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would-be investors, then surely we cannot repay that debt at the moment. This is simply because we have nothing to repay that debt with, not exactly because we are a people of given inanity, but because it is not our responsibility to repay a debt which we did not help create.

We cannot repay the debt of safeguarding the self-interests of capitalist foreign investors because history owes us something that the greatest riches can never repay – a debt of blood. It was our blood that was shed for Africa to be colonised and for it to assume the geographical characteristics it carries today, as well as its socio-economic skewed structures.
Today’s poverty in Zimbabwe is mainly a product of confrontations. When people talk to us today about our economic crisis, they forget to mention that the crisis didn’t appear overnight. It has been with us for a long time, and it will deepen more and more, whether we choose to remain subjects to our exploiters or we embark on a revolution to reverse our misery. The only difference is that the later will finally end our agony.

There is a crisis today because the masses refuse to allow wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, and it does not matter that the few elites brag about bringing economic stability, or about creating for us numerous jobs. They ask us today to collaborate in the search for stability – stability to the benefit of the holders of financial power, stability to the detriment of our masses. We cannot in sanity be accomplices in this kind of colonial slavery. Surely we cannot go along with those who suck the blood of our peoples and who live off our sweat – telling us that such sweat is employment for which we owe them inexplicable gratitude. We cannot go along with the murderous ventures of imperialism and monopoly capitalism – calling it investment policy, or whatever it is some of our politicians say it is. When we get ready to create a revolution there are no shot cuts. Revolutions are about redefining the world, about redefining words, about redefining paradigms, about redefining structures; and there is no cosy way around it.

The Bible talks of Adam being given the power to name things, and through naming of things he is given dominion. The connection between naming and dominion is apparent, and of course naming brings reality. When we permit another people to name and define the way we should live our lives, we permit another people to gain dominion and control over us.
This is why this writer is no admirer or borrower of these fancy concepts peddled by Western civic organisations in the name of democracy, humanitarianism, liberties or any other good intention that all sane people are bound to have respect for.

The languages we learn and speak are most frequently directly related to the power relations between us and the owners of those languages. Many people will start learning Mandarin, just like they once clamoured for English, Japanese, Russian, German, Latin, and so on. This is because like those others before it, China is in ascendancy. There is nothing good or bad about English or any other language. All there is is language connected to power. After our native languages we often learn the language spoken by those in power. There is a connection between the capacity to have other people speaking your language and to call things by the names you give them, and power. Imperialism is about domination and it is about defining the way others must comply to the diktats of foreign powers. If we are serious about assuming power in Zimbabwe then we must assume the capacity to name and define everything around us, including the way we exploit and benefit from the resources of the heartland.

Obert Gutu loudly bemoaned that “the average Zimbabwean is still classified as poor by world standards,” adding “this is a very sad indictment on the vision of this great nation’s founding fathers and mothers.” He pointed out that 70 percent of Zimbabweans live on less than US$2 a day. Truly a Pan-Africanist like Obert Gutu has every cause to lament over the predicament of our long suffering masses.

It is Gutu the politician that this writer is going to interrogate. In an apparent bid to marry his reputable Pan-Africanist principles with party political correctness, Gutu decided to reduce himself to a blatant street MDC-T activist defined only by the emotive desire to bring down Zanu-PF, by any means necessary, as the late Learnmore Jongwe would always say, borrowing from Malcom X. We were told by Senator Gutu that the problem we have is Zanu-PF “going into overdrive” with “the so-called indigenisation and economic empowerment program”. The cynicism is understandable when one stands in the shoes of Gutu the politician, certainly riled by the “overdrive” of a rival group – an overdrive that can only be a threat to those at whose expense the intended goals will be achieved.

This writer shares fully the concerns of Senator Gutu when he laments that the crafting of an indigenisation and economic empowerment blueprint leading to a statute was only done around 2007. But sadly, Gutu forgot to acknowledge that there has always been an indigenisation drive from the onset of independence, culminating in the creation of such organisations like the IBDC and the AAG.

No doubt Zanu-PF was pushed into enacting the indigenisation and economic empowerment policy more by political factors than by the plight of the oppressed, just like it is often argued that political factors played a major role in pushing Zanu-PF into embracing the land reclamation program. As Zanu-PF enacted the Indigenisation Act to attract popular support from the suffering masses, so did it delay its gazetting to avoid attracting more ruinous and illegal economic sanctions, as was being promised by Obert Gutu’s opposition party and its handlers from Western capitals.

