Maravi

(TALKZIMBABWE) Zimbabwe will be saved by her wits

Zimbabwe will be saved by her wits
By: His Excellency President Mugabe
Posted: Friday, July 9, 2010 11:09 am

THE following is an extract of a speech made by PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE to the 81st Ordinary Session of Zanu-PF's Central Committee at the party's headquarters in Harare yesterday. Media reports on Friday spun the president's speech saying that he said Zimbabwe does not need Western aid. Zanu-PF dismissed this assertion saying that conditional aid is what the president dismissed, not aid per se.

SELECTED EXTRACT

"The maximum exploitation of Zimbabwe's natural resources will turn the Zimbabwean economy around and, as a nation, we should not wait for Western benevolence.

Zimbabwe shall recover by her wits and resources. Zimbabwe will not be saved by any country or organisation, least of all Western.

Let our partners in the inclusive Government get that, so we do not waste our efforts on useless initiatives.

It is our mineral resources — all these helped by the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of our people which will turn this economy and country around!

We have friends in other parts of the world, friends from history and common outlooks. Let us work with those for progress and let us turn our back on those who do not want to work with us.

Let the Zanu-PF take a leading role in ensuring our policy of 'Looking East' gets vindicated.

We meet today as Western countries are redoubling their efforts to control Zimbabwe’s affairs.

The latest such gross and unashamed meddling comes in the wake of the recent meeting of the Kimberly Process Certification Process on diamonds held in Tel Aviv in Israel. This is a voluntary organisation whose focus is on regularising movement and sale of diamonds to keep them away from being used in destabilising legitimate Governments by armed rebels.

It is not a human rights organisation. Yet this is what the United States of America, Canada and Australia would want it to be — not for all times, not in all cases — but only and simply for Zimbabwe.

We have been put in the dock for having diamonds in our territory and for wanting to exploit them with partners from other countries other than from these (Canada, United States and Australia) and other Western nations.

We have been put in the dock because it is assertive Zimbabwe that has found diamonds and is thus likely to be even more assertive in outlook.

We have been put in the dock because these same countries have imposed illegal sanctions on us for our total ruin.

Diamonds would thus blunt their sanctions enabling us to offset and checkmate their disastrous effects on our people and on our economy.

We are a sovereign country. We have no conflict here, no rebels here. We are a lawful Government representing the people of Zimbabwe who own these resources.

Our diamonds are not only bright and clean, they are greatly demanded worldwide. We have the technology to mine them and will soon have the technology to polish them. Let no one doubt our resolve to sell them, with or without the KPCS, with or without the blessings of the USA, Canada, Australia or their NGO pawns.

We do not need the blessings of anyone, least of all nations with chequered origins and equally chequered profiles in spilling so much blood to lay their filthy hands on resources of other nations.

We have positions to defend, principles and policies and on these there shall be no compromise.

We are working towards a Zimbabwean constitution, not a constitution for Zimbabwe by non-Zimbabweans, a constitution which foreigners want or wish for us. Foreigners must back off. We had nothing to do with their constitutions, in fact we were not even there as a free people when they wrote them.

Zanu-PF has to defend the constitution-making process to ensure it has integrity and is not taken advantage of by hostile foreigners who wish to hang and enslave us by this process and by a deformed outcome.

The draft constitution must come from the hands of Zimbabweans, not from those countries who think the fact of making financial inputs to our processes entitles them to interfere with the outcome. We cannot swop our birthright for the donor's dollar.

Foreigners drafted nasty constitutions for Zimbabwe in the past and the country bears everlasting scars from harsh laws written for us.

Once the process is defended and secure, we must ensure the product carries and consolidates our ideals as a nationalist revolutionary party. We fought for the Independence and untrammeled sovereignty of this nation. That coveted status must remain solid, secure and unshaken for all time.

Zimbabwe ndeyeropa, yakauya nehondo. Haichadzokera kuvarungu zvakare (Zimbabwe was won through the shedding of our blood and will never be controlled by whites again.

The process of capturing and collating views during the outreach should be honest, broad, accurate and completely free from personal prejudice.

We commend the spirit of peace and mutual tolerance being exhibited during the outreach, although the process has faced some challenges.

From the reports we are getting, it is clear this crucial exercise has been made more challenging by the sheer sparseness of resources. The whole process is severely underresourced, creating situations that are near impossible for all those involved.

We pay tribute to our teams for persevering against such scant support."

(Part of the Speech delivered to the Zanu-PF Central Committe, the highest decision-making body outside Congress on Thursday 8 July 2010)

Labels: KIMBERLEY PROCESS, MUGABE, NEOCOLONIALISM, SPEECHES

posted by MrK @ 1:34 PM