Online Reporter
Tendai Chirau
October 25th is designated as Anti-Sanctions Day, a day to oppose the illegal and unjust sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe.
These sanctions represent a continuation of the neo-colonial agenda.
Here are the key reasons for their imposition:
1. Land reclamation: To punish Zimbabwe for reclaiming its land from minority white settlers who occupied large tracts of prime territory, and redistributing it to landless indigenous people.
2. Containing success: After the land was returned to its people, the West sought to ensure the land reform programme would fail. To prevent this successful model from spreading to other African and Latin American nations, they invested in negative propaganda. They knew that if other countries followed suit, their kin who occupied vast tracts of foreign land would lose out.
3. Regime change: To remove the revolutionary ZANU PF party from power and replace it with a pro-colonial, liberal opposition. The neo-colonialists believed a new government would reverse the land reform. They aimed to achieve this through socio-economic engineering designed to make the economy “scream,” inciting public rebellion against ZANU PF.
Over 20 years later, Zimbabwe still stands under the leadership of the revolutionary ZANU PF party. A cocktail of sanctions-busting measures have been implemented to counter and minimise the negative effects.
With or without sanctions, Zimbabwe under ZANU PF will succeed. Were it not for these illegal sanctions, the pace of development would have tripled.
This challenging environment has also provided key lessons, with the most important being that “nyika inovakwa nevene vayo.”
* Tendai Chirau is the ZANU-PF Deputy Secretary for National Security
