adminso given that such an agenda has been driven by the west’s insatiable appetite for our vast natural resources.
To achieve their foreign political agenda the west’s strategy has been cantered on the mobilisation and distribution of economic resources. It has been a strategy to deprive the Government of Zimbabwe of its means to mobilise economic resources for distribution to meet the needs of our indigenous majority.
Thus sanctions were designed to debilitate Government and ensure it fails its obligation to guarantee the people’s socio-economic welfare and livelihoods, thereby crippling Zimbabwe’s economy and making it “scream” against the Government, as professed by America’s sanctions legislators.
They created a conducive environment, the west’s authored crisis that has tormented Zimbabwe, within which to direct foreign aid and donor funds to manipulate a socio-economically impoverished majority toward achieving their political and regime change agenda.
The most appropriate defence to such western imperialist aggression could only be re-aligning Zimbabwe’s rich yet sanctioned economy with the ability of the indigenous majority to exploit and mobilise their country’s vast natural resources.
Thus community trusts now established as a ‘broad-based’ empowerment mechanism within Government’s indigenisation programme are most effective for indigenous resource mobilisation.
They reassert the indigenous majority’s economic interests; freeing such interests from sanctions and ultimately our political will from conditioned and enslaving foreign aid.
The empowering nature of community trusts, their re-alignment of Zimbabwe’s economic veins to sustain indigenous communities, disarms the west’s instruments of economic and political subjugation. Their stick of economic sanctions whipping us into vulnerability lies broken, while their carrot of foreign aid and donor funds used to entice our desperate dispossessed condition becomes less appealing.
We had found ourselves trapped in their vicious cycle, wherein we are forced to feed off foreign aid thrown at us by the same western hands flogging us with impoverishing sanctions. It has been a cycle within the struggle for control and mobilisation of Zimbabwe’s vast economy, by a legitimate and God given indigenous claim to our natural resources against expropriating foreign gluttony.
The Government’s 51 percent indigenisation mandate seeks to facilitate indigenous resource mobilisation and distribution. It is these advances by indigenous economic interests against which sanctions became the west’s last line of defence to retain monopoly over expropriated indigenous natural resource wealth.
Sanctions were calculated to smother any rising hope for economic emancipation within our indigenous psyche, turn the idea of indigenisation into a nightmare. Without hope for economic emancipation our starved majority would be forced to turn to aid, drawn closer to eat from the west’s manipulative hands.
President Mugabe thus warned that “Communities are bound to lose confidence in themselves and continue to always look towards the donor community for social, economic and infrastructure development and a general improvement in their livelihood. Genuine empowerment begins with making own decisions as opposed to being perpetual observers or bystanders and recipients of charity acts.”
It came as no surprise then when the west, calling themselves “Friends of Zimbabwe” recently boasted of pouring US$2,6 billion in aid into Zimbabwe’s economy since the conception of the inclusive Government. These conditioned foreign resources for “transitional development” ironically sought development within an economy whose growth was kept hostage by the same western “Friends” economic sanctions.
Theirs was conditioned aid distributed outside the institutions of representative government and instead channelled through civil society and humanitarian organisations. The west sought to impose a civil society without any mandate from the people as our “de-facto government”. It mobilised resources for civil society to distribute, enabling them to herd the people’s political will toward a western agenda.
According to America’s State Department Report, US Record 2006 of April 5 2007, “the US supported the efforts of civil society to create and defend democratic space. The US government also sponsored an NGO leader on an exchange programme to learn about activism by civil society groups in the US.”
With such ill-intent against our pursuit of economic emancipation it was untenable that we remained dependent on the poisoned chalice of donor funds and aid. Thus community trusts have become our alternative to dependency and a vulnerable economic condition. We must understand them as the heart of indigenous resource mobilisation, countering new attempts at foreign economic expropriation.
Within the mandated 51 percent indigenisation quota community share ownership trusts are securing at least 10 percent shareholding in companies exploiting local natural resources, to be held in trust on behalf of the majority indigenous populations living in local communities across Zimbabwe.
As best described by President Mugabe, community trusts are “a vehicle for broad-based participation in shareholding in various businesses by our communities. The proceeds from such participation shall be used for the provision of social and economic infrastructure in line with the priorities of the communities concerned.”
These broad-based empowerment vehicles enable communities to mobilise economic resources through their shareholding in companies exploiting some of the world’s largest known mineral deposits, including platinum, diamonds, gold and coal. They facilitate a ‘broad-based’ distribution of resource wealth within communities, ensuring that our majority is less vulnerable economically and politically.
To date US$109 650 000,00 has been pledged to community trusts as seed capital, in addition to the 10 percent shareholding in qualifying businesses. Already, US$24 826 000,00 of this seed capital is being made available to local communities through their Trusts, money to be applied toward socio-economic development and empowerment projects.
In the mining sector alone qualifying businesses that have now submitted indigenisation plans are guaranteeing communities 10 percent shareholding whose current total estimated value is US$640 000 000,00. Already, in February 2013 the Gwanda Community Trust received dividend worth US$360 000,00 from its 10 percent shareholding in Blanket Mine.
The days are numbered then, when we must remain a people condemned to extending begging bowls for aid and charity, forced to tolerate conditions set against our national interests. Local communities within which the majority of our indigenous population resides can now begin to mobilise their own resources ensuring they remain the architects of their economic and political destinies.
Western governments and donors must rethink and restructure their aid. We are to be respected as empowered development partners now that we constitute local communities capable of mobilising our own resources. USAID, DFID, SIDA and others face a new hard reality. Their acts of charity can no longer be sustainable in their conditioned foreign agenda driven state, now that our majority sheds the imposed scales of desperation which sanctions cast upon us.
We are no longer to be viewed as beggars, without choice over what scraps are to be cast into waiting begging bowls. But still, among us are those who suffer relapse, like addicts nostalgic for economic subjugation at those street corners where dignity was wagered in begging bowls.
It is the MDC-Ts presidential hopeful, Morgan Tsvangirai, who believes with every fibre in him that “We can’t build an economy that survives on peasants”. The MDC-T’s JUICE and now ART would rather we peasants remained under the yoke of foreign property rights. They think us peasants to be without brains or dreams to aspire for and realise our own prosperity outside of the west’s overbearing hands.
And so the MDC-T will attack community share ownership trusts and have its legal minds, like Tendai Biti, declare them illegal. They do so knowing what Zanu-PF has unleashed against their foreign handlers’ interests here. It is an empowered peasantry and indigenous majority now capacitated to mobilise and distribute their natural resource wealth.
The MDC-T and foreign interests fear an empowered majority whose economic appetites will no longer be starved by sanctions or manipulated by donor funds and foreign aid.
We exercise a new economic democracy within which our sovereignty and political independence shall be consolidated. It is all to be on the back of our new found ability to mobilise our nation’s vast natural resources.
The age of indigenous resource mobilisation has arisen, breaking down sanctions and pulling down conditioned and often unsustainable development aid. We are witnessing, those with eyes and actually see, the weaving of a new economic and political fabric that is true to indigenous majority aspirations.
The coming Zanu-PF Government, certain to reclaim an unmolested term, must remember its mandate signed off by a people whose cry for economic emancipation it has paid heed to.
It is a term to ensure indigenous roots are sunk deep into the core of our nation’s vast natural resource wealth, with community trusts made the heart beat of a sovereign Zimbabwe defined by absolute economic and political independence.
RanguNyamurundira is a lawyer and an indigenisation consultant based in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Online Reporter