THE most baffling thing about the recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa is the failure by the perpetrators of the violence to locate the root of their problems.
And the enemy is enjoying the resources of that country, undisturbed and untouched.
Equally astounding is how South Africans have forgotten the assistance given to them by the same people they now call ‘enemies’ while the real enemy lies in the institutional set-up of that country.
Zimbabwe is a classic example of the few countries that have located the cause of poverty and suffering of the majority and has dealt with that colonial infamy.
Our problems as a country were enmeshed in relics of colonialism which included among other issues, a skewed land ownership pattern and an economy in the hands of the minority.
In 2000, we embarked on the revolutionary Land Reform and Resettlement Programme while in 2010 the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Programme was launched.
The results of these two initiatives are there for everyone to see.
Today, our more than 80 000 tobacco farmers are doing wonders not only for the country but for their livelihoods.
Currently we are faced with a bumper harvest, courtesy of the Command Agriculture initiative that is likely to see the country harvesting between 1,5 to two million metric tonnes of maize.
But taking control of the land and economy comes with its own fair share of punitive measures and fierce resistance from whites.
The country is burdened by illegal economic sanctions imposed by an angry West which did not take kindly to land redistribution.
This is what angry South Africans must not only be probing but doing.
They are directing their anger at the wrong people.
It is about owning and controlling the land.
It is about running the mines, running the economy.
It is the economy that whites have bluntly refused to relinquish to a justifiably aggrieved black majority.
When our liberation war fighters say the struggle is a protracted one, the South African situation aptly fits into that description of what the struggle is all about.
In his closing speech to the African National Congress (ANC) Policy Conference in 2012, South African President Jacob Zuma noted this glaring anomaly of ownership and control of the economy when he said: 
“With regards to the ownership of the economy, after excluding the value of foreign operations, the gross black ownership of South African assets on the JSE is equivalent to 6,8 percent.”
President Zuma, during that gathering, correctly noted that ‘the economic power relations of the apartheid era have in the main remained intact’.
Zuma’s statement sparked a fierce debate with whites, obviously shamed by the exposure of their obscene and primitive accumulation of wealth, ‘arguing’ that the South African leader had given what they claimed were ‘wrong’ statistics.
Blacks, obviously antagonised by the revelation, were understandably agitated.
Dave Steward, executive director of the F.W. de Klerk Foundation took a swipe at the Sunday Times’ Mondli Makhanya:
“My article on ‘who controls the South African economy’ evidently upset Mondli Makhanya of the Sunday Times (ST July 8 2012), probably because it questioned some of the sacrosanct preconceptions on which he and many other people base their analysis of South African politics.”
(In fact, even with regard to the JSE, the President was wrong.  According to a thorough and conservative study carried out by Trevor Chandler and Associates in October last year, direct and indirect black ownership of JSE shares is 17 percent of the total – and 28 percent of the shares available to South Africans.)
Makhanya duly called Steward ‘nauseatingly patronising’.
Yet the fact remains that these are the kinds of debate that should be dominating South Africa not their anger over ‘foreigners’ eking out an innocent living in their country.
Still the real issues elude them
And this tendency of calling fellow blacks ‘foreigners’ is itself a misnomer that says a lot about the mentality of South Africans.
If blacks are foreigners, what do they call the whites who are running their country?
The British, for once, were fair in their assessment of the obtaining situation in South Africa.
Below is a report published by The Guardian seeking to blame the Government of Zimbabwe for the xenophobic attacks on Friday last week.
“South Africa is to many Africans what America represents to many around the world: an escape, a fresh start, a land of opportunity. When gold was discovered in Johannesburg in 1886, it was soon being mined by men from a dozen African (countries). Today the country is a magnet for Congolese, Ethiopians, Malawians, Mozambicans, Nigerians, Somalis, Zimbabweans and others fleeing conflict or seeking to improve their lot. Estimates of immigrant numbers vary from two to five million, out of a population of 51 million.
But the recent wave of xenophobia has tarnished this image and fuelled resentment among those who accuse South Africa of an arrogant exceptionalism that looks down on the rest of the continent.”
Let those with ears listen.