President Mugabe
From Mabasa Sasa at the UNITED NATIONS
PRESIDENT Mugabe yesterday took his place front and centre among other world leaders in the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations for Pope Francis’ historic address at the opening of the Summit for the Adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. The first Latin American leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics is on his first visit to the United States, and has been drawing massive crowds and congregations when he moves or conducts a mass. Yesterday, he spoke on a wide-range of issues, including drug trafficking, climate change and the environment, nuclear proliferation and socio-economic inequality.
At the time of writing, Heads of State and Government and/or their representatives had started their addresses to the gathering. African Union Chair President Mugabe is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Monday. President Mugabe, who is accompanied by First Lady Cde Grace Mugabe, is leading Zimbabwe’s delegation to the Summit for the Adoption of a Post-2015 Development Agenda and the 70th Session of the UN General Assembly.
Members of the delegation include ministers Simbarashe Mumbengegwi (Foreign Affairs) and David Parirenyatwa (Health and Child Care, and other senior government officials. World leaders will at the Post-2015 Development Agenda Summit adopt 17 Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2030) as the successor global initiative to the Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015).
The 70th Session of the General Assembly opened on September 15 with Mogens Lykketof of Denmark presiding. The theme for the General Debate is “The UN at 70: The Road for Peace, Security and Human Rights”. High-level engagements started on September 25 and will run through to October 3.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s Land Reform Programme is a shining example of how African countries can ease the pressures of migration to urban centres by creating economic reasons for people to remain in, and develop rural areas.
Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi who was standing in for African Union Chair President Mugabe said this at the Africa Urban Agenda Dialogue here on Thursday. Present at the dialogue were UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, African Union Commission Chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, UN-Habitat executive director Joan Clos, and African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina among other dignitaries.
Minister Mumbengegwi told delegates that Zimbabwe’s land reforms, which were fast-tracked from the year 2000, had eased rural-urban migration. “One area (in which we are dealing with rural-urban migration) is our Land Reform Programme where people have been given opportunities of bettering their lives in rural areas.
“Hundreds of thousands of our people have been given land and they don’t need to stay in the cities because they have opportunities in the rural areas,” Minister Mumbengegwi said. Minister Mumbengegwi said African cities were overburdened by large populations for which they struggled and often failed to provide essential services such as electricity, water, healthcare and schools.
As such, he said, much work needed to be done to develop both urban and rural areas so that “we put the infrastructure where our people are”. The Foreign Affairs Minister had delegates in stitches when he made reference to an incident at a high school public speaking event where a pupil said: “I love Zimbabwe, beautiful Zimbabwe, my Zimbabwe. It’s the only country where romantic candlelit dinners are compulsory.”
This was in reference to the massive load-shedding that has affected Zimbabwe and many other African countries. Dhlamini-Zuma stressed the importance that cities had in the broader development matrix as enunciated in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, while Ki-moon said urban areas were “at the heart of many global challenges and opportunities”.
He commended global leaders for appreciating this in Sustainable Development Goal 11, which “calls for an urban transformation, which requires political will and the capacity to coordinate many actors and stakeholders. If cities join forces with governments, the private sector, civil society and urban planners, they can become the hubs for climate action and sustainable development solutions,” he said.
AfDB chief Adesina said the bank would soon establish an Urban Municipalities Development Fund, adding that over the past decade the institution had spent $3.8 billion to provide safe water and decent sanitation to 20 million people across the continent. He slammed the fact that 61 percent of Africans in urban areas actually resided in slums, saying talk of “slum upgrades” was unacceptable because “a slum is a slum”.