By Charles T.M.J. Dube

THERE are two kinds of independence.
The first is the one we were celebrating on Tuesday and was part of a wave that began with Ghana in 1957.
This, Kwame Nkrumah called the right to manage or to mismanage our own affairs.
With the exception of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic where there is some altered variant of imperialism from Morocco, the rest of Africa has all been ‘free’ for the last two decades or so.
The case for Southern Sudan could be a different ball game.
Nkrumah’s definition therefore only remains politically correct in as far as we describe the period up to the fall of the last bastion of colonialism, South Africa, when getting back political power from colonialists was probably considered an end in itself.
Virtually, each and every issue of The Patriot reminds us that it was certainly no easy walk to freedom for Zimbabwe.
Many lost life and limb.
Others were tortured and had their homes, grain and livestock destroyed.
Many more had their academic and employment careers disrupted and lost their freedoms for the attainment of this first independence.
Thirty-seven years down the line, we have come to the realisation that we still have another struggle to fight.
This is the second independence that we have to fight for and in that, the enemy’s foot soldier is none other than ourselves.
I have called this war the ‘parallel agenda’ before and this we must fight tooth and nail.
I call this the real independence, for it is an independence to excel, free from the machinations of others.
In this second war of independence, we have to redefine Nkrumah’s definition of independence and drop the last bit.
We must now fight against the right to mismanage our own affairs.
We have to fight against hunger, poverty and underdevelopment.
We must fight against accepting that our path has to be the second best and solutions to our problems second best.
We have to refuse to accept that corruption is an African phenomenon that must be budgeted for in the execution of public and private projects.
Some survey somewhere declared that Zimbabwe was one of the best three African countries in terms of accommodating foreign direct investment and business investment climate.
We climbed all the anthills and mountain tops in ululation.
We have had seminars, deliberations and made effort in improving the ease of doing business.
There is nothing wrong with that.
There could be something wrong with our motivation and primary focus though.
We want to please the outside world and streamline ourselves to better serve international capital.
Our focus is on becoming better servants, compliant and acquiescent junior partners in the exploitation of our human and natural resources, producing for the metropolis while our nation and citizenry obtain just enough from our production effort to be able to serve the master in a sustainable self-reproductive manner.
We are investing time and effort in becoming a giant servant of international capital and not our own giant with self-focus on our own independent growth in the community of nations.
We have bought into the hoax that we cannot do without foreign aid and foreign direct investment for our own development and prosperity as a nation.
If the truth be told, what we need is to have selective collaboration with foreign direct investment and not have it as the prime driver to our developmental agenda — yes, that, and not even foreign aid.
In my research with the University of Ottawa of 1988, I wrote at length about the economic problem of Zimbabwe then being the accelerated integration in the international economic system.
In this they had to force a lot of loans and grants down our throats.
They also had to destroy our capacity to produce for ourselves.
They had to change our mindsets from the of the sacrificial ethos of the liberation struggle era to that of greed, self-interest, nepotism and corruption.
Do not ask me who they are, but we know how they did it and have told some of them before.
If you will check very closely, you will discover that corruption was never part of our culture and way of doing business.
You will realise that there is a very positive correlation between the growth in reliance on aid and corruption.
In this fight for the real independence, we will need to be more discerning in identifying the enemy for he comes in all shapes and sizes.
He is well positioned in the ruling and opposition parties.
He sits in Cabinet, the Politburo and Central Committee of the ruling party.
He is in the opposition trenches and even in their highest bodies.
He is a civil servant or even a man of the cloth preaching about hell and damnation as well as everlasting life on Sundays or Saturdays.
He is a human rights and pro-democracy activist or even a vendor.
He runs a seemingly successful business or is a small or big scale miner.
He has heeded the call for indigenisation and started his own businesses.
He could be unemployed.
He could be Chinese or some other foreign national doing business or working here.
You will know them by their fruits.
In all they do, they are driven by Me, I and Myself.
They do not have the interests of Zimbabwe, let alone those of their customers, at heart.
For the period up to 2008, they almost ground Zimbabwe to a halt.
They are at war with the nation as collaborators of foreign interests or as hackers of their own people.
They dribble business partners and customers alike as they cheat and steal at the slightest opportunity.
Hanzi mbudzi inofurira payakasungirigwa(A goat grazes where it is tethered).
With this life ethic, they will use every position they occupy whether as a businessperson, civil servant, politician, church leader, policeman or vendor, to enrich themselves at everybody else’s expense including that of their customers.
They believe in reaping where they have not sown and in building their estates through deception, corruption and using other people’s feathers.
They are the witches among us, the Judases like we are reminded during this post Easter period.
They will use their strategic positions to sell their country and ethics for 30 pieces of silver.
They dislocate national and international trade through cash hoarding and interference with our distribution systems for corrupt purposes.
They are in politics and public service not because they want to serve and make a difference, but because they want to be better positioned for plunder.
They do not subscribe to producing for national wealth, but in what they can get from other people’s production.
They are a sorry sight who actually think they are the smartest among us.
They stink.
These are our enemies in the new struggle and some of them will sing hosanna and hallelua in the name of our nation and even in the name of fighting poverty.
They no longer wait for nightfall to rip us off, varasa mwise zvokutibira takasvunura.
They make me angry.
Thus, in this new struggle, our greatest enemy is none other than ourselves.
Let us fight the parallel agenda at individual, family, community and national level.
Aluta Continua!