Indigenisation: Western economies’ African dilemma

dehumanise the socio-economic status of the newly liberated masses.
Fanon asserts that, “What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a distribution of wealth”.
Prophetically he concludes that “Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.” Today his prophecy holds and Zimbabwe’s indigenous people shake the very foundations that have locked them out of their socio-economic wealth.
And as we turn 32, we can declare that our condition can no longer be that of the wretched of the earth.
Young a nation as we are, we have lived and experienced beyond our age, bearing scars from tribulations inflicted by those whose colonial hand remains nostalgic, transcending our hoisted flag to maintain exploitative ways despite our liberation. Against us, so much time has been dedicated and millions committed to turn our vision of economic emancipation into a nightmare.
The west has monopolised the media, bought off non-governmental organisations and nurtured opposition forces. It has conscripted them to contain and kill off economic empowerment ideals that threaten the sustenance of their parasitic economies.
And so we see the advocates of economic sovereignty vilified and turned to monsters to have us fear to dream and share their vision of a nation whose umbilical cord must be severed from foreign stomachs to guarantee greater sustenance to indigenous appetites.
The West’s intent remains to make us wake in cold sweat before such vision manifests in our laying claim to economic inheritance too long dispossessed.
President Mugabe’s vision, toward which he uncompromisingly leads our nation, sets chilling precedent against the West’s economic interests. They must taint his and his party’s name and image before the eyes of his people and an African continent closely watching, waiting upon a sign to follow suit and declare unconditional claim to their natural resources.
The greatest threat indigenisation poses to Western economic interests is that Zimbabwe’s vision can no longer be its own.
It stirs emotions, arouses the threat of actions only subdued by the still timid but easily emboldened. Such vision must now be contained, dampened from lighting a “dark” continent with flames of economic revolution.
An emboldened Africa embarking on a scorched earth policy against western economic interests causes Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy to panic.
They must have their way in Africa, for it is there that their economies will acquire real bail-out, where resources are plenty to mortgage their gluttony and restore their fading glory.
They have tasted our blood, our diamonds, platinum, gold, copper, cocoa, uranium, and now oil, and lots of oil.
There is new oil across Africa, gushing from Ghana’s wells, expected to produce at least 450 000 barrels per day by 2014. Uganda expects at least 2 billion barrels; while Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania are among many anticipating new discoveries.
Surprise, surprise, the United States of America now expects to increase its oil imports from Africa to 25 percent by 2015.
Libya must teach us of the extremities of desperate and hungry men, who have ripped open its bowels to plunder oil wells and aquifers to quench and sustain ailing French and British economies.
They will murder, rape, plunder and commit crimes against humanity, to retain Africa like leeches sucking on the backs of emaciated, unwilling hosts.
They have much to lose: they fear the impoverishment of their civilisations whose grandeur had long been founded on Africa’s imposed poverty, and the rude awakening of an American Dream to be denied the comforts of ill-gotten wealth.
No wonder they were shaken as President Mugabe boldly told Tony Blair off those years ago that he had to keep his England and let Mugabe keep his Zimbabwe.
It’s a Western dilemma; to keep an England with little value to mortgage its own receding economy, and be denied the plunder of its needs from Zimbabwe and Africa’s vastly endowed lands.
And so today, England, Europe and America’s fight to keep Zimbabwe should be a hard lesson to Africa. But they are disoriented by NGOs reporting no real returns on funding and opposition political forces unable to deliver regime change like the head on a silver platter.
Now desperate, they seek remedy from erstwhile comrades-in-arms, Sadc.
Their cold war must now have reference to long tested strategies of divide and rule.
They have a glimmer of hope, appeased by South Africa’s Judas tendencies best reflected by the whole business with Libya.
Has Africa’s strongest economy been enlisted to betray Africa’s economic aspirations, to deliver Zimbabwe with a kiss upon Mugabe’s cheek?
Yet we know the man to loathe another man’s kiss. So we may still have hope against such betrayals. But as for Judas, he did hang himself after the betrayal, didn’t he?
South Africa’s citizens awake from a growing socio-economic appetite too long subdued and rupturing in unrest and riot.
