THE announcement, by President Emmerson Mnangagwa, of the amendments to the ZANU PF Constitution designed to focus on economic development was well-timed.
The Party is alive to the threats to its survival and that of fellow liberation movements across the African continent.
Zimbabwe has been under relentless pressure from Western countries which want to remove ZANU PF from power through illegal means.
There could not have been a better place for the announcement than the recently held ZANU PF 20th Annual National People’s Conference in Gweru last week where the ruling Party gathered to map ways to protect and develop the country.
The West is now circling overtly and dangerously around Zimbabwe, which tops the list of the CIA anti-liberation movements project as they seek to finally achieve their desired illegal regime change.
The time for liberation movements to re-organise, re-focus and adapt to modern times is now!
They also need to adopt serious generational blending to keep the national flame burning, something that ZANU PF has successfully done in recent months although much more needs to be done.
There has been a relentless onslaught on liberation movements in recent times, with the latest being the foiled and embarrassing attempt by Zambia’s Nevers Mumba to discredit the August 23 harmonised general elections in Zimbabwe through an EU and US post-election preliminary ‘report’ which he maliciously tried to attribute to the SADC Election Observer Mission.
That onslaught is drawn from two poignant issues; namely, the West’s gluttony to loot African resources and the assertion that the former liberators have failed to live up to the ideals and values of the liberation struggle.
Those issues, together with several others, have compelled the West to intensify its efforts to remove liberation movements from power; with the ANC, which goes to elections next year, the next target of those manoeuvres.
Zimbabwe presents an apt case study of why Western countries have scaled up their drive to push liberation movements out of power.
Until 2000, when the country embarked on the revolutionary land reform and resettlement, there had been deafening grumbles over the slow pace in addressing the colonial land question.
The West then responded by forming the MDC to safeguard their interests.
And it had long ceased to be just noise.
It was threatening to morph into an uprising by the agitated masses, including the late great musician Simon ‘Chopper’ Chimbetu whose song ‘Zuva Raenda’ duly fed into the majority’s exasperation over the unexplained delays in redistributing the land.
In all fairness to ZANU PF, the delay was being caused by whites who were reluctant to let go of their source of income and power.
The Lancaster House Constitution’s 10-year restrictive willing-buyer willing-seller clause lapsed and was replaced by the 1990 amendments to the Constitution, including the Land Acquisition Act of 1992. This Act compelled acquisition of land ‘for a public purpose’, invoking serious objections from whites who owned and controlled vast tracts of prime land in the country.
Then there was the benchful of whites protecting their kith and kin.
There was more.
The years from 1997 had been miserable ones for Zimbabweans, with Claire Short’s infamous letter to former Minister of Agriculture, the late Kumbirai Kangai, all but sealing the country’s fate.
In that letter, Short said her country would not fund the country’s land reform, but ZANU PF would have none of that.
The first stone to ZANU PF’s quest to economically empower its citizens had been cast.
The West, too, were throwing their own stone, rubbing their colonial arrogance in the faces of the masses through the illegal economic sanctions imposed on the country by the US and the EU on December 21 2001 and February 18 2002 respectively.
These are the sanctions that have been hampering ZANU PF’s efforts to fully empower its citizens – sanctions which have been used to mobilise them to revolt against their Government.
And ZANU PF, together with other liberation movements, have been contending with that issue.
But the amendments to its Constitution means that it is moving with the times by leaving no-one and no place behind in its economic revival and development agenda.
“Accordingly, the functioning of departments and Party structures have now witnessed the establishment of clearly disaggregated departments; namely, the Department of Economic Affairs, the Department of Economic Development and Empowerment, and the Department of Business Development,” said President Mnangagwa.
“To that end, Party departments are now efficiently organised and refocused in line with the thrust of the Second Republic with regard to the efficient service delivery that will sustain our national development agenda which leaves no-one and no place behind.”
The future could not have been brighter, with ZANU PF moving towards capacitating its citizens economically in spite of the illegal economic sanctions.