[UAH] MORGAN TSVANGIRAI'S LACK OF VISION ASTOUNDING

Tsvangirai’s lack of vision astounding

 

Tuesday, 11 June 2013 00:00

Rangu Nyamurundira THE day was May 19, 2013 and the place was the historic Zimbabwe Grounds. MDC-T had called for its so-called “star rally”. There stood party leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, eyeing the presidency of this nation. His agenda surely was to win our watching majority to his party’s cause. It was expected then that his words would stir our hearts, charm with their expression of a leader for our cause and aspirations. It was not to be. Tsvangirai’s words proved an anti-climax to a nation pursuing economic empowerment with reaffirmed vigour, celebrating the gains it begins to reap from land reform. “We can’t build an economy that survives on peasants,” was the echo around Zimbabwe Grounds, resonating across the nation, boldly declared by a man sure of himself, of his vision for a majority he would want to preside over. He forgot it is a majority awake to the God-given title to their nation’s wealth. We can bet one Professor Moyo at that moment chuckled, thought to himself “I told you so’, warned us of the man who speaks with an “open mouth and shut mind”. Tsvangirai spoke such stinging words to a people long sustained by an agro-based economy, which he would have to rally to him. Yet his wisest words were that if made president, he would “remove people from the farms to the industries than removing people from the industries to the farms because I don’t see that working.” Gosh! open mouth and shut mind indeed. What about peasants owning land Tsvangirai? What emboldens him to dismiss his own people’s growing enterprise on land restored them, enterprise which has endured and overcame a decade of sanctions that have been like salt cast upon their land to dry its fertility. Now he condemns our “peasantry”, you, me, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, brother sister, cousin, uncle, mukwasha, muroora, who now work on the land restored us. What makes him think we have no “property rights” over that land violently expropriated from us now restituted? We know now, if president he would champion only property rights of foreign investors here. Despite sanctions, despite being denied state support by an MDC-T Finance Minister, the “peasants” are proving the old adage about the old women of Chivi who cooked rocks and drank soup.” The peasants, placed between a rock and a hard place by the hand of Tsvangirai’s MDC-T party are not only reaping from the land, but begin to feed into a national economy emaciated by sanctions. Yet the MDC-T leader stood at Zimbabwe Grounds playing ignorant to glaring findings, reported even from western capitals where his ‘Friends only to a landless Zimbabwe’ reside. The facts now finding light are that the “peasants” are ploughing Zimbabwe’s agro-based economy back into health. Upon the land an army of indigenous peasants, took over from white farmers, are making steady advance with Zimbabwe’s main agricultural export. They are expected to provide 170 million kilogrammes of tobacco this 2013, more than the 140 kilogrammes reaped in 2012, which injected US$517 million into the nation’s economy. Peasants are on track, to match the 220 million kilogrammes produced by white former commercial farmers. Contrary to Tsvangirai misrepresentation, do they not “build” an economy in a tobacco industry accounting for 10.7 percent of gross domestic product? Meanwhile, across the whole agricultural sector as many as 245 000 of “peasants” benefiting from land reform are said to be capable of generating annual earnings of US$10 000. If Mr Tsvangirai does the maths, how much is earned by 245 000 peasants earning US$10 000 each. It adds up to a whopping US$2 450 000 000 to be generated per annum, more than the US$2,6 billion in foreign aid over a whole four years that Tsvangirai’s European “Friends” brag to have injected into the regime change agenda. The Prime Minister should have taken time to tour youthful “peasants” growing at least 40 hectares of potatoes in Nyanga following youth empowerment interventions. Had Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti supported them surely the young peasant farmers would contribute significantly towards growing enough local produce, reducing imports from South Africa. All to the benefit of the national budget. Instead, all Tsvangirai claims to have seen during his term as Prime Minister is that peasants on the land are not working for the good of Zimbabwe’s economy. Zvakaoma. The man was too busy fighting for partisan interests to see an indigenisation programme sure to work for the national interest. Worse still, during his four years in government, the man was blinkered from seeing beyond his trade unionist ideology. All he remains focused on is us as factory workers, to sweat and labour for Western capitalists called foreign investors. So he would rather “remove people from the farms to the industries” were