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It is not possible to establish a democracy in Zimbabwe on the basis of a constitution whose values and content were conceived by non-Zimbabweans who have manipulated gullible politicians by dangling money bags in front of their faces. You need democracy to produce a people’s constitution, and you can never have a constitution in order to establish a democracy.

We risk today being spirited back to a world of slavery and colonialism, and this is purely because our elites in Africa are addicted to today’s fashions coming from the so-called specialists or experts on the politics of the developing world, most of them hailing from industrialised countries in the West. A Western expert needs only a week in Zimbabwe in order to write a book with expert opinion on the country.

A parliamentary select committee with an egregious contempt of the people of Zimbabwe so gross as to ignore the collated and collected views of the generality of the population just wakes up and calls a conference of about a thousand people an “All Stakeholder Conference,” and that is supposed to make perfect logic and sense. These are the terrible consequences of the devastation imposed on us by so-called experts – some of whom seem to believe that by merely having spent four years in law school they now qualify to determine the fate of all mortals.

The biggest challenge we have in Zimbabwe is that those in positions of leadership are not prepared to give up their privileges, either because of intellectual laziness on the part of the learned elites, or plain greed on the part of the less educated who happen to have political greatness “thrust upon them,” to borrow from William Shakespeare. The taste of the sweetness of Western life has crippled the minds of our politicians – stifling to a standstill every prospect of innovation.

Our leadership is simply the “us too” type, so thoroughly obsessed with imitating Western diktats, and blatantly unaware that all genuine political struggle requires rigorous debate, serious innovation, and the need to rise to the intellectual effort of discovering new concept equal to the global challenge of Western imperial hegemony. We cannot rely on a leadership obsessed with the sweetness of Western aid if we are to come up with concepts strong enough to thwart the scourge of imperialism.

We have an alienated and estranged elite made up of passive and pathetic consumers of Western aid – and they are unmistakable in their wallowing in terminology borrowed from the West, just as they delude themselves consuming expensive whiskey and champagne in between days of Western sponsored talk-shops disguised as noble-intended workshops and seminars – often sponsored and hosted by Western NGOs.

The people of Africa have waited since the mid-sixties for a post-independence peaceful revolution that is meant to emancipate and empower the African. That has not happened, and it continues to be delayed by an estranged political leadership so alienated from its own people. But this leadership must be reminded of the words of John F. Kennedy who once said, “Those who make a peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

The elites who relied on the 1979 Lancaster House Constitution’s Section 16 chapter on property rights made a peaceful revolution towards the distribution of land in Zimbabwe impossible for a while, and for their efforts they also managed to have a violent revolution inevitable. The price they paid was quite telling.

We cannot rely on our current crop of intellectuals to push forward a peaceful revolution towards the economic empowerment of the African in general, and of the Zimbabwean in particular. We can always search in vain for anything that can be called a new idea from the brains of our great intellectuals, whose vocabulary and ideas are proudly borrowed from some dead Westerners who left their thoughts in some books.

We are led in the intellectual fraternity by academics that are more than happy to mimic textbook ideas in a showy fashion laced with velvety superlatives and complex jargon borrowed from the West – useless engineers who cannot even design a water filter to clean up drinking water for their own mothers in the villages.

It is surprising that we are coming from a century of despicable colonial oppression, and yet we have to put up with a political leadership that is content to give our former colonial masters monopoly over thought, imagination and creativity – even ready to play quislings to the politics of Western elites, ready to be sponsored pawns for the furtherance of Western interests in our own backyard.

We cannot be distracted by today’s fashions of Western democracy when the people to whom we preach these velvety ideas are the disinherited poverty stricken masses whose natural resources have been perpetually looted to cause traffic jams and obesity in Western capital.

The only credibility an African politician can ever have is to help wrench our continent from Western imperial domination and exploitation, not the kind of treacherous stuff our politicians are often rewarded for by organisers of such Western awards as the Nobel Peace Prize or the Knighthood offered by the ageing Queen of England. Accepting the awards given to us by our oppressors makes us more of accomplices than victims of Western oppression.

