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TODAY it is 33 years after independence and 12 years under the onslaught of Western-imposed illegal economic sanctions, so insultingly sugar-coated in the hypocritical targeted sanctions rhetoric, and so inanely disguised as harmless isolation of just over a hundred “rogue” characters — ostensibly guilty of unspecified “gross human rights abuses.”

We are told the sanctions are an effort by the all merciful Americans to free us from our own monstrous leaders, to teach us ignorant people of how to practice democracy, to open our eyes on which leader to choose, to teach us to whom we should open the doors to our natural resources, and to teach us who should endorse the legitimacy of our elections.

We are told it is possible to sanction a government without sanctioning its people, without sanctioning the country that the same government leads. Of course this is the kind of nonsense is only sellable to the unthinking lesser peoples of this world, us Africans and the rest of the developing world, and as such we are supposed to embrace it all.

Many in Zanu-PF would want to view the recent landslide electoral defeat of the Western-sponsored puppet politicians in the MDC formations as the end of imperial domination, as a victory against imperialism. It is not.

The victory might possibly breathe death to the puppet project called MDC — most certainly in all its fragmented formations, but that project was in itself only a face of the imperial onslaught, not its heart. Imperialism throws away its masks the way condoms are disposed, and that is what has happened to Tsvangirai and his colleagues.

Imperialism is a ruthless monster, and that monster has been badly wounded by the Zimbabwean electorate. The monsters writhes in agony and fury — ready to use its fangs and claws in the most ruthless of ways.

Zimbabwe needs to relentlessly continue to make radical material transformations to its economy and its politics and those who tell themselves that we have completed the land reform program must wake up from this unwitty slumber. We have started a long and tedious journey, and as things stand there is more chances to abort the journey than to finish it.

Yes we can pride ourselves on having constructed so many schools, clinics, so many dams, so many roads, of having reclaimed our farmlands, and of reclaiming our stake in industry and commerce; as the indigenisation portfolio is all about.

We can also take pride in having provided housing for the people, although we have long lost the momentum and capacity to build new urban suburbs — that capacity that gave us post-independence suburbs of Chitungwiza, the Nketas of Bulawayo, the Kuwadzanas of Harare, the Rujekos of Masvingo, the Chikangas of Masvingo, the Westleas of Harare and so on.

The most important thing for Zimbabwe right now is not the pride of our heroism, certainly not the satisfaction of what our revolution has so far achieved.

Rather it is what is lacking, what has yet to be done. This is no time for Cabinet Ministers on the defensive, ready to explain why things are not working, ready to justify failure by blaming it all on the imperial onslaught of economic sanctions.

Sanctions will not forever be an election winning trump card. They are not different from the protest politics that once upon a time fooled Morgan Tsvangirai into believing that he was indispensably popular. People protest because they are unhappy with who they are protesting against, not necessarily because they are happy with who they give their protest vote.

In 2000 and 2008 the illegally imposed economic sanctions gave to the MDC formations the protest vote against the economic hardships that came with the sanctions, but the vote just fell short of being big enough to effect the regime change scenario so desired by the imperialistic forces behind the sanctions.

The strategy was to get the people of Zimbabwe stoning Zanu-PF leadership in fury caused by the biting embargo, and that nearly happened in 2008.

In 2013, the collective call against the illegal sanctions led to a reverse protest vote against the sanctions themselves, and also against those associated with their imposition. That protest vote, together with the popular people-oriented policies of Zanu-PF led to the landslide electoral victory of July 31.

Zanu-PF simply created a lasting impression that the party was the only vehicle to state controlled economic privileges like benefiting from the 51 percent indigenisation policy, and that alone attracted a significant number of votes.

But let no one be fooled that the vote was a sign of people’s satisfaction — that the vote is in itself an endorsement of the competence of Zanu-PF. The vote was not a statement of satisfaction but of assignment and mandate. Of the competing parties only Zanu-PF looked ready for a mandate to spearhead the road to an economically empowered Zimbabwe.

The inherent and accumulative weaknesses of Zanu-PF did not, and will not go away with the winning vote, and people are quite aware of that. Hopefully the winning politicians are aware of this. It is extremely dangerous to misread a winning vote the way MDC-T politicians did after 2008.

Patronage cadres, opportunists, manipulators, reactionaries, corrupt personalities, traitors and incompetent nepotism beneficiaries are all aspects of the revolution that cannot be wished away by merely pointing a revolutionary raging finger at the all evil imperialist.
Zanu-PF has a huge task ahead — transforming people’s attitude.

With this transformation each one of us must come to a point where we feel wielding power is our business, that the destiny of Zimbabwe is the business not just of certain people, but of all Zimbabweans.

We have to come to a point where everyone has something to say. We must strive for a Zimbabwe where each one of us demands an accounting from the other, not where some of us enjoy de-facto immunity from accountability.

