By Sharon Chimenya
PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa broke ground and laid the foundation stone for the construction of Great Zimbabwe University’s new site, located just a few kilometres from its current main campus.
During his address, Great Zimbabwe University (GZU) Vice Chancellor Professor Rungano Zvobgo said the ground-breaking ceremony marks the establishment of a permanent home for the university.
He said it is a moment in which the university must also devise strategies that will complement government support in building their home.
Paying tribute to the President’s vision, Prof Zvobgo said: “While we say Nyika inovakwa ne vene vayo, we must also say, University inovakwa nevene vayo. We thank you for your transformative vision and unfaltering guidance which has brought us this far. Your Excellency and Chancellor there is a profound truth that says: to build a future, one must first have a home from which to build it. Today marks the beginning of the establishment of a permanent intellectual, administrative and cultural home for Great Zimbabwe University.”
This year’s graduation ceremony was held at the new site where construction is set to commence in which Professor Zvobgo said its architecture draws inspiration from the timeless ingenuity of our ancestors.
He said the Great Zimbabwe Monuments are a testament of the African engineering, creativity and innovation in which the University to this day draws its inspiration from that heritage and inspiration.
“This Main Campus will become a home for generations of students, scholars, researchers, innovators and communities. It will be a place where knowledge is created, transmitted and transformed into solutions. It will be a place where Zimbabwe’s young people will imagine the future-and have the courage and capacity to build it,” he said.
“The architecture of this campus draws inspiration from the timeless ingenuity of our ancestors, translated through the construction of the Great Zimbabwe Monument. That is deliberate. For the Great Zimbabwe Monument is a powerful reminder that Zimbabwe has always been capable of extraordinary feats of engineering, organisation, creativity, innovation and industrialisation.
In crafting the Masterplan, the architectural drawings for this edifice were drafted by the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) architectural team.
He said the institution-to- institution collaboration directly reflects the Ministry’s vision of shared national capacity which proves that the institutions in this country possess the requisite expertise for monumental projects.
