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we wake up as democrats.
For as long as our aspiration for democracy is merely an exercise in pursuing political ambition by our political leadership, and an exercise in feeling good by our energetic youths, then it is likely that we Africans will die feeling good — albeit good for nothing.
We must start focusing on central issues whenever we are looking at governance issues for Africa. History must not teach us dependency and how best to do proposals for money from Western donors. Such a history is lethal and fatalistic.
It must not teach us how to be reliable and hardworking employees for investors coming from foreign lands. Rather, history’s tremendous value to us must be the virtue of it teaching us the regaining of power. We cannot have a history that convinces us that the transiency of democracy is dependent only on the input of Europeans.
Our politics, our policies and the education we give to our children must be about nothing else but regaining power. If our education is not about regaining power then we are miseducating ourselves, or we are being miseducated and misled. The majority of our political elites in Africa are miseducated and misled, proudly bragging about how good they are at imitating Westerners.
What we must understand as Africans is that there is no such thing as freedom without a firm economic foundation. The economic empowerment of Zimbabweans must not be a mere act of compulsive acquisition of majority shares in white people’s businesses. Grabbing shares has absolutely nothing to do with economic empowerment, because shares in themselves are simply a reflection of the performance of a business, not the business itself.
The share acquisition is only justifiable from the point of view of correcting a historical injustice in the exploitation of national resources by the foreign investor, not from the view point of sustainable development. You do not create sustainable development through acquiring shares in a business whose only connection to you is your envy and greed. Sustainable development is about active participation in the growing of a business so it expands to create more and more wealth not only for its shareholders, but also for the nation at large.
We must get sick and tired of political and social leaders whose only obsession is to make the political ballot viable, never ever providing to our people the economic ballot. Morgan Tsvangirai is doubtlessly more concerned about the freeness and fairness of the political ballot than he is about providing an economic ballot for Zimbabweans, a ballot for economic justice to our people. He is convinced that ensuring majority control of shares by local Zimbabweans in big foreign owned businesses is “bad crafting” of policies.
The man is convinced that good crafting of policies must “ensure jobs for our people,” regardless that these same “our people” will not be ensured of wealth. Whenever faced by Western politicians, Morgan Tsvangirai is so timid about the economic empowerment of indigenous Zimbabweans, perhaps a clear sign that the man is still alive to the neo-colonial supremacy of the Westerner, avoiding at every cost to confront the glamour and might of Western imperial investment.
We today spend so many hours in long political discussions about the morals and equivocations of democracy for Africans, in the process hopelessly obscuring the main point we ever liberated ourselves for. We liberated ourselves to seize power from the white man, and that is pure and simple. The worst thing to be said about the founding fathers of Africa’s post-colonial independence is that the majority of them have seemed not to understand that the only issue to be addressed by independence is power — both economic and political. Nothing else but power and power alone must be our resolve.
Sadly the younger generation of today seems to shy away from the topic of power even more than those from the liberation era. When we got independent in Zimbabwe, our politicians at one time worked so very hard to prove the goodness of the black man to the white man.
We called it reconciliation, whatever that meant. Even poor whites received social and economic privileges rich colonial whites had denied them during the colonial era, with some poor whites from Europe immigrating to Zimbabwe to benefit from the compensatory benevolence of a newly formed government of blacks, so eager then to impress on matters of civility.
Today, if you wash up a homeless white person in Europe and take him to Africa, the man can easily secure a meeting with an African head of state, more for the skin he wears, and less for the substance he carries.
We set up so many schools to educate ourselves after independence, educating ourselves with an education that produces engineers who cannot even make simple water filters for the benefit of their own dying folks in the villages. We educated ourselves highly with the sole aim of competing so hard among ourselves for employment by those with economic power — the very people we foolishly think we liberated ourselves from. The illusion cannot be greater. The stupidity is legendary!
The mere presence of black politicians in our parliament and at Zimbabwe House or State House, just like our getting top jobs in white owned corporations, can in no way in itself ensure the survival of black people.
We cannot make the progress of the indigenous person synonymous with our qualifying for degrees and our getting jobs in towns. We can never win the war against poverty through degrees and jobs. It is time we all wake up to this because we have had this game played upon us for too long a time.