Apart from the principled and consistent advocacy of President Robert Mugabe, and the occasional support from Uganda’s Yower i Museveni, and of course the now extinguished voice of Muammar Gaddafi, hardly anything else resembles the hunger for a revolution on the part of Africa’s political leadership.

What we have today is a club of middle aged puppets that compete so vigorously to impress the West; and they do so on the sickening rhetoric of being “part of the international community.”

These wretches take so much pride in governing countries inundated with Western aid, and some of the countries have annual budgets made up of up to 75% aid from the West. Clearly, administering foreign aid and governing a country are concepts that must be worlds apart, yet in Africa our leadership seems convinced that one cannot govern a country without Western aid.

Foreign aid is often heralded and glorified without rhyme or reason as a panacea to our poverty, and in theory we are told foreign aid has got something to do with development. Plainly speaking there is no such thing as developmental aid – apart from the euphemism used to hide the real intention of imperial aid. It is so sad that our leadership dismally fail to place demands on foreign aid in keeping with our own interests as nations of Africa. Rather they rush with no hesitation to be whipped into compliance to the interests of Western countries.

The broader goals of Western aid are not a secret at all. This aid is designed to benefit the non-productive sectors of the economies of beneficiary countries, it is designed to create unbearable burdens on our meagre budgets, it is designed exacerbate our indebtedness, and this aid is inherently designed to create for us a perpetual sense of dependency.

Aid is the neo-colonial weapon used to rob poor and weaker nations of their sense of responsibility over their economic, political and cultural territory. This is precisely why today’s Western aid increases correspondingly to the rhetoric of democratisation, the kind that has reduced Libya to a battleground of lawless war lords.

What we want in Zimbabwe today are new paths that will achieve for us greater happiness as a people. We want new paths in the way our economy is run, and this is precisely why the call for the democratisation of our economy is long overdue. We want an economy that creates money for the people of Zimbabwe, and gone must be the days of chasing after foreign money that is falsely believed to be capable of creating for us an economy. There is no single developed nation that used money to create for itself an economy. It is the creation of locally controlled economies that generated money for all the industrialised societies. Now that the US unwittingly exported its economy, there are no surprises that the empire is softly but surely falling.

But it is these industrialised countries that send their experts to teach us that economies are created by Foreign Direct Investment; that is, capital cash from foreign countries. Our own political leadership in Africa plays accomplice to this gigantic fraud.

We must turn the tide against these charlatans that advance the interests of our oppressors. We must decree and declare today that nothing in Zimbabwe will ever again be undertaken without the full participation of indigenous Zimbabweans. The precondition for foreign investment in Zimbabwe must be that the people of Zimbabwe will conceive and decide on everything to do with their country.

The Western assault on our sense of decency and dignity must end. Those who enjoy cordial relations with the people who assault our sense of dignity must be reminded that we cannot pay through our integrity for their quest to please their political models from faraway lands.

We are not going to allow the name of democracy to be used in reversing the gains of our independence. We are not going to allow the abuse of the concept of democracy by people who veil their evil intentions through contriving false meanings for noble concepts.

Zimbabwe will not allow the concept of democracy to be used in the way the West did in Libya. No sane Zimbabwean will allow a transition in the direction we have seen in Libya – a transition into pliant politics towards Western powers. We are not going to have a manipulated election that is disguised as the dawn of democracy. We are enlightened enough to distinguish between democracy and foreign hegemony, and no mistake of this nature will ever be allowed to happen.

We need a resolute political leadership to ensure that we safeguard the sovereignty of Zimbabwe, not the estranged leadership we have been putting up with of late.

Those among us who believe that free and fair elections take precedence over the national interest must have their heads thoroughly examined. The freeness and fairness of elections will always be in the context of the national interest, and the national interest can never be defined by international forces, however civilised these may claim to be.

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

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