To win back Bulawayo, Zanu-PF must deliver

For the next seven days, Bulawayo will temporarily transform from a decaying metropolis to Zimbabwe's most important city.

Among all the towns and cities in this country that are crying out for help, none are screaming louder than Bulawayo. The City of Kings is desperate for renewal.

To a city that is literally gasping for survival, one of the immediate benefits of hosting the Zanu-PF National People's Conference will be the loud projection of its critical challenges. With Bulawayo hosting such an important gathering, the nation expects a more robust approach to the problems bedevilling Zimbabwe's second largest city.

Politicians should now feel compelled to move beyond the empty rhetoric and start doing more to revive the economic pulse of a city which used to be the hub of Zimbabwe's industrial activity.

Factories have collapsed in record numbers in that part of the country. Belmont industrial area ' once the envy of Africa ' has been reduced to a sorry wasteland. Vital infrastructure is rusting away and the billowing chimneys which gave Bulawayo the nickname "koNtuthu Ziyathunqa" are now clogged with cobwebs.

What are our national leaders doing about those derelict factories? What are the leaders of Bulawayo and Matabeleland doing about the Belmont ghost zone?

Workers have lost jobs, families are in distress, small enterprises have seen their business evaporate and the local economy has been left comatose. The ordinary citizen expects leaders to show the way in finding solutions to the challenges plaguing Bulawayo. More effort should be invested in addressing bread and butter issues than shouting political slogans.

As matters stand, the anguished people of Bulawayo are being sold a dummy by politicians who, in this day and age, think they can get away with such a brazen act of smoke and mirrors.

For far too long, the political leadership in that part of the country has not sung from the same hymnbook. In a normal community, a crisis of the magnitude we are witnessing in Bulawayo would have galvanised the local leadership, eliciting a collective response. Sadly, not in Bulawayo. Political opportunism and petty jealousies have been perfected to an art.

Zanu-PF, as the party of Father Zimbabwe Dr Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, is the only political formation in Zimbabwe which can find lasting solutions to the problems facing Bulawayo.

We must not forget the main reason why Zanu-PF has struggled politically in that city since the turn of the millennium. If the truth be told, the residents of Bulawayo got frustrated with Zanu-PF's failure to deliver on bread and butter issues. That is how MDC-T rode on the protest vote and cruised to victory.

Here is a simple proposition: to win back Bulawayo, Zanu-PF must deliver on the crucial issues affecting the people. Today, those issues include the collapsed factories, the perception (real or imagined) that people in that part of the country are not significantly benefiting from national programmes, and the strong feeling that everything of economic and political importance revolves around "Bambazonke"' Harare.

And yet Zanu-PF does not need rocket science to win back Bulawayo. The indigenisation and economic empowerment revolution can be the answer to Bulawayo's factory woes.

There is no better way to safeguard Zimbabwe's sovereignty than by propelling the historically dispossessed black majority into mainstream economic activity.

The indigenisation revolution is Zanu-PF's pragmatic answer to serious structural deficiencies in the economy which are a legacy of racist colonial rule. And the policy thrust is clearly defined. Whereas the MDC formations have been busy telling Zimbabweans that a messiah is going to bring bags of money from Western governments, Zanu-PF has since moved beyond preaching the gospel of self-emancipation and is now actively implementing it.

Indigenisation is also the answer to the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by some racist Western governments.

We must remember that President Mugabe has said if the sanctions are not lifted, it may be useful to go beyond the 51 percent indigenisation threshold and demand 100 percent ownership of Western companies operating in Zimbabwe.

But beyond the sanctions, there are grievances from Bulawayo's business community that need to be addressed for the sake of our hard-won freedom and in the national interest.

When entrepreneurs in Bulawayo complain about commercial banks that force loan applicants to travel all the way to Harare just to submit application forms, central Government has a responsibility to listen to the people and take decisive action. Opportunities for economic progress must be created all over the country ' and not just in Harare.

We cannot realistically expect every Zimbabwean to flock to Harare. Zimbabwe is not Harare and Harare is not Zimbabwe.

Which is why Professor Welshman Ncube's proposal to have Parliament sit in Bulawayo deserves some attention. There is a retrogressive mentality in some circles which views Bulawayo as nothing but the venue of a once-a-year event called the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair.

How else do you explain the scandal that in this country, a good 31 years after Independence, certain paperwork can only be processed in Harare?

Entrepreneurs and investors are forced to travel long distances to obtain some official forms. When they fill the forms, they must travel again to submit the documents.

By frustrating the business sector, the system is suffocating job creation and accelerating the shrinking of the nation's tax base.

The Zanu-PF National People's Conference must consolidate Zimbabwe's sovereignty by reaffirming the crucial role of the indigenisation revolution in dismantling both racist economic domination and the evil Western sanctions.