“SCORES of South Africa based Zimbabwean migrants are reported to be among more than 200 refugees who have started a long walk from the port city of Cape Town into neighbouring Namibia,” reported Bulawayo 24.
“The distance between Cape Town and Namibia's Ariamsvlei border is estimated at 950km.
“The refugees, according to media reports from the two SADC countries, are fleeing violent attacks that rocked South Africa August this year, leaving scores of people including two Zimbabweans, dead.”
This is a really sad and tragic story. So these Zimbabweans, tracked all the way from Zimbabwe to Cape Town as political and economic refugees. They have since found out that they are not welcome in SA, so unwelcome they have often been treated like stray and diseased dogs. The sight of the victims of xenophobia attacks running for their lives and some being burnt alive is the stuff of nightmares.
So these economic and/or political refugees, now penniless, have decided to go to Namibia, a distance of 950 km, on foot! What an epic journey.
How long is it going to take them to get to Namibia? Where will they sleep? What will they eat?
At the end of their epic journey, they will still be economic and/or political refugees. Namibia, unlike SA, is not exactly an economic power house and so the prospects of landing a job are not good. The refugees’ greatest hope is that they will not be treated like stray dogs!
This tragic tales raises two related points:
- The very fact that these Zimbabweans have chosen to walk 950 km to Namibia where they will still be destitute refugees instead of going back home goes to show just how serious the economic and political mess in Zimbabwe has become.
- There is something fundamentally wrong with someone who would rather risk all the hardships on a 950 km journey in a strange land with nothing but the shirt on one’s back than standup to the country’s corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical ruling elite who are responsible for all of Zimbabwe’s criminal waste of resources and the tragic human sufferings and deaths.
Zimbabwe is a great country with enormous economic potential as white colonial rule has shown. Zimbabwe produced enough food to not only feed its own people but had plenty left over to feed the region. Zimbabwe was the bread basket of the region; not any more.
At the beginning of the century, Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF friends seized all the white own farms and gave them to party loyalists mostly leading to the collapse of the country’s agricultural sector. We are starving in a land that, for all practical purposes is the Biblical Garden of Eden - a damning indictment of the country’s failed leadership and of us, the people, to hold the leaders to account.
When all is said and done, most nations gets the government they deserve. Zimbabweans deserve this corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship complete with its entourage of equally corrupt, incompetent and utterly useless opposition parties.
To the Zimbabweans on the epic 950 km journey and all the Zimbabweans scattered in all corners of the globe like dry leaves in the wind; I hope you will find peace, justice and prosperity in your new home. I hope you will contribute it the defence and up keep of the peace, justice and prosperity in the new home and back in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is a failed state, that is a historic fact. Once upon a time, it was a great nation and, given the political will and resolve, it can still be restored to it’s former glory!
“Nyika vanhu!” (If the country is great, it is the people who are great and made the country great. The opposite is equally true; a failed country is a nation of failures!) So goes the Shona adage!
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