History is not always about people progressing. Sometimes it is about regressing, and the politics we see across Africa today are likely to lead to continental regression. From a history of nationalistic politicians who fronted the liberation effort that brought down colonial empires we have moved to an era of lapdog politicians whose expediency is only the funding they receive from Western powers.
With such politicians gracing the African scene two political non entities like France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron can secure African backing for the invasion of a sovereign African country like Libya, and the whole African Union can only watch in agonising reticence.
Regressing at this point for Africa is a dire situation where prospects of fighting back all over again look really slim. One has to look at the youth created by our post-independence system in Africa to see the danger we face as a continent.
Colonialism bred a lot more revolutionary and visionary African youths than our own independence. Our main stream African youth of today can easily be mobilised against a rare revolutionary like Julius Malema of South Africa, persecuted more by his own comrades in the ANC than he is by the imperial enemy he seeks to floor.
Even the legendary ANC has become a sorry tragedy, looking precariously delicate under the leadership of what appears to be a clueless Jacob Zuma.
We are facing a dire prospect of a wholesale wiping out of the entire gains of African political independence. It required over 100 years of gruesome oppression and oceans of blood for Africans to fight down colonial empires, and today we face a free fall from the political plateau founded by the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Samora Machel, Jomo Kenyatta, Patrice Lumumba, Robert Mugabe, Nelson Mandela and many such other luminaries.
Today we are made to put all our faith in laws largely formulated by the white man, be it domestic or international law. For international law we are even made to abide by laws enforced by the white man’s NATO, or by the white dominated UN Security Council, four of whose five permanent members are white countries, or by the IMF or the World Bank, both controlled by the West.
As argued by renowned writer Amos Wilson, if ever there will come a day when society has to make a choice between feeding European children and African children, no amount of civil rights laws or any other laws will prevent the people from white industrialised countries from feeding their children first — which in fact they already do anyway.
We are being sponsored to come up with a new Constitution in Zimbabwe, and we have rested our hope for freedom on the basis of the new law, despite history teaching us that the law in itself does not guarantee freedom. We have this silly faith in the law, and it is time we must question our sanity.
The law is not stronger than its enforcers, and that is a simple fact of life. It is usually the same people who pass laws who allocate themselves the responsibility to enforce the same laws. The law in itself does not necessarily arrest or jail those who decide not to enforce it, it only becomes of no value and of no power.
Ultimately, fairness of the law rests not in the law itself, but in the activities of people and the attitude and consciousness of those responsible for law enforcement. The treatment of people whose freedoms are protected by the law is not dependant on the law itself, but on the attitude of the law enforcers, an attitude that can change from time to time.
One can look at the Rome Statute and how it has spared the likes of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, Ariel Sharon, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, Barack Obama, Donald Rumsfeld, and many other Western suspects of war crimes, rather targeting specifically over a dozen Africans, mainly rag tag rebel soldiers in war torn poverty-stricken countries, and a few targeted African leaders whose politics are deemed not to be compliant with Western domination.
Clearly the Rome Statute is being applied on the principle of attitude and not on the basis of law. Even this writer was once served with papers carrying baseless charges related to the ICC, and that would not have been so easy if this writer wore a skin apart from the African one, everything else remaining equal.
The overzealous case officer presiding over the trumped up case was clearly elated to be dealing with “the right person” to be investigated for the alleged crimes, especially with the name Robert Mugabe thrown all over the place. It is attitudes and not the law itself that matters when people get persecuted in the name of prosecution.
Are we not all convinced that the new Constitution for Zimbabwe will guarantee our freedoms? How many of us believe that anti-discrimination laws, civil rights laws, voting laws, free speech laws and so on will guarantee our freedoms? But there is no greater illusion than that. It is a national flight into fantasy!
A lot of us would want to believe that things must over time get better, especially if our political preferences are allowed to carry the day. But life is not a fairy tale wherein certain things are accomplished and people live happily ever after. This writer talks to a lot of people who seem convinced that only a government made up of their political party of choice will prosper Zimbabwe, and these people are from across the political divide.
We must not be so optimistic as to be stupid. The answer to the prosperity of Zimbabwe does not lie in political parties or in politicians. It lies in total power. There are issues more central to national development than politicians and their parties.
What we want more than the law and political parties is total power to Zimbabweans, economic and political power. We do not owe that power to the benevolence of politicians. That power is our birthright.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

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