards.

"Values that go beyond rhetoric,  into the daily realities of our people , values that find life in things that we fight for every single day," he said.

"We want to work collectively  to win people over to the basic values we all accept, to change minds, and change politics, so that we can have a Freedom Justice Coalition Zimbabwe government, we can look in a different direction, we can look away from the policy of growing inequality and look to a society that grows in equality, in confidence, in involvement of everybody, and does not allow the gross levels of poverty and inequality to get worse in Zimbabwe."

Banana said when  they have all had a say on how they  develop, say, the housing policy, or, say, the health policy, say any other particular area of environmental protection or anything else, if everyone has been involved in that policymaking, they own the policy that is there at the end.

"hey are more determined to campaign and fight for it," he said.

 Banana said when politicians get out of touch with reality, they sometimes forget where skill sets really lie.

"Skills at the workplace, skills of ordinary people, knowledge of ordinary people. Some of the elite in our society look with contempt on people with brilliance and ideas just because they don't speak like them or look like them. Let's do things differently and do things together," he said.

"Had we had a different approach, would we now have the millstone of private finance initiatives around the necks of so many hospitals and so many schools in this country, or would we, instead, have a more sensible form of public sector borrowing to fund for investment and fund for the future, rather than letting corruption destroy our public services, which is exactly what this Government is doing? We need to be confident and be strong.  After all we also have lots of knowledge and ability from our diaspora brothers and sisters."

Banana said research shows that Diaspora remittances now top Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Zimbabwe. So we say there should be no taxation of the Zimbabwe diaspora without representation!! He said Zimbabwe migrants now play a huge role in funding Zimbabwe.

"We believe that they should have a right to vote from wherever they are," Banana said.

"Every difficulty actually gives you an opportunity, and the difficulty is that these bond notes have been placed in front of us, but it also gives us the opportunity to defend civil liberties and traditional freedoms and explain to the wider public,  So we are going to continue our opposition to this. Government is threatening the right of peaceful protest by looking to ban them. They are even threatening the right to free speech by seeking to limit what a citizen can say on social media."

"Are we really going to have teams of civil servants or lawyers or police or somebody trawling through massive numbers of twitter messages, Facebook messages, to find something somebody said about their government or about the President?  What kind of intrusive society is our government really trying to bring about. They will use it as a tool to make other attacks on other sections of our community. Let's be strong about this," he added.

He said FJCZ also believes in the promotion of trade unionism and understand that good trade unions, good trade union organisation, yes, protect people in the workplace, yes, it leads to better pay, better conditions and better salaries and better promotional opportunities as a whole, but it also means there is often better management in those places where unions are very strong. 

"It is our job as FJCZ to set out a vision for a better society and campaign proudly to  inspire others to join our efforts. Our shared vision will be delivered by shared campaigning, Zimbabwe is a rich country but actually a country that is deeply unequal. Surely, the whole vision of those who founded our country and founded our political parties was about doing things differently and for the benefit of a greater number of our people," Banana said.

"That generation, those brilliant people brought us the one man one vote, got women the right to vote,and brought us so many other things.  We must build on that in the way we do our policy, we build on that in the way we develop our country, and we build on that in the way that we inspire Zimbabweans to come together for a better, more decent, more equal, fairer and more just society.  These things are not dreams.  These things are practical realities that we, collectively, intend to achieve."