Days of sloganeering are over, says President 

From Victoria Ruzvidzo in Beijing China
Zanu-PF President and First Secretary Emmerson Mnangagwa has castigated the elevation of some party members to positions of authority simply because they can recite a slogan, saying those days were over. Addressing Communist Party of China (CPC) senior officials here yesterday, President Mnangagwa said such a practice was untenable and damaging to the party’s governance systems.

“In my party, we say if someone makes a slogan, we give him a post. That must be a thing of the past.”

He said Zanu-PF needed to draw lessons from the CPC, which was a party built on solid ideology in which a majority of its leaders had gone through the party’s school where its ideology was inculcated.

The CPC was a well-structured party whose membership was not automatic, with those seeking to join it having to go through certain processes.

“The Communist Party of China has survived up to today because it is systematically structured, but in Zanu-PF, we are a mass party where anyone can wake up one morning and join and the next day they can decide to walk away.

“We have people in senior positions in the party or Government who will be going left when the party is going right,”  he said

He said Zanu-PF had a lot to learn from the CPC to ensure that it had great leaders who would leave a legacy for the next generation.

In this vein, President Mnangagwa said it was critical that Zanu-PF and the Communist Party of China escalate their relations just as what had happened at government-to-government level, where it was no longer just all-weather friendship, but something deeper.

“We have elevated our relations from being all-weather friends to the level of an all-encompassing strategic partnership, so we need to adopt the same thing with our parties,” he said.

President Mngangagwa toured the party school where he commended the CPC for setting up a facility that trains leadership at all levels on the party’s ideology, management and good governance, among other tenets.

He challenged the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology to draw lessons and implored the CPC school management to assist in the formulation and teaching of lecturers on the various disciplines offered by the CPC school.

The President himself went to the Peking School of Ideology here in China in 1963. Zanu-PF national chairperson Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, who is also part of the delegation, was tasked with leading a delegation soon that would visit the school to assess and structure programmes for adoption in Zimbabwe.

The CPC school, which has been in existence since 1933, trains more than 8 000 students annually from China and other countries on various short and medium-term courses.

The CPC school executive vice president commended President Mnangagwa for being the first Head of State to have visited the school after it was restructured.

He said there was scope for building synergies with Zanu-PF. At least 168 Zimbabwean officials had been trained at the school in various disciplines while some of its professors had visited Zimbabwe to give lectures.

He said the school provided training for political parties, governments, academic institutions and enterprises.

President Mnangagwa then presented the school with a drawing of the Great Zimbabwe Monuments.