In the background a government in denial naively supplants a day so endeared as “Sharpeville Day”, in memory of 69 blacks murdered while protesting apartheid’s exploitation of black South Africa.
A day of such meaning, identity, and deserving of historical preserve is now blurred by “Human Rights Day”.
Whose day then shall it be? Can such a day ever be made common to misrepresent shared and common scars between the racially oppressed and oppressors still monopolising that which he exploited?
From what reference point are South Africa’s still economically segregated youth to muster courage to see socio-economic apartheid at an end?
So then, “Human Rights Day”, Mr President? Which rights, whose rights; questions already asked by one black South African captured by SABC News while retreating into the shack he has called home since Mandela’s South Africa was born.
Yet another lamented how he is still subjected to a dehumanising bucket system imposing the sight and smells of human waste which blur and choke the dawn of every new day he wakes to hoping for emancipation from a wretched state.
It is lucky then to be an African born to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, today laying claim to its wealth so that its indigenous people’s nervous socio-economic condition is a thing of the past. Does it not now make sense, the real reason the “boy” Julius Malema must be silenced?
His tongue bears a flame threatening to torch the comforts of racial economic privilege.
But Malema’s plight would have us dare ask dangerous questions of Mandela’s legacy, one revered most by former apartheid beneficiaries.
Malema is hounded and barred from Mandela’s ANC for simply blowing the dust off and parroting a Freedom Charter authored by the great Madiba’s vision for socio-economic sovereignty.
Is it that Malema dares enlighten a once great old man’s vision being overshadowed by the pretence of Western accolades?
They accuse the messenger of threatening the death of a “Rainbow” South Africa, yet embrace and claim to love one whose forgotten words and pursuits inspire the “boy”.
It is of boys and their youthful dare that threatens those who thought their injustices now buried with the aged whose pursuits are now weakened and lost in fading memory.
This little matter of age and aging is heard aloud on both sides of the Limpopo river.
Revered in the south, yet reviled across to the north. In Zimbabwe they fear it, age, wish the abrupt silence of its ticking clock.
To their despair, age and aging across the north has not withered memory and oaths taken, nor slows vigour to see through the full cycle of a long revolution only put to rest by economic liberation.
Worse still his age now charms the resolve of youthfulness, does not banish them, rather entices their aid in bringing economic revolution to closure.
And so, Zimbabwe must not now apologise nor backtrack from its authoritative declaration and forceful pursuit of economic emancipation.
We must not be frightened away like lay men, by these questions and doubts against our legislative force, force necessitated by their own arrogance and miscalculated superiority.
And so this futile recent business to seek review and with it nullification of indigenisation laws under the pretext of such law being unconstitutional and badly written.
With risk of repeating past thoughts, I must ask again what “unconstitutionality” and bad text, when the critical and defining question is whether such laws endeavour on the will and intent of a people’s needs?
Are laws not fashioned and guided by legislative intent, intent best expressed by legislators representing the will of the majority who so happen to be indigenous Zimbabweans?
With respect, our learned colleagues, moreso when funded by western coffers, will seek to confuse with declarations that the people’s law was badly written and unconstitutional.
They will never dare engage the people on the legitimacy of their intent for economic emancipation which caused such forceful laws.
And so Minister Saviour Kasukuwere, force has been necessitated and we dare not be apologetic.
To your credit you have adopted legal force.
There could have been other measures by a restless wretched of the earth burdened by scars from injustice and criminality.
Frantz Fanon reminds us of an oppressed and colonised African people who are taught by the very brutality and authoritarian nature of colonialism that resort to force of a similar nature was their only liberation.
Fanon observed the “ironic turning of the tables” in which the native now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.
Africa must understand then that ours is a legitimate legislative force, whose forceful nature has been necessitated by the pursuits of a people and nation seeking reparation from colonial injustices denied remedy by perpetrators.
So we must not now be disarmed of our means, our facilitation of such remedy. A socio-economically deprived and oppressed people must never be caused to disarm what force will liberate them.
Legal force is necessary and critical.
What is the law if not force, more-so when it remedies injustices that negotiation and round tables were unwilling to allow non-legal settlement.