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Reason Wafawarova on Monday
SOMETIMES people just want to sin without consequences, and they will try by every means to create good explanations around their shortcomings. In religion, atheism is often seen as the best excuse to sin without thinking of the consequences. Once you have decided that God does not exist then you free yourself from any form of accountability relating to God. When a wrong is righted by the identity of the perpetrator we have a problem. The September 11, 1973 bombing of Chile’s palace was planned and endorsed by Richard Nixon’s government. It was a blatant use of military force to kill and remove a democratically elected President — for the simple reason that the United States did not like him.

In all reality Salvador Allende was removed by a brutal terrorist attack masterminded by the CIA. The subsequent regime change replacement junta of Augusto Pinochet was immediately recognised, supported, and funded by Washington. A terrorist attack was sanitised as an acceptable military coup.

When the United States faced its own September 11 bombardment in 2001, no one was allowed to see anything else, but ultimate terrorism — the epitome of all tragedies. Isolated groups of Afghanis were spotted celebrating the attack, and there was fury in Washington, leading to the invasion of Afghanistan.

So many times the nobility of democracy has been used to sanitise war crimes and crimes against humanity. Syria is burning today because someone decided to fund extremist rebels against that country’s democratically elected government — in the name of democratisation of course.

We are proud of our revolution in Zimbabwe, as we indeed must be. We fought for our independence, we reclaimed our land from colonial beneficiaries, and we are putting in place affirmative indigenisation policies in the business sector.

However, our pride has been betrayed. We have many within the ruling party who now believe revolutionarism is nothing, but the most convenient rhetoric one can use to sustain monopoly of political power, and to loot.

By definition a revolution is democratic. It is a majority movement, a sweeping change propelled by popular demand. It is a wonder that in Zimbabwe there seems to be a clear distinction between democracy and revolution, with the former being the catchword for opposition political parties while the later is a preserve for the ruling Zanu-PF.

Of course the kind of democracy preached by the opposition is a convenient one, a hollow bunch of sweet nothings designed to attract the youth vote. They yearn for a new Zimbabwe where everyone will feel high and good because there will be abundant limitless freedoms and liberties for all of life’s essentialities and miscellaneous.

This is the kind of democracy our opposition cannot marry to the country’s revolution. Conversely the ruling party cannot marry this kind of democracy to the revolution. We now have a democracy that excludes the revolution, and a revolution that does not accept democracy, or so it appears.

In the world of Morgan Tsvangirai the revolutionary gains of today will have to be revisited and reversed if the man was to govern the country any time soon.

In Kudzai Chipanga’s world only Zanu-PF supporters must benefit from the country’s revolutionary policies, and even from State resources, according to media reports. We have politicians who have declared themselves custodians of the national revolution, and frankly most of them are quite irresolute on matters of true democracy. To them anyone who does not affiliate to Zanu-PF is a mere quisling of Western imperialists with nothing better to do than spend time worshipping at the Alter of puppet politics.

The revolution must attract people to its cause, not repel people on the basis of partisan interests. We now have a revolution betrayed. Our land, our mineral resources, and our wildlife have all been looted in the aggrandisement of self-centred politicians who care very little about the devastating impact of corruption on the collective livelihood of the nation.

The question to ask is why the concept of democracy should ever run contrary to the tenets of a popular revolution like the Zimbabwe one, or why a popular revolution like Zimbabwe’s land reform program should be led by people who are wary of democratic tenets, if indeed we are talking of true democracy.

Is it not given that democratic uprisings give rise to popular revolutions? Is it not factual that revolutions are an expression of democracy itself, born out of the collective will of the people?

Why then do we seem to have two clearly distinct camps, one of self-proclaimed revolutionaries and another of self-anointed democrats in the same country — both proclaiming to be standing for the will of Zimbabweans?

Zimbabwe has become a victim of its own politics. We have this chaos where people are faced with two hard choices — foreign backed politicians determined to please foreign imperial authorities at the expense of sovereignty on the one hand, and on the other a thoroughly compromised band of nationalists whose only preoccupation seems to be bastardising the revolution for the sole purpose of self-aggrandisement.

This essay is not about setting out any doctrines, and neither is it about a messianic deliverance of our people. It is not about great prophecy, and it certainly does not make claims about possessing any truths. It is simply about speaking on behalf of Zimbabweans in particular, and on the greater behalf of the African people.

We live today a life of contradictions because we are a disinherited people, so disparagingly viewed by those who immensely contributed to our dire status by fate of history — a history of painful slavery and brutal colonial exploitation and persecution, effects of which we cannot erase by the mere prospect of forgetting. We have today lost the clarity of our own revolution, and among us there are others who with rigour and vigour are pursuing nothing, but monopoly of political power.

Admirers of African revolutionary luminaries like Samora Machel and Thomas Sankara are many, and they include people like Obert Gutu and Nelson Chamisa from the opposition MDC-T — a party whose modus operandi would certainly rile the two iconic revolutionaries, if the MDC-T had existed in their time.

We are all victims of the order of the “Third World,” that lesser world invented for us at the fall of colonial empires. We have allowed this unjust perpetuation of foreign control over our intellectual, cultural, economic and political collective being. We live in perpetual dependency, we belong to dependency political parties, and we have no idea how to extract ourselves from the misery of poverty in the land of plenty.

Those whose mentality is a direct product of colonisation have sadly hijacked our revolution, and those among us who proclaim to stand on the platform of democracy are only pawns of neo-colonial supremacy of the former colonisers. We have hopeless wretches like Evan Mawarire, who cannot distinguish between democracy and confusion.

It is the sad reality of our times that we have inherited a highly noble legacy from revolutionaries who secured for us political freedom and independence, yet we continue to give credence to this gigantic fraud of history that exalts the white person as superior and Western nations as hegemonic, even as exemplary.

We have the truth of the righteous guiding us. We fought for our independence. It was a war of uprightness and justice. It is a tragedy that the truth of the righteous has been trampled upon by vampires that thrive on sucking the blood of the nation — siphoning public funds in pursuit of selfish interests.

The bigger tragedy is that Zanu-PF has allowed into its leadership ranks these blatant kleptocrats; miscreants who openly boast about looting public funds to fund their own political careers. Some have claimed they have legitimate discretion to loot.

We have rallied against the imperial onslaught on our economy with the passion of true patriots. Why must we be rewarded with the insult of thieving characters taking over this sacred revolution? Who needs imperial enemies with these self-destructing personalities in charge of the country’s affairs?

On the one hand, we have among us those who have dared to revolutionise the false struggle for democracy, playing treacherous flag patriotism in promotion of foreign interests. On the other, we have false revolutionaries hijacking a genuine revolution in pursuit of illicit wealth — corrupt people whose only knowledge of revolutionary ideals is sloganeering. We hear a Pastor has been leading a self-style global campaign for the shutting down of Zimbabwe, dissuading potential investors from associating with the country. The robe of Christ has been abused a lot over the past 2000 years. We had shameless characters putting on the robe of Christ as a means of aiding colonial domination — renting our bodies and souls asunder, some to deceive us for their own personal gain, and others to deceive us on behalf of Empires back in Europe.

Thomas Sankara had this to say about the salvation of Africa: “We must state categorically that there is no salvation for our people unless we turn our backs on all the models that charlatans of all types have tried to sell us . . .” He continued, “There is no salvation outside of this rejection. There is no development separate from a rupture of this kind.”

We cannot save ourselves without rejecting the cause of our bondage. It is like talking about salvation without renouncing sin. The cause of heathenism is sin, just like the cause of Africa’s exploitation is the subjugating of nations. Without rejecting the cause there is no redemption.

But we must also reject with utmost disgust the rise of similar charlatans in our midst. Zimbabwe is not going to develop simply because we have rejected foreign domination. The country will develop because we have rejected every form of injustice, every form of corruption, every form of illicitness, every form of selfishness, every form of treachery, and every form of one subjugating the other.

We have to come to an understanding that the economy is not money, and that money is not the economy. That has been the deception of our time. The economy produces money and not vice versa.

Distributing things is easier than producing them, and that is why it is very tempting for aspiring young politicians like Chipanga to go around distributing housing land without a housing plan in place. We once had the craze of visiting foreign owned companies with the intention of distributing shares of these companies to local people. That is an easy task to carry out, but it is a vacuous exercise in futility.

There is no country that ever ran on distributing of freebies. A country has to run on production. Industry must be working, mining must be financed adequately, there has to be financial liquidity in the market, and indeed these are things that need leadership with the mental muscle to offer economic solutions to economic problems.

Largely people who have political solutions to every form of problem are the ones in leadership. This is why it is very easy to say once the Western imposed economic sanctions are lifted, Zimbabwe will be heaven on earth thereafter. What simplistic load of nonsense.

We just have to start rebuilding Zimbabwe’s economy; otherwise we are headed for a rude awakening. A time will eventually come when our leadership may be confronted by the dizzying rise of millions of people in rags — and that threat is getting increasingly inevitable with each day passing. It is never a healthy thing to govern a sick nation — to lead a hungry people, to rule a nation in strife.

We have a collective responsibility to build this nation, and we must accept that leadership comes with responsibility, which if not observed and carried out is in breach of public trust. In any democracy a price has to be paid for failed leadership, and this is why we must not allow a system that appears to be shielding criminals.

Zanu-PF does not have internal systems to deal with crime. It is a citizen under the rule of the supreme law of the land, just like any other citizen.

For the Commissar of the party and others to suggest that there are internal systems to investigate and resolve criminal matters is the same as any other citizen telling the police or any other law enforcement agency not to worry because they have internal systems to investigate themselves and to resolve any criminal matters that may be attributed to them.

It is like a parent of a criminal suspect telling investigating officers that they should not worry because the family has internal systems to deal with such matters.

We cannot in the name of the revolution begin to sustain a culture of impunity. The fear of this writer is compounded by the fact that there are hardly any stalwarts for justice left even among those that purport to stand for our revolution.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

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