Maravi

(HERALD) Tsvangirai dishonest on land issue

Tsvangirai dishonest on land issue
Monday, 25 April 2011 22:10
By Alexander Kanengoni

During the Easter holidays, I bumped into two old friends and two views about Zimbabwean politics that I found interesting. The first guy seemed extremely worried about what I write and asked whether they had not put me on the sanctions list yet.

I was bemused. Actually, I had never contemplated that possibility. If that is what it takes to have your name put on the sanctions list, it's crazy. Just to express your point of view? Isn't that the democracy they preach to us day and night?

My friend advised me to take my foot off the pedal a bit and take it easy, leaving it to others to run with it.

It wasn't quite the same with the second guy. I met him by accident along the First Street mall, and we both expressed surprise how long it was since we last met. In fact, several years.

But he quickly added that it wasn't the same regarding me, because once in a while, he reads me in the papers.

We talked for some time and just before we parted he remarked that he would continue to keep to the side-lines, waiting to see what happened next.

My two friends' political position is the same, they are happy to remain outside.
I cannot, because I have always been inside.

The Rhodesians peddled the myth that everyone who joined the struggle was forced, I wasn't.

Ian Smith claimed we were the happiest Africans on the continent. I joined the war on my own volition.

I cannot stop expressing my views publicly when we fought a war so that people would do just that.

But then, Ian Smith was a mad man. He believed it would take us more than a thousand years to be free.

Which brings me to Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Independence Day message that came out in the press last week.

It was an interesting message.

Whilst it tried to support the reasons why we went to war, it got confused at the end, but that was not surprising, knowing Morgan.

The message talked about freedom, justice and prosperity as the cornerstones of the war for independence.

No one would disagree with that, but how do you achieve those objectives?
How do you make the people prosper?

If the Prime Minister believes that the issue of land only popped up 20 years after independence as he claims in his message, he is being deliberately dishonest. The issue of land was always at the heart of our fight for freedom.

[To quote the MDC leader from this Independence Day message:

" Twenty years after independence we were told that the land would set us free. The same land was later grabbed by avaricious politicians and the well-connected in our society.

Now, thirty years after independence we are being told by multi-millionaires and multiple farm-owners that indigenisation will set us free. By this they are not referring to broad-based empowerment of the ordinary man and woman, but the looting and plunder of national resources by a small, parasitic elite. " - MrK]

The First Chimurenga, in 1893, was fought over the land. The Third Chimurenga, more than a century later, was all about the unresolved issue of the land. How then could the Second Chimurenga, in between, be about other things excluding the land?

The PM talks dismissively about the land in his message too. He says 20 years after independence in 2000, we were told land would make us prosper but that didn't happen. Well, such a view from Morgan Tsvangirai is not surprising.

His contempt for the land reform programme was evident when he once described the newly resettled farmers as mushrooms erupting all over organised white commercial farming areas.

The Lancaster House Conference almost broke down over the issue of the land, Morgan surely knows that.

So, he is only being dishonest when he says the issue only cropped up in 2000.
And then, his message goes on to dismiss the indigenisation and economic empowerment programme as a ploy to enrich the already rich elite, presumably the Zanu-PF leadership.

The question becomes - how do you make people prosper without empowering them? How do you make them prosper without opening up entry into mainstream economic activities for them?

Minister Kasukuwere has many times given Schweppes as an example of the success of the indigenisation programme, where the employees successfully negotiated 51 percent shareholding equity.

It is most likely that some of the beneficiaries at Schweppes are members of the MDC.
He cannot deny that!

The most likely people to resist the economic empowerment programme are our erstwhile colonial masters, the Rhodesians and the British; because they still believe all the resources in the country rightfully belong to them.

As an African, one would not expect Morgan to participate in, let alone champion such resistance and yet he doesn't.

It is for this reason that we say Morgan and his MDC are driving a foreign agenda. That is why we say Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC are being used by imperialism. These are the kind of views that one of my friends doesn't want me to express publicly.

In fact, he went on to say that he found what I write more enjoyable if it wasn't politics.

Later, I wanted to know what his real political position was; his motivation.
It's not true that one can remain outside and have no political point of view; it's impossible. So my friend was being dishonest.

He just didn't have the courage to tell me he did not agree with what I write, no matter how sensible it might sound.

My nephew, also an avid MDC supporter, put it in a pleasant and surprising way.
He said he no longer read what I write because he found it difficult to disagree with it.

For example, the American ambassador, Ray Charles, cannot deny the fact that he is black and that his grand parents were probably slaves, can he? And, that our fate in history is basically the same!

Or the fact that the West is in Libya not for humanitarian concerns but purely for their selfish desire for oil!

What we are witnessing with the West is a 21st century version of the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884, the scramble for resources from the Third World.

The French came quite strongly in Libya and the Ivory Coast.

If they tried to do the same regarding Zimbabwe, the British would nudge them gently on the side and smile menacingly.

The message would be clear: Take your hands off, Zimbabwe is British. And the French would oblige.

With the creation of the EU, the possibility of war in Europe has been virtually eliminated.

Instead, they have transferred their wars to our territories. We are fighting their wars and they only enter on our invitation. That is what is happening in Libya.

That is what happened in Ivory Coast, inviting them to re-colonise us! What sort of people are we who are not proud of their African identity? People fawning for the white man's perpetual leadership?

And here at home, the MDC is foolishly agreeing to be used to do exactly that, agreeing to an agenda for our re-colonisation; what a tragedy!

Does Morgan not have the capacity to understand this or he just doesn't care? The British are more interested in our resources than the so-called humanitarian situation.

Europe is running out of raw materials and they are prepared to go to war to get those resources where they are available in the world.

The contemporary popular parlance is: getting them by "ginya".

And yet, there are some amongst us who are literally inviting the British and the West to come and invade us.

I hope they can see the scale of the destruction and the enormous loss of human life happening in Libya.

And the West doesn't care a hoot. And so would the British.

In fact, for them, it would translate into a boom for their depressed construction industry and economy when they have razed Zimbabwe to the ground and start to rebuild it.

That is what the Americans did in Iraq and they are making the rich pickings. Who would want to be left behind?

They went to Libya hoping to do a quick job.

More than two months later, they are still bombarding the country and contemplating sending ground troops, and there shall be more destruction of property and loss of life and the solution still not in sight.

One hopes that those people who are foolishly stopping short of calling for such an invasion to happen here would survive to tell the horrible story.

Those who have survived the liberation war know that war is all about destruction of infrastructure and property, killing of people or getting killed, nothing else.
It is difficult to keep quiet when we are faced with such a horrible prospect. It is also difficult to keep quiet when the Prime Minister misrepresents some basic issues like that of the land.

You feel obliged to point it out to other people for the sake of the record. Or perhaps, for the sake of those who might ignorantly believe him.

Giving land to the people and economically empowering them to own and control their economy is the surest way to make them prosper.

You cannot talk about them being free when they continue to be poor.

The war to empower the people, just like the liberation war, requires tough fighters and not pathetic pretenders who returned before they got to Chimoio because the going had become tough.

I hope I have not offended my two friends from the past.

Labels: ALEXANDER KANENGONI, CHIMURENGA, INDIGENIZATION AND EMPOWERMENT ACT (ZIMBABWE), LAND REFORM, NEOCOLONIALISM

posted by MrK @ 2:37 PM