THE world is at loggerheads for a reason.

Incessant bickering and haggling is now the order of the day.

Antagonism and mistrust now define humanity.

Global superpowers seemingly have their way over everyone and everything.

The poor are being subjected to untold suffering by the superpowers.

They have no voice.

They have no say in global affairs.

Their voices are drowned by the bully tactics of those superpowers.

Their wealth is looted in broad daylight.

Their land is plundered with no mercy.

Their minerals are carted to faraway lands on a daily basis.

Sadly, those minerals benefit the looters.

All they remain with is unproductive land and poverty.

Their labour is exploited with no end in sight.

Conflict and wars are sponsored to make the looting and exploitation possible.

They are given an education that makes them perpetual employees.

They have not had the opportunity to create employment.

In the few instances they do so, they are swiftly obfuscated.

They are accused of human rights violations, among a litany of other accusations.

They have no room to develop themselves and their nations.

They are denied the right and chance to create wealth and are denied creating inheritance for future generations.

They are told to pursue birth control methods and to stop population growth.

Vaccines are experimented on them.

Guns are tested on their land.

Chemicals are tested on them.

They are viewed as hapless people.

And they seem to have accepted their fate.

They seem to have agreed with the assertion that they are a charity case.

They seem to have agreed with the notion that their future lies elsewhere.

They seem to have agreed that land has no future.

They seem to have agreed that they cannot till the land.

They seem to have agreed that their fate and future lies in the hands of whites.

Negativity is what now makes their lives.

Uncertainty now makes up their lives.

That is the mentality that Zimbabwe has been trying to shake off.

And that mentality is born out of our terrible past.

A past enmeshed in abuse and suffering.

Ours has been a past made out of mental subjugation.

A past entrenched in exploitation and brazen plunder of our resources.

A past that has made black people third-class citizens across the globe.

A past that made us forget who we are and where we came from.

A past that has made us forget about slavery and colonialism and that has made us a deeply divided people.

This is a past that whites have frantically tried us to forget.

This is a past that whites have hidden through their propaganda.

This is a past that whites have masked through use of terms such as ‘democracy’ and human rights.

We know democracy and it is in our DNA.

We fought for it and brought it to the masses.

This is a past that we can never forget.

They can kill us but we will never forget.

They can racially abuse us but we will never forget.

And Zimbabwe has been perfecting it through its empowerment programmes.

We have given our people land to correct that past.

We have given our people control of the economy to erase that past.

But we will never forget!