Why go to Chimoio when we can tell you the story of a betrayed struggle?

Yesterday, I penned an opinion piece titled: A visit to Chimoio should make Zimbabweans see how the ZANU-PF regime has betrayed the struggle.

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It was prompted by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s address at the burial of the late Brigadier General (Rtd) Charles Chimwaza at the National Heroes Acre, where he urged Zimbabwean youths to visit liberation war shrines such as Chimoio to appreciate the sacrifices made by freedom fighters.

This morning, however, I received a message that profoundly touched me and, in many ways, reframed the entire debate.

It came from a veteran of the armed struggle, a survivor of Chimoio itself.

His words were simple, piercing, and devastating: Why should the youth go to Chimoio when we, the ones who survived, are still alive and can tell them how we feel about today’s Zimbabwe?

That question has not left my mind.

There was no anger for its own sake in his message, no cheap political point-scoring.

What came through was pain—deep, unresolved pain—borne by men and women who offered everything for Zimbabwe, only to watch their dream hijacked by a selfish and predatory elite.

The veteran asked pointedly: what exactly do the youth want to see at these shrines without us?

Graves?

Plaques?

Silent reminders stripped of context and truth?

Why not come to those who lived, those who endured the bombings, the hunger, the fear, the loss of comrades, and ask them what the struggle was really about—and how they feel about what has become of the country they fought to liberate?

That question alone exposes the hollowness of the ruling party’s ritualistic invocation of liberation war memory.

Shrines like Chimoio are important.

They are sacred.

They are sites of immense historical trauma and courage.

But when they are weaponised by a ruling elite that has systematically betrayed the very ideals for which those buried there died, they become instruments of political deceit rather than spaces of national reflection.

The liberation struggle is reduced to a museum exhibit—sanitised, selective, and stripped of its radical demand for justice, equality, and dignity for all.

The men and women who went to the bush did not fight so that Zimbabwe would merely change the colour of its rulers.

They did not abandon school, family, comfort, and safety—some while still children—so that a small clique could replace colonial settlers as the new owners of the country’s wealth.

They fought for a Zimbabwe in which all would be equal, in which access to land, resources, education, healthcare, and opportunity would no longer be determined by race, class, or proximity to power.

That was the promise.

That was the dream.

Today, that dream lies in tatters.

The veteran’s message made one thing abundantly clear: the living heroes of the struggle are not proud of what Zimbabwe has become.

They are not happy watching a country of vast natural and human potential descend into permanent crisis while a politically connected few amass obscene wealth.

They are not happy seeing tenderpreneurs flaunting luxury cars, mansions, and private jets—often acquired through dubious, inflated public contracts—while ordinary Zimbabweans struggle for water, healthcare, and the most basic necessities.

They are not happy that hospitals have become places where the poor go to die for lack of medicines, equipment, and staff, while billions are siphoned from the public purse with total impunity.

Most painful of all, they are not happy that many of those who actually fought the war are themselves languishing in poverty, old, sick, forgotten, and discarded by the very system they helped bring into existence.

These are men and women who survived bombings at places like Chimoio, Nyadzonia, Mboroma, and Freedom Camp—who watched comrades die in pieces, who lived for years on little food, no comfort, and constant danger.

And yet today, they are expected to clap, sing, and chant slogans for leaders who have turned the liberation legacy into a private business venture.

The veteran asked a question that cuts to the bone: Did we endure all that so that individuals like Wicknell Chivayo and Kudakwashe Tagwirei could accumulate billions, while nearly 80 percent of Zimbabweans struggle to afford a basic meal or send their children to school?

It is a question that cannot be answered honestly by those in power.

Because the truth is too damning.

Graves cannot speak.

Plaques cannot protest.

Shrines cannot tell the youth how the liberation struggle was betrayed after 1980—how corruption, greed, authoritarianism, and entitlement hollowed out the promise of independence.

Only the living can tell that story.

Only those who were there can explain that the struggle was never meant to end in the grotesque inequalities and indignities that define today’s Zimbabwe.

Yet, despite the pain and anger, there was something else in that veteran’s message: a quiet, defiant hope.

He and others like him do not believe the struggle was entirely in vain.

They believe it was interrupted.

Hijacked.

Betrayed—but not concluded.

They want the youth to understand that they, too, were once young when they took up arms.

They did not wait for permission.

They did not surrender to fear.

They acted because the future was being stolen from them.

That is the uncomfortable message the youth are meant to hear—not at shrines alone, but from the living witnesses of history.

Today’s struggle may not require guns or camps in foreign lands, but it demands courage, conscience, and action.

It demands that young Zimbabweans refuse to normalise looting, poverty, and repression.

It demands that they reclaim the true meaning of liberation: a Zimbabwe that works for all, not just the connected few.

The veteran is right.

Before sending the youth to graves, let them first listen to the living.

Let them hear the truth—raw, painful, and unfiltered.

Only then can the memory of Chimoio truly honour the dead.

Only then can the struggle continue, not as empty rhetoric, but as a renewed fight for the Zimbabwe that was promised, and still remains possible.

• Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to WhatsApp or Call: +263715667700 | +263782283975, or email: mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com, or visit website: https://mbofanatendairuben.news.blog/