Oliver Mtukudzi’s advice for young people chasing their dreams
When I am asked what advice I can give to youths chasing their dreams or goals I do not restrict myself to the guidance that I offer them. When I advise youths, I seek also to counsel parents because they turn the goals of their children into pipedreams when they want to impose talent on their children. Yet only God gives talent and God takes it away. That is how I view life.
My first advice to youths chasing their dreams is to build the very difficult but achievable culture of self-discipline. Have respect for yourself first then everyone else will respect you. How you carry yourself amongst other people, how you engage others and your humility defines a well rounded youth in the context of self-discipline.
No one is born a squeaky-clean character. Self-discipline is a process that is cultivated or is inculcated. Our environs at family level, the parents, the peers, the school and social environment all have immense influence and bearing on discipline and parents are central in ensuring that children are not only raised to fear evil but to love, to learn restraint and to tolerate others who may have different views to life. Read more
Don’t matter
Through this currency
My dreams and hopes
Don’t matter
As the politicians get fatter
I look at my skinny son
A reflection of my situation
I pray for my salvation
A whole nation in my position
On the brink of starvation
Our ambitions
Dont matter
To the corrupt politicians
As they seek higher positions
They don’t listen to our questions
In their quest to stay in power
They come to our ghetto election time
To address the poor
Like ghetto veterans
Jive talking slang
Giving temporary handouts
With promises of land
They dont understand
Their dreams and hopes
For this land
Don’t matter to me
Some things are never easy
Gone
I wake up with a start… my poem is gone
I grapple with under-blankets
Shake the spring bed
Sounds of strained wires
Irritate my half-slumbered mind
I search for a word
A title to begin with
I search for a rhyme
That like a drum beat
Spread its echoes in my dream
The sheets reek of broken dreams
Scattered from the pillows to my toes Read more
If we did it once, we can do it again…but when?
“If not now, then when?” Echoes from a plaintive Tracy Chapman song, if my memory serves me right. But the mind is numbed by a vicious summer flu (as well as age, I guess), so I can’t be certain. But that line finds resonance as deadlocks continue, Troikas defer crucial meetings- all because there was an apparent hide and seek shenanigan with travel documents…If a small country like Zimbabwe can’t make agreements work, what more the grand dreams of SADC, AU and Pan Africanism? Read more
Recalling Kwame Nkrumah
“Countrymen and women, the task ahead is great indeed, and heavy is the responsibility; and yet it is a noble and glorious challenge - a challenge which calls for the courage to dream, the courage to believe, the courage to dare, the courage to do, the courage to envision, the courage to fight, the courage to work, the courage to achieve - to achieve the highest excellencies and the fullest greatness of man. Dare we ask for more in life? ”
- Kwame Nkrumah, Address to the National Assembly. 12 June 1965