By Gutu’s own admission the Indigenisation Act was “vigorously opposed” by the Tsvangirai-led MDC-T, and as such there was no national united front on this very important matter, itself the cornerstone of the liberation war that brought us independence. Politics took precedence over the national interest and Zanu-PF was culpable by perhaps doing only the politically popular thing, while the MDC-T was culpable by thwarting the national interest in a bid to stall the strides of a political opponent. Burn the house to kill the intruding rat.

Gutu derided the belatedness of taking “three decades” to come up with a “people centred policy for the empowerment of historically disadvantaged people.” Maybe this is the only reason Gutu should not seek to stall this “people centred policy” any further as he is apparently doing, but to make a united front with his political opponents to ensure that the national interest is neither politicised nor thwarted.

By his own admission, the empowerment of Zimbabweans “is a very serious and crucial issue,” it being the founding cause for the blood that was shed to bring us freedom. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Senator Gutu wrote that the empowerment policy “should not be taken as a simple electioneering gimmick by any political party.” Very wise words befitting of an Honourable Senator, one must admit.

If we agree that ZANU PF is electioneering with the empowerment policy, then we must also agree that the party’s unscrupulous behaviour is sadly complimented by the behaviour of its main political opponent, the MDC-T, itself vigorously electioneering not by the promotion of the empowerment policy, but by its derision and vilification, that way mocking every prospect of ever empowering what

Gutu told us are “historically disadvantaged people.”
The Senator rightly informed us that indigenisation and empowerment are “a matter of life and death,” and as such it must be acknowledged that there is no substitution for life or death. Both are unambiguous and absolute. This is why the job-creation rhetoric at MDC-T rallies will not and cannot be a substitution for the empowerment of our people, regardless of how determined Tsvangirai may sound.

The Senator was quite candid and correct in telling us that “we cannot empower the poor by grabbing wealth from the rich and dishing it out like confetti at a wedding.” Surely the reclamation of our economy and resources is not and cannot be a wedding matter. It is a vicious revolution.
What is happening is reclamation of economic power, a redefining of power relations. If any wealth is being grabbed then that wealth only belongs to Zimbabwe, not to the historically privileged that successfully stole it from the masses.

“You do not empower the poor and marginalised by changing the colour of the new bourgeois from white to black,” the Senator counselled. Rather you change the colour of the new bourgeois from white to black by empowering the poor and marginalised, this writer counter counsels.
The Senator defined the current economic empowerment policy as “dishing out that shareholding to politically well-connected individuals,” sadly without making an effort to prove this grave assertion.

We got what read like a disempowerment scheme from the Senator. Instead of trying to empower our people, we should be “creating more business opportunities,” presumably for foreign investors, and we should be “expanding the industrial and financial base,” presumably by having many foreign owned industries and so much foreign owned finances, and we must “create new employment opportunities for the millions of our unemployed youths,” the honourable thing good Africans should do.

He went on to tell us; “once this has been done, inevitably, new business opportunities will crop up and our local entrepreneurs will then be able to establish new business ventures that will create new employment opportunities.” Talk of precious piece of nothing!
Just how is it “inevitable” that by allowing foreigners to expand our industrial base using our cheap labour we naturally and automatically create local entrepreneurs?

Senator Gutu warned us that we face “pauperisation” and “unprecedented de-industrialisation and capital flight,” should we pursue the empowerment policy in its current form. Quite a scary prospect; except that it makes very little sense that one is so worried about the flight of the very capital that has perpetually subjugated our “historically disadvantaged peoples.”
It is not a good patriotic gesture to vainly threaten people by saying the flight of Western capital is synonymous with de-industrialisation. The Malaysians and the Chinese will differ sharply with that.

The Senator clearly confuses the fierce competition for untapped African resources for “fierce competition for FDI,” and in this mix up warned us that if we do not shape up to the demands of this competition by foreigners for our own resources, we face the bleak future of being a de-industrialised community.
If the current economic empowerment drive is a “recipe for corruption,” as asserted by Senator Gutu, then the remedy is not to fight the empowerment, itself “a matter of life and death,” but to craft ways of combating corruption as practised by the political community to which Senator Gutu belongs.

The fear that economic empowerment creates “cartels” is a contradiction in itself. For as long as Zimbabwe pursues the capitalist model in empowering its people, it is bound to create cartels, not because of the weakness of the implementers but that of capitalism itself. Every capitalist state is controlled by cartels and that is by definition.

No one has the sole responsibility of creating wealth for all Zimbabweans. All that is needed are empowerment opportunities and our people will create the wealth for themselves.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.