Mnangagwa to tap on Zimbabweans in the diaspora

Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa is setting up a working committee on diaspora affairs to help Zimbabweans abroad to invest in the country.

The committee will be chaired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International with the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development as its deputy.

Writing in the Sunday Mail, Mnangagwa said the ministries of Home Affairs, Industry and Trade and of Lands and Agriculture will be part of the working committee which will report to Cabinet.

Other ministries will be co-opted as and when issues relevant to their portfolios emerge.

Below is the full write-up:

Across millennia, generations and civilisations, human movements have been a permanent feature.

Africa, which anthropology tells us is the cradle of mankind, unleashed humans to different hemispheres of our globe.

On the African continent itself, more movements took place in different directions as communities sought more land and more hospitable parts to claim and settle as permanent homes.

We in Southern Africa trace our origins to a massive human dispersal historians have termed Bantu Migration. Our forebears, we are told, hailed from the Great Lakes Region, before migrating southward towards the tip of our continent. Mfecane, we are again told, was another mass movement of our forefathers, only northward this time.

In the fullness of time, our forbearers traced and retraced steps, all the time creating communities, civilisations and polities.

Today our nations on the African continent are a rich mosaic of peoples, tribes, languages and cultures. We have always been a footloose species.

The nineteenth century saw mass migration of Europeans into Africa, leading to the continent’s gradual conquest and eventual occupation by colonialists.

This outward, western expansionism arose in circumstances of extreme population pressures, acute poverty and virulent diseases in countries to the North of our continent.

Typically, Cecil John Rhodes, after whom colonial Zimbabwe was once named, came to the southern tip of Africa from Britain as a poor invalid.

Southern Africa gave him back his otherwise broken health, while our rich mineral resources gave him a fortune. To this day, his Estate, built from African mineral resources, remains inexhaustibly endowed.

After the Second World War, Europe settled its demobilised, war-weary soldiers here on the African continent, including on Zimbabwean soil.

To this day, we have areas which historically were carved out for the exclusive settlement of these veterans of European wars.

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