his foreign investors would exploit and expropriate in the name of their “property rights”. Chilling thought, of peasants removed from their land by any MDC-T government. It provokes most disturbing images doesn’t it, in the minds of a people still traumatised by the ghost of a colonial authority violently dispossessing them of their fertile lands. Yet a whole president wannabe threatens such a fate to be relived upon the peasants, a whole 245 000 of them and their families, millions really. Alas. Tsvangirai’s economic vision for this country is that we all be turned into worker bees, to toil in making honey for a queen with not a single iota of Nehanda’s genes. The queen he would have us slave for will never ensure that the honey sustains our nation. Rather it is a British Queen, and her European court, for whose companies we must harvest our country’s honey to sweeten western economies. The trade union raised man cannot see beyond the assembly lines, cannot fathom life beyond the factory walls. He cannot see the peasants’ enterprising hand, but only the hand of foreign investors giving out wages never enough to sustain an entire people’s socio-economic needs. Thankfully, another Professor, Madhuku, now points out to Tsvangirai’s “narrow minded” nature, failing to see beyond trade unionism. But what are these Professors seeing that they are not taking good time to enlighten the people on. They must hasten to enlighten us now that we go to the ballot, to cast upon our nation’s fate; to be worker bees or empowered “peasants” owning their land. We must be made to have eyes that see and ears that hear. For there is confusion isn’t there, all within one man and his MDC-T party. Tsvangirai, seeking to lead you and me, is a renowned flip flopper. He says one thing only to mean the other; he turns rights only to take immediate sharp left, embrace as lands foreign wolves among us. We will be like sheep led by a confused Sheppard, all to be picked one by one by marauding wolves. The man disparages peasants given land, constituting a significant majority of our indigenous numbers, while his lieutenant Biti calls vehicles empowering our majority illegal. Yet Tsvangirai will still claim he has a better answer, an alternative to indigenisation, as if the peasants and our kin in local communities are not the very majority being empowered by indigenisation. Maiwe zvangu, wanoda hukuru awa. They are at loss these leader wannabes, drowning in bitter JUICEs and now an ART more graffiti that economic genius. Professor Madhuku was to the point again, that “The policies such as JUICE are a clear sign that (Tsvangirai) is narrow minded and sees everything through the eyes of a trade unionist.” They are at pains before the truth so glaring, which they distort and would want to shut their eyes to. Yet however much they may close their eyes the truth remains patiently waiting for those eyes to be opened. That truth is indigenisation and economic empowerment, of empowered “peasants”, youth and local communities where Chiefs begin to confidently preside over community trusts worth millions. And the most damning truth to the lies and partisan interests lacking a national cause, Mr Tsvangirai, is that it is an indigenisation empowering those very workers you would simply throw a job at. Indigenisation, Sir, transforms workers into more than “hewers of wood” and condemned second class citizen within their economy. Indigenisation is making workers own a direct and real share in companies once solely foreign investor owned. They are to be less exposed to high costs imposed by inflation and the economic recession we saw in the west, were only the elite got state bailouts while millions of workers remain destitute. We must take time then, all those of us workers who found their way to Zimbabwe Grounds on that day. We must deeply reflect and ponder. If we are to be workers would we not better be workers within the framework of indigenisation, workers with a stake in the hive, the economy for which we toil. Pafungeyi. Remember too in your reflections that it was Robert Gabriel Mugabe that spoke to a nation at the first and still only true “Start Rally” at Zimbabwe Grounds, on the eve of independence in 1980. He spoke of his Zanu party’s coming victory, surely anticipating a fight for the people’s economic independence that lay ahead. It is a fight Tsvangirai cannot fathom nor declare allegiance to such a people’s cause. And so a united Zanu PF today continues in its fight, this time for economic emancipation to achieve total independence. The next real “Star Rally’ then, God grant us, shall be in the aftermath of an empowered people’s victory by August 2013, when the same Robert Gabriel Mugabe shall reclaim the dignity of a now molested Zimbabwe Grounds to declare our nation’s economic independence. Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and an indigenisation consultant based in Harare, Zimbabwe.

 

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