Revolution at crossroads

best foot forward through the harmonised election to burst out of the woods and onto the home straight with all the peace — and — freedom loving Zimbabweans home and dry.
Held under the inclusive Government of believers and non-believers in the journey into an opaque future, the forthcoming elections are so critical in deciding which way Zimbabwe and her concomitant revolution go. They stand at a monumental crossroads before both revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries who have accumulated layer upon layer of fat thanks to the Uhuru over which some gallant sons and daughters of the soil laid down their precious lives so that those who live after them should never again carry the burdensome yoke of white, racist colonial rule.
It should be foolhardy of anyone to take for granted the voting instincts of Zimbabweans in the March polls, misled by fake revolutionary masks that some political party leaders and their supporters wear in public prior to the elections.
Hyenas in sheep skin might infiltrate a flock of sheep for the kill, but will still remain hyenas whatever the guise in which they choose to appear — and political hyenas are on the loose among the wider public, whether one likes it or not.
Already some political party leaders have taken advantage of meetings with nothing whatsoever to do with the pending elections to mouth some putrid stuff against Zanu-PF or its leaders — giving off a picture of wholesome hearts in which Machiavellian designs abide with regards to the elections that should dismantle the agreement under which three political organisations have ruled Zimbabwe since 2008.
Indeed, the voting patterns of the two MDC formations and Zanu-PF have already been exposed by the manner in which the three political parties handled the draft constitution, choosing to ignore the voices of the majority recorded during the constitution making outreach encounters with the public.
It is now common knowledge that Zanu-PF stuck with the views of the general public concerning the type of supreme law that the masses want to see put in place, while the MDCs appeared to have pandered to the whims of imperialists who wish to see this country divided and weakened for them to come marching back in to feast on the country’s rich natural resources.
Danger lurks, for instance, in total devolution which some people want and which has the potential to create tribal fiefdoms or homelands out of the existing provinces with Zimbabwe as a strong, unitary state becoming a virtual proverb.
It seems really very sad that some Zimbabweans, either driven by an obscene desire for power and power’s sake or by blissful ignorance, do not realise the mettle they carry by leading the Southern Africa and, indeed, the continental pack, in democratising African economies through land reform, indigenisation and economic empowerment initiative that have made Zimbabwe a pariah state in the West which sees its economic interests under threat in a Zimbabwe moving in step with post-modernity.
Obviously, local political parties that cannot stay the revolutionary path pursued by Zanu-PF would have their foreign backers believe that these parties want to “liberate Zimbabwe” from Zanu-PF communist tentacles with a restoration of capitalism, which some Zimbabweans describe as mafavuke or “the weed that refuses to die”, in the hands of the powerful while the poor settle for crumbs.
As is known to everyone, he who pays the piper calls the tune and there can be no exception in the Zimbabwean political arena where some parties are bankrolled by foreign powers.
As things stand, Zanu-PF’s signature presence on the economic arena, as a revolutionary follow-up to the party’s political signature presence in 1980 cannot be reversed without serious repercussions to planned agrarian and economic reforms elsewhere in the Sadc region.
Thus, if Zimbabweans vote unwisely, thereby giving anti-revolutionary forces at home and abroad a reprieve on a silver platter at next year’s general elections, we will have sold out on those African countries that take Zimbabwe as their mentor and history will judge this nation very, very harshly indeed.
What is worse, this generation will have left future generations in a lurch from which it might be near — impossible to escape.
Yet should Zimbabwean voters shame the running dogs of imperialism by not voting for them, this nation will parallel its highest literacy rate in Africa at 92 percent by also becoming probably the only country on the continent to boast full-fledged political and economic independence when the empowerment programmes now under way achieve their goal.
It is said that revolutionaries never die and this suggests for Zimbabweans that the masses must continue to talk and walk the revolution as their second nature replicated into a bequest to generations to come.
Stephen Mpofu is the former editor of Chronicle.