In Zimbabwe’s education system, courses such as communication, branding, and marketing were not considered as important subjects at school. However, it is these very subjects that provide the West and China the goodwill and leading positions they enjoy in the world.
Our country has always only prioritized STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), but what our founding fathers forgot is the importance of communication, which was central in their political education of peasants to galvanize them to remove the Smith government through guerilla warfare.
Without politicization that won the hearts, minds and trust of both guerrilla recruits and citizens alike and enabled citizens to accept guerrillas as “fish in the water,” our liberation war would have been a still-birth.
Today, we need new kinds of political commissars, such as social media influencers and professional PR specialists, to work on social media, engage the masses and win their hearts and minds to the nation-building agenda.
Currently, we face a country with an engraved colonial mentality, afro-pessimism and self-hate because African leaders, not just Zimbabwean leaders, have nurtured their citizens on Western education and ideology.
As a result, they have raised a generation that hates their country and continent, which they believe is only a transit point for obtaining a Western education and living in the West.
But who can blame the youth when in our legal fight against sanctions in South African courts, we have had senior government officials themselves, refuse to assist our fight because they do not want to upset the West, as they fear their children will be ejected from Ivy League and Oxbridge universities.
Even though these leaders are governing Zimbabwe, they externalize their wealth to the West and educate their children there, hence they are afraid to advance Zimbabweβs national interests, out of fear that the surrogate homes of their children will eject them.
Just like our former colonizers, such leaders see Zimbabwe as a source of wealth, but not as home.
The current agenda of all Zimbabweans must be to build Zimbabwe collectively through sourcing capital, mining our resources, farming our land, processing our resources and agro-processing our agricultural products to industrialize and find markets to build the commonwealth known as Zimbabwe.
To unite the nation in this cause, communication must be central to build national core values, national pride and bring everyone into the same vision, while brand building is necessary to attract investments and generate markets in this new season of AFCFTA and the shifting world order.
However, this cannot be accomplished without skilled communicators, marketers, brand architects and social engineers. They will play the critical function of making Zimbabwe a desirable place to be, especially as some foreign organizations are sponsoring skilled communicators to discredit Zimbabwe, poach our skilled workforce and divide our people by decampaigning the country.
To counter this negative sentiment, Zimbabwe must prioritize communication parity in terms of budget, skill, messaging, creativity and execution.
While there are qualified communicators in the country, they need the opportunity to practice their craft ahead of STEM non-communicators who currently lead the nationβs communication efforts.
It is striking that Rwanda, a country three times smaller than Zimbabwe, is excelling at brand management better than Zimbabwe and has become a giant in the minds of the world while our country is seen as a minnow.
As a nation, we must learn from their success and invest in effective communication and brand building to achieve our national goals.
