Uhuru and the ownership factor

connection with the current indigenisation programme, in which locals are supposed to own at least 51 percent equity in foreign firms operating in the country. Expectedly, a discussant latched onto this, and suggested that locals, or even Government, needed not own anything but could do with receiving royalties and taxes and so forth.
After all, she said, we are bad managers having “run down” such entities as Zupco, Air Zimbabwe, National Railways of Zimbabwe, etc. Australian Ambassador to Zimbabwe Mathew Neuhaus weighed in putting a sophistic argument that his country did not actually own companies, especially mining houses in the country as foreigners like the Chinese and Americans did.
However, Australia exacted some taxes and royalties, quite profitably. (It is said Australia, is particularly adept at this.) Neuhaus said the current indigenisation drive was “old fashioned nationalism”.
This brings to the fore the one important dialectic in the whole discourse of black empowerment right from land redistribution — the best thing after Independence and its current kin — economic empowerment.
Are Zimbabweans better off without the means of production, which happens to be God-given and actually at some unfortunate point stolen from them?
If some little band of foreigners decided, with the help of the gun, to deprive a whole populace of the resource, surely it is not such a valueless asset?
History teaches that after colonially-owning the land, the settlers went on to control the use of the land as well as the people that accessed it.
Applied to the poor deprived, who happened to rise against the incipient status quo, without much success at first, they surely knew how it is to lose that which they lost and to be controlled thereon.
Now that the people of Zimbabwe have the land, who should deny them the right to farm even grass on the land that rightly belongs to them?
Some quarters accuse newly-resettled farmers of lacking productivity, even if it is known that that they cannot be fairly compared with those who spent more than 100 years working it, as the basis for depriving the “poor black farmers” of the land.
Can it be denied that the crusaders that came here and established a colony they called Rhodesia were no more than adventurists, course and perhaps criminal youths and the ultimate sickly like Cecil John Rhodes but carved out land and mines for themselves, which they could not even use immediately?
Some of the land and the mining claims as well as hunting areas were used for speculative purposes, while some of these resources could only be used generations later. In the warped reasoning of some people, only these people could be allowed to hold on to land — even to the deprivation of a majority — while it is a cardinal sin for a black farmer to fail to utilise some land owing to some economic problems.
The act of owning and controlling something is not only a practical and necessary step, it is fraught with emotions. Any wonder then that the erstwhile coloniser is so passionate about his deprived “property” rights, which property he got by murdering, maiming and raping some unfortunate people so many moons again.
He even conveniently forgets about the hurt he himself caused in the evil processes of murdering, maiming and raping. The fact of the matter is that with the moral, historical, social and economic redress such as the land reform in place, owning a piece of land is one of the greatest manifestations of Independence.
However, along with owning the means of production, there is need to change the psyche of the owner. The analogy of the slave above presupposes a person without the sense that he can be his own, and his own master at all. It is said that those who enslave other people first take care of their victims’ minds and erode confidence and ego.