WHILE joy marked Zimbabwe’s 43-year journey as an independent nation on Tuesday, there remains the never ending antics of the enemy who has found no shame in trying to sneak through the back door, again and again, in attempts to regain control of the country.

The usual suspects from the West, using their willing but inept local acolytes to dilute the spirit of freedom, shamelessly claimed that: ‘It’s not yet uhuru’.

In Mt Darwin, a rural community that bore the brunt of the liberation struggle, celebrations of uhuru showed the ludicrousness of such a claim.

There continues to be nauseating attempts by the West, using the opposition, to present a picture of a Zimbabwe under siege from its leaders; a country yet to deliver to its people the gains of the liberation struggle; a country whose story begins and ends with the Western founded and funded opposition attempting to get into power by means unconstitutional.

On Tuesday, CCC leader Nelson Chamisa took his antics too far through his frivolous claims that Zimbabweans are yet to benefit from the liberation struggle.

It is a claim meant to buttress weird claims that they will deliver to the masses what they say is a ‘new Zimbabwe’ while the real plan is to hand back the country to our erstwhile colonisers who they work for.

This is why Zimbabweans should never lose sight of what needs to be done to fend off the enemy’s destructive manoeuvres.

Zimbabwe needs to have a firm grip not only on the levers of power but on the country’s agonising historical narrative which is now leaning heavily on a land-based economy courtesy of the Land Reform and Resettlement and Economic Empowerment Programmes by the same Government which the CCC says has ‘failed’.

Zimbabwe’s story has to be in tandem with the prevailing realities of why the country still remains targeted by the enemy whose objective is to erase its history from the collective psyche of the masses.

They Western agenda in the country, through their surrogates the CCC, has been dubbed the ‘struggle for democracy’ in a bid to put it at par with the war of liberation.

“We salute the gallant citizens who fought for our independence. That independence is yet to come. It’s not yet #Uhuru,” said Chamisa in a post on his Twitter account.

“True Independence, a happy and prosperous Zimbabwe for everyone is definitely coming!”

The tragedy of puppets is that they are almost always woefully disconnected from politics of liberation, home and belonging, as well as past, present and future realities.

They just consume instructions from their handlers with very little thinking accompanied by actions and utterances devoid of substance and out of sync with reality.

When their handlers speak, they do not probe the needs and aspirations of the people they claim to represent.

The money dangled by their masters is enough to switch off every brain part responsible for reasoning.

As such, there is little surprise that Chamisa foolishly tries to dislocate the unbreakable alliance between the masses and the freedom fighters by allocating the success of the liberation struggle to the ‘citizens’.

There too is little surprise that the choice for this year’s independence celebrations shook them to the core.

The two-hour drive to Mt Darwin High School, the venue of the 43^rd Independence Anniversary, past the country’s unmistakable flora and fauna, the green veld carpeting the vast unexploited landscape, the towering mountains enmeshed by jostling trees and grass draws you closer to the agonising realities of the brutal scars and stains that lie beneath the cheerful smiles of the people there.

Beneath that glistening, sprawling nature in the silent mountains and caves lies the souls of those who were brutally slain by CCC and Chamisa’s handlers.

Underneath those cheery faces in Mashonaland Central are the eternal agonies of the sadistic nature of CCC’s owners.

That story, the agony, the trauma and the anguish belong to us all.

This is a story that defines us, the story on whose rugged terrains lies the blood, bones and bravery of those who took up arms to fight the enemy; a story which the opposition and their handlers do not want to be part of.

A story which we will never tire of telling until it is in tandem with collective aspirations.

A story that steers us to the unravelling future where development, both at individual and national levels, has been visible and will remain like that for many more years to come.

“Sombre memories of the immense suffering of our people in ‘Keeps’ and surrounding villages under the brutal colonial administration embolden us to stand firm, defiant and confident that never, never again shall our people live as slaves in their own motherland, Zimbabwe,” said President Emmerson Mnangagwa in his speech at the anniversary.

“The atmosphere here in Mount Darwin must evoke, among all of us, hope and a resolute determination to realise Vision 2030.”

And Vision 2030, like all other trajectories that we have pursued over the years as a country, will morph into tangible realities which the West and the opposition are frantically trying to obfuscate.

We are already seeing the fruits of that Vision wherein the people’s future lies.