No longer should the wealth of our country belong to a minority, and that remains our greatest challenge. A wealthy black minority may enjoy moral supremacy over a colonial white one, but it is an unacceptable minority all the same.

Inevitably wealthy minorities will be victims of people-driven revolutions and our revolution is no exception. It is suicidal to do for a minority that which is proclaimed in the name of the masses.

By its own call the implementation of the anti-imperialism revolution is not pleasant. That is only natural. When people have been subjected to domination for many years and then they suddenly have someone declaring that they are free to own their own resources and to determine their own destiny, naturally the people may overdo things here and there, and that is what the detractors of the land reform program and the indigenisation policy have been taking advantage of in demonising Zimbabwean economic policies.

The greatest enemy of our revolution is not the Western imperialist of today. Rather it is the dead imperialist of the colonial era. The neo-colonial spirit existing in Zimbabwe and all other African countries is the greatest enemy to our sense of self-belief and our collective esteem as a people.

In Zimbabwe we were colonised by Britain, a country that left us with certain habits and aspirations. For us success and happiness still means trying to live as they do in Britain. We want to be like the richest of the West and never like the richest of Africa.

Our Western orientations lead us into these so many constraints and obstacles to the changes we want to carry out. We have among us very influential people who will not accept even a minimum sense of social justice, people who wish to preserve at every cost their privileges even at the blatant expense of all others.

Our struggle is not only against those imperialists so interested in exploiting our resources together with exploiting ourselves.
It is also against those among our own selves so bent on exploiting our resources in our name all for their own selfish ends, and dare I say these are the greatest enemies of the people today.

We need to define what the Zimbabwean revolution is going to do with the selfish interest of the bourgeoisie, and that of the petty bourgeoisie, which is the most dangerous.

The petty bourgeoisie is a great admirer of the prestige of revolutionaries, but his inclinations stand dangerously against the interests of the majority — the typical wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Normally in a revolution numerical strength counts. However, a revolution in a post colonial set up such as ours will have to content with the preponderant place of the intellectual — his advantageous position to shape opinions. Where the numerical strength lacks the petty bourgeoisie will make up with his influence — all of it a legacy of the colonial era mentalities.

The most dangerous bit of our revolution is that the weakest link available to the imperialism monster is our petty bourgeoisie. It is easier for imperialism to find an ally in our middle class than it can in our masses.

Speeches against imperialism are easy and very impressive. Sadly speeches do not make imperialism tremble. We must brace ourselves to the fact that in imperialism we are dealing with a ruthless monster.

As Thomas Sankara once said, imperialism has claws, horns and fangs. It has venom and it is merciless, so merciless that it can drone to death hundreds of children in Afghanistan, so merciless that it can sponsor murderous wars in Syria and Libya, so merciless that it can pride itself in the ruin of economic sanctions in Zimbabwe, and so ruthless that it can invade and kill a country’s leader like what happened to Gaddafi in Libya.

Let it be known today that the best way to fight imperialism is not to shout at it, or to keep asking it to reverse its own tactics and decisions, like we have been doing with our meaningless call for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Imperialism fears one thing, and that thing is people. Even in its own heartland imperialism fears so much the power of the people. So what we want is unity of purpose and rallying our people solidly behind every project we embark on. Without people endorsement no policy can be sustainable.

Imperialism will seek to separate our revolution from the masses, and will accordingly fight relentlessly to win the opinion war, and imperialism has at its disposal this insurmountable disinformation machinery, and that is exactly why for many years our land reform was portrayed as the definition of barbarity.

This machinery can tell us about our diamond industry a million times more than our own Press — even from the faraway West.
Imperialism writes more books about our own Mugabe than we can ever imagine doing ourselves. Imperialism tells us more detail about our own struggle for independence than what our own cadres who fought in that war can ever do.

Imperialism told the world a lot more about our National Youth Service programme in the early 2000s than we ever did ourselves, of course all in its own version.

Imperialism did not observe our elections in July 2013, was indeed not invited except for its handful of diplomats in Harare. However, imperialism tells a bigger story about those elections than the observer missions who came to the country all put together can ever tell. Imperialism tells its own stories in its own way regardless of facts on the grounds, and that is why it told us that Assad had killed his own people by gas chemicals well before any investigation into the matter had even commenced.

Imperialism once told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and it declared the lie as fact — killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in pursuit of those fictitious weapons. The exposure of the lie did not come with an apology, and that is what makes up imperialism.

If we fight imperialism as a people we stand a chance of winning. If we use anti-imperialism rhetoric to fool our people imperialism will one day hit us under the belt and the country will be derailed to immeasurable levels. Only a fool can declare that the regime change agenda has been defeated.